We have endless threads here where this comes up and it gets kind of old.
If you are a commercial kitchen you can’t BEEP around, you’re serving thousands perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of unknown health status. You’re mixing up batches that can potentially sicken tens of thousands.
ALL this changes in a household, you’re cooking for one or a few people where health status is known and if everyone is healthy worst case scenario you get some mild food poisoning. In this case the smell test is definitely doable.
Yet we still have threads where this is not made clear, along with “it was unrefridgerated thirty minutes? TOSS IT”:smack:
When you’re putting out food safety guidelines, you’re advising perhaps tens or hundreds of millions of unknown health status.
Also, mild is relative. I’m a healthy person that had food poisoning a couple months ago. I had to take a couple days off work and for one of those days I couldn’t really leave bed.
They aren’t rules at home, it’s just advice. There are actual food safety rules for commercial food preparation, at home you don’t have to follow them, but you’ll get just as sick under the same conditions.
Could you be more specific about what health regimes you feel are NOT being observed in homes?
The 5 second rule? Because your floors, no matter how infrequently you clean them, are infinity cleaner than any restaurant floor by the end of the day.
Both are using soap to wash their dishes, cleaning the work surfaces, storing perishable foods in refrigeration, etc.
The food safety rules do differentiate between commercial and home. The local ‘Health Department’ (that being whatever sub-branch of the government is responsible for health and safety in your community) inspects commercial food preparation areas and certifies that they meet minimum code standards, or takes action against them up to and including closure.
Nobody from the government inspects the kitchen in your home and fines you if you store your raw chicken on the shelf above your vegetables or if you let your cat up on the kitchen counter.
The guidelines regarding food safety are the same regardless of the type of kitchen, because salmonella can’t differentiate between the kitchen at Chez Panisse and the kitchen in your friend Bob’s apartment.
I came to say basically what Suburban Plankton said. Also, if someone gets food poisoning from my cooking, it means a conversation with my girlfriend that I will not enjoy in the slightest. When it’s a restaurant, there will be lawsuits.
I suspect few home kitchens operate at restaurant standards because those guidelines err on the side of caution.
The only home kitchen I’ve known that operated at “restaurant standards” was my father-in-law’s (actually, MIL ran the kitchen) in his final few months of terminal cancer - but that was because he was in an extremely fragile state of health at the time and unable to fight off pathogens the average person would never even notice.
Outside of serious health issues like that, I’ve never encountered anyone whose kitchens would conform to health department standards. They usually aren’t cesspits, either, thank goodness, but clearly one can fall slightly short of the mark without undue hazard.
The “violations” I see in homes are typically less than spotless counters and surfaces, food left out longer than ideal, thawing frozen items on the counter at room temperature, pets (and thus dander and hair) allowed in the food prep areas, people performing grooming or hygiene tasks in the food prep areas, less than ideal cleaning of cutting boards, knives and other utensils, and less than perfect practices in keeping raw meat/fish juices and other foods separate.
There are places where certain rules are allowed to be “violated” - in many places locations serving sushi have to post warnings about raw and undercooked seafood which I’m totally OK with - there is a slightly greater risk of food borne illness with raw flesh and just in case someone hasn’t heard that yet having a posted warning makes a great deal of sense. Then adults can choose to take the risk or not. Bravo. I’ve seen similar regarding meat cooked to less than “well”.
In a household of healthy people, where they most likely have already passed any transmissible pathogens among each other, being slightly lax makes little to no difference but restaurants serve hundreds or even thousands of different people in a week, of different health profiles and carrying different germs. Greater vigilance makes more sense.
Of course, on TV and in books and in podcasts they’ll always say thaw in the refrigerator, cook to 160, and so forth, out of the same fear of lawsuits. I assume that’s the same reason I sometimes see a warning on the copyright pages of cookbooks ordering the reader not to alter the recipes in any way. Once I saw it in an anthology of food writing that didn’t even have recipes.
I probably do all of these except the last. I do like to be careful about separating stuff that is probably contaminated from anything that might eaten raw.
Vanishingly few cooks understand even the basic principles behind food safety so they just parrot back received wisdom because they don’t have the tools to question it. There’s also no incentive to be liberal. Err on the side of conservatism and the worst that happens is some food gets wasted. Err on being liberal and you could be blamed for someone getting sick.
These two factors combined with the game of telephone that food safety advice gets dispensed through means you hear absurd recommendations that are made from an abundance of caution. I’ve pretty much given up dispensing food safety advice on the internet because the effort of going against the stream isn’t worth it.