I’ve taken soft cheese on 5 to 10 day hikes, and eaten it. It gets soft and oily, but still edible. And this is opened packets, we eat some every day. Cheddar, gouda, bree, camembert etc. It is mostly a matter of what risk you are willing to take, and I am fairly blasé about it.
With most meat I would be somewhat concerned when it starts to turn green, but that is the last day you have to eat it. For what it is worth, you can easily grill a steak (or whatever) on a flat stone mounted above your camp fire.
Salarmi and other such cured meat don’t concern me, I have returned from long hikes with leftovers and I consume them over the next few weeks, though I do refrigerate them. Excess cheese I throw away, because I can buy new cheese in a better state.
Huh, I’d be more worried about the meat. Botulism and all that. But if it’s preserved with nitrates it should be okay.
I’ve never worried that cheese might be dangerous for having sat out. Sometimes it gets less appealing, as the oil moves to the surface, or molds grow. But dangerous?
Why do something uncomfortable by throwing away perfectly good food? I’m not seeing the virtue there, unless you are extremely frail, or maybe pregnant. For most people, most food poisoning is just unpleasant, and the risk of that unpleasantness is very low, especially with the cheese.
Haha (he says with careless abandon) - on a long hike the last thing you want is needing to poo all the time.
My opinions might be somewhat influenced by attending an all-boys boarding school with astonishingly bad catering, so my appetite and digestive system have been well trained.
I spent 5 weeks in India fairly recently and despite all the warnings about “Delhii Belly” I ate wherever i saw a crowd of locals eating, so street food, cheap restaurants etc. I did only drink bottled water but I accepted ice made from non-bottled water because the deserts of Gujurat & Rajasthan are fairly hot at the time I visited.
I must say, this is the first time I’ve seen most of the responses say to eat it! Usually it goes the other way. I hate to throw out food, and it does seem like the kind of thing that is meant to travel well, so I would eat it.
My opinions are influenced by having grown up in a household that was sloppy about refrigeration, and having very few experiences with food poisoning. There was one, where everyone who ate the fried chicken at an event had the runs that night. That’s maybe the only time. (And i was totally fine in 24 hours.) So I’m willing to risk a tiny chance of a stomach ache to eat food that appeals to me.
I think it makes sense to be a lot more cautious than i am if infants, elderly people, or immune compromised people might be eating a dish. But for what I’m consuming? I just don’t worry much.
(I am extremely careful about cleaning when i cook, especially cleaning up after meat. Because i don’t want to create hidden risks. )
There’s a huge range of food poisoning that is undetectable even to super-sensors, including that caused by staph and salmonella through scombroid fish poisoning to deadly fugu toxins.
I personally would’ve eaten the salami described in the OP*, but then again I have appalled Mrs. J. on many occasions by consuming items she felt were past their safe date.
*This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This poster is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
Doubt is something that varies from person to person. “Should” be okay on packaged meat that says “Keep Refrigerated” but was not for several days isn’t a risk I would take, no matter how appealing the food is, or how confident I thought the preservatives worked. YMMV.
Your “how else” paragraph seems like a non sequitur to the first. Our ancestors sometimes learned that certain things are extremely poisonous by people dying, not always by people trying a little bit and dying a little bit. And surely the advantage of the cultural transmission of knowledge (whether folk wisdom or scientific) is that every generation does not always need to reacquire that knowledge by the potentially risky trial and error approach that you advocate in your first paragraph.
I think hard cheese is usually safe to eat if you remove any mold. But anecdotes about what individual people have personally tried and survived are not really the best source of reliable information. Most moldy soft cheese probably won’t make you sick either. The issue is quantifying the risk.
