Ripped parts of the post:
The bacteria is best known for causing a type of food poisoning called “Fried Rice Syndrome,” since rice is sometimes cooked and left to cool at room temperature for a few hours. During that time, the bacteria can contaminate it and grow. B. cereus is especially dangerous because it produces a toxin in rice and other starchy foods that is heat resistant and may not die when the food it infects is cooked.
And
Unfortunately, that was the case for a 20-year-old student, who passed away after eating five-day-old pasta.
His story was described in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology a few years back, but has since resurfaced due to some YouTube videos and Reddit posts. According to article, every Sunday the student would make his meals for the entire week so he wouldn’t need to deal with making it on the weekdays. One Sunday, he cooked up some spaghetti, then put it in Tupperware containers so that days later, he could just add some sauce to it, reheat it and enjoy it.
However, he didn’t store the pasta in the fridge, rather he left it out on the counter. After five days of the food sitting out at room temperature, he heated some up and ate it. While he noticed an odd taste to the food, he figured it was just due to the new tomato sauce he added to it.
Honestly 5 days out on the counter was asking for trouble - that long is tempting fate even when stored properly in the fridge
Huh, i always thought that pasta and rice are some of the safer things to store a week in the fridge.
I mean there’s caution and there’s what is fine to do normally. I’ve noticed that especially online people heavily lean towards caution, some don’t even reheat rise because dangerous.
I think something like five days is fine and just be sensible about it, look, smell, if seems good, taste, if good, should be just fine.
Dumbasses who just leave pasta in room temperature for five days and then eat it are what scare people in being really cautious and the reason some stricter recommendations are made.
Yeah, cooked pasta? Two days tops, and I personally wouldn’t touch it after one. And why not refrigerate it? Did they not own one, because I can’t see any other logical explanation to not do this.
Two days on pasta? I give 5-7 in the fridge, and six months if I freeze it. Maybe a little less if its a dairy based sauce like alfredo
Yeah, like I said, tops. I wouldn’t eat it personally, but I don’t think you’ll die.
From just the post I was going to say college student with a crappy mini fridge that couldn’t possibly hold a weeks worth of meals. The article had more info and said his parents found him after he didn’t get up for class though. So seems like he was still living at home. No reason to not refrigerate it and how did his parents not notice what he was doing? Seems like somebody around should have had more common sense than this.
One Sunday, he cooked up some spaghetti, then put it in Tupperware containers so that days later, he could just add some sauce to it, reheat it and enjoy it.
Five day old spaghetti sitting on a warm counter? Eww.
I thought he made a pasta dish, and the kept eating that. What the hell, making the spaghetti is the easiest bit and barely take a longer than microwaving some disgusting old pasta.
RIP this guy but I feel like we didn’t necessarily lose one of our sharpest minds.
I found out about this case through the chubbyemu video. Not sure how much of this was embellishment, but the way it’s explained in the video is that the pasta was left out for a couple days, then thrown into the refrigerator by a roommate who didn’t know it was probably bad. The guy then took out a portion of the pasta, completely unaware that it had gone rancid. Definitely a more believable mistake (although still pretty irresponsible of the meal prepper).
That does sound way more reasonable.
This thread is interesting. Everywhere ranging from “I eat pizza from the counter after 3 days” to “yeah I would never eat anything left out on the counter for over 2 hours”.
And someone said everything in their fridge is food they cooked over 5 days ago… Why??
And someone said everything in their fridge is food they cooked over 5 days ago…
I’ve been doing this for years and years. Maybe not wayyy more than 5 days but it is usually about a week. I don’t have all that much time after work so I don’t want to waste time cooking and I’m not wasting money on take out so I do all my cooking for the week on Saturday or Sunday. I don’t do what the poor kid in the article did though, if anything I put things in the fridge that are still way too hot but I never wanted to risk something like that.
Cook it, seal it, put it in the fridge. 5 days is fine.
even better: freezer
Can just be a bit less convenient, depending.
if anything I put things in the fridge that are still way too hot but I never wanted to risk something like that.
It’s better for food hygiene to go from hot to cold as fast as possible, it reduces the time it spends at the optimal temperatures for bacteria to grow. That’s what we do for example when we sterilize milk, tomato, etc.
If your fridge can handle it, it’s not a problem AFAIKYeah the only concern is if you put too much hot food in at once or your fridge isn’t good, it can warm up other food in the fridge and cause it to spoil faster.
I can’t verify this, but I’ve heard that modern fridges are better at maintaining cold air temp and so there’s an outdated concern for putting hot food in your fridge. Just don’t have your hot food touching another highly perishable food item.
You’re probably right except in cases of heavy and especially heat-holding foods. in other words: May not be the best idea to put your still piping hot big pot of soup in the fridge
Even with older fridges, I feel like it’s a mostly unfounded concern; yeah sure, don’t go putting 15 liters of boiling soup in the fridge, but if you put 500g of cooked pasta into a 300l fridge, it’s not going to care. Bear in mind that the other food in the fridge also acts as a negative calories storage.
That tracks with me. My rule of thumb is if you can hold the container with your bare hands long enough to get it in the fridge, it’s not hot
If you meal prep and know what you’re doing, 5 days is not outrageous.
Misleading title. He didn’t eat leftovers. He was eating rancid, spoiled food that had been left out for 5 days. He was eating garbage.
Leftovers are when you store food in the fridge for a few days in a container.
I’m surprised there wasn’t any mold after 5 days of being kept unrefrigerated.
Rancidity is unlikely to be a factor here, as it primarily affects foods high in unsaturated fats when exposed to oxygen over an extended period. Leftovers stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for just a few days won’t experience significant oxidation to cause rancidity.
I think emptiestplace is correct. Rancidity is oxidation of fat. Highly saturated fats are very resistant to oxidation (it take a bit much energy to oxidize fully saturated fats)
Beef tallow is highly saturated and is shelf stable for years
The bacteria is best known for causing a type of food poisoning called “Fried Rice Syndrome,” since rice is sometimes cooked and left to cool at room temperature for a few hours.
left to cool at room temperature for a few hours
I think I do that almost every single time I make food
Guy that died let it sit out for multiple days per article… he was eating rotting food.
Yes, I was just laughing about the clickbaity nature of the article.
After five days of the food sitting out at room temperature, he heated some up and ate it.
Super clickbaity lol, we all know not to leave food on the counter for a week right? It wouldn’t surprise me if the pasta was getting fuzzy by that point.
Worst I’ve done is eat pizza I left out overnight. A week? Nah. Never.
However, he didn’t store the pasta in the fridge, rather he left it out on the counter.
Oh, okay. And I was worried for a moment that it could happen to me…
Fr I also got scared until I realized the guy is just an idiot. Who eats food that that has been left OUTSIDE for 5 days. How did it not stink or taste sour?
How did it not stink or taste sour?
OP was kind enough to summarize the article into 3-4 short paragraphs, one of which answers your question.
Here:
While he noticed an odd taste to the food, he figured it was just due to the new tomato sauce he added to it.
B. Cereus is no joke!
This guy had that…he pasta way, though.
That’s actually a good one.
5 days ON THE COUNTER?! And it tasted off, and he consumed it anyway.
This is so stupid that it has to be intentional suicide.
I one time argued with literally hundreds of people on Reddit about basic food safety regarding food left out on the counter. I’m still floored by it. Numerous government agencies around the world agree about this, and yet…
Btw food safety was MORE critical before modern science because you could easily die from it back then. That was a common excuse people gave me in the previously mentioned subreddit, for eating food left out/bad - “our ancestors did it”. No.
Dude, I grew up with nonstop food poisoning because my mom did this. My family always said it was a “stomach flu” when the whole family was puking and shitting every other week.
It was horrible and I think it did some damage to my digestive system long term. I didn’t figure it out until I was in my 20’s and stopped eating anything she cooked.
I’m weird about left overs now, even though my husband is very clean when he cooks and doesn’t leave food out, or if he does it goes in the trash.
Don’t leave your food out people. It will fuck you up one day.
This is why I am highly circumspect about any food that people offer me. Cause you never know what their understanding of food safety is.
Wow, that sounds so frocking horrible… I grew up with a mom that involved me in the kitchen every chance she got, and I am really thankful for that, it taught me so much about food, cooking, baking. your story is basically the evil twin of mine! ‘Being weird’ about leftovers now seems like the minimal damage you could have taken, I would have a very hard time of trusting other folks’ food after growing up like that. Wow.
Food safety is so important! After taking the food manager safety test I hate eating at some peoples houses. It scares me. My step brothers use to leave meat to thaw on the countertop overnight. Miserable.
Our ancestors took storage measures right away, salting meat, putting root vegetables in the root cellar…
OK, so we can set the benchmark for danger at 5 days of room temperature.
Thanks random test subject. And RIP.
This made me really anxious about how long I tend to leave food out up until the moment I read that he left it out on the counter FOR FIVE DAYS
I once ate a slice of pizza that sat in a ziploc bag for three days inside a truck when the outside peak temp was near 110f.
I love me some day old room temp 'za, but even at 22, I knew that was risky.
Needed a day off, I guess.
I leave out my soup in room temp for days, while regularly boiling it every meal time to prevent it from spoiling. Am I screwed?
That’s bad but you’re not screwed. Just stop doing that. Get some Tupperware, put it in the fridge between uses.
There are two vectors for food poisoning: Active harmful bacteria in your food, and toxins which are produced by harmful bacteria. When you boil it again, it removes the former threat but not the latter. Yes, this is very dangerous and you could die.
I lived with a flatmate that used to pull this sort of shit.
Typical process:
She would remove the frozen chicken from the fridge, put it on the outdoor table, then go to class. Would come home to a defrosted chicken, which she would take and chop in half on the kitchen floor. Then she would put one half back in the freezer, usually on top. Lovely going to get ice to find it’s covered in frozen defrosted chicken blood. She would then use the other half to cook up a soup in our one big pot we had. This pot would live on the back corner of the stove for a week. Or two. Each day she would take a ladle full and warm it up to eat. The big pot wasn’t kept warm or in the fridge.
I got to the point where as soon as we saw the mould growing out of the pot, we would biff the entire contents and water blast the pot outside. Much to her annoyance.
She would then just repeat again the next week.
My MIL does this, to this day, regularly, and it baffles me how she doesn’t get food poisoning.
She most recently let a chicken carcass hang out at room temp for 36 hours before boiling it to make a soup, which, okay, boil it long and high enough you’re probably fine. But then after it was done the stove was turned off and it sat out for another 18 hours before being put in the fridge.
Also she doesn’t believe that hard boiled eggs need to be refrigerated, I’ve seen a batch sit for 7+ days.
She also thinks I’m wasteful if I toss something that’s moldy, she scrapes the mold off and eats it. But based on what I’ve read, there are unseen spores you’re just ingesting so screw that.
Why is she alive?
Kitchen floor you say??
Man she just really wanted to see if her body could take it. Imagine the confusion at the horrible shits she must’ve had regularly. Couldn’t have anything to do with those food practices.
When’s the funeral?
Where was she from?
Cambodia
I wonder if that’s common practice, where I grew up in Australia it wasn’t uncommon to see meat hung up outside under a tree and people just cutting off the rotten bits
For meat, that’s actually OK. Many meat curing processes involve mold.
On the other hand, don’t eat moldy bread.
Maybe.
This was Dunedin, NZ, so it was cold enough during the day to not be the end of the world, but still…
Yeah In today’s day and age with what we know about bacteria and refrigeration i see no need for what any of these people were doing
what the fuck??? how did you not pull her aside and say “hey, not ok”??
Oh we did.
Regularly.
But as poor students, it was pick your battles. Her dick boyfriend used to drive them both home drunk as, then cook chicken nuggets at 3am setting off the smoke alarms on a Tuesday…
The despair I felt reading that was awful. Also it was super gross; I had to pause halfway through.
Good times.
That’s Wolverine level of self-healing if she didn’t get ill.
Did she like, mop the floor first? Was it vinyl or tile?
No.
Vinyl.
Never fails to amaze me how so many people don’t understand basic food storage.
My clients, constantly: “What do you mean I can’t just throw this open bag in the fridge?”, “What do you mean, ‘foil isn’t airtight’?”, “I don’t know how long it’s been in there! What do you mean it expired a month ago?” and my absolute favorite, “You can’t throw my moldy food away! You owe me money for that!”
What are your clients?
Er, better question to ask is probably, what do you do for work? Lol
I’m a residential counselor. Basically what someone else described, I work with people out of the hospital to reintroduce them into the community. I teach life skills, coping skills, appropriate behavior, that sort of thing.
My clients are middle functioning adults, primarily male, right now 30s and up. Think a grown man, but with the comprehension skills of a middle schooler or lower.
Lot of patience, lot of repetition, lot of getting yelled at, hit occasionally. Fun times.
Thank you for doing what you do.
I think I see a lot of your clients hanging out in the comments sections of Facebook and Instagram!
Are you a fridge-contents-consultant or something?
Likely some kind of aide or in-home help. I have family that works in that field and a lot of it is just helping people with “normal” routine things we all do, but that they’re unable to for whatever reason.
Foil isn’t air tight?
How are you making foil air tight?
Crimping and folding it around the edge of the pan or the foil itself. Foil can hold in the steam of a pan in the oven or a foil pack on a campfire, for practical purposes that’s air tight. If you’re trying to contain superheated helium then it’s a different story.
Not air tight enough for extended storage purposes, too air tight for cooling in the fridge. It’s all relative as your examples demonstrate.
Yup. This exactly. After 2, and I feel like I shouldn’t even go that far lol, I toss out. Safe than sorry and all that.
You’d eat food that’s been sitting on the counter for 2 days? Maaaybe 2 hours.
You’ve never brushed the mold off a week old pizza after a heroin binge?
No, not once in my 21 years using heroin.
Yeah it’s normally just some diarrhea, maybe some vomiting, maybe some immunocompromised people will have more serious symptoms. 5 days is a long time, but so is killing a 20 year old in 10 hours.
It’s probably helpful to think of it as increasingly bad results from increasingly bad practices, and still seek to avoid the milder non-deadly results too.
Same lol. 5 days is absolutely insane.
It was a bit of an anxiety ride for me as well, being a frequent rice and pasta consumer.
Good yeah, I passed out after dinner last night, woke up 4 hours later and scooped up the left over spaghetti from the pan and fridged it. Ate* it for breakfast.
Edit
I’d think pasta and rice would be a little bland together.
Saffron rice+orzo
If you haven’t had pasta fried rice, you have lived an easier life than I.
Please do tell me more about pasta fried rice!
A pasta? Am I to accept as gods own truth that a pasta was the one who took wok into hand and fried this rice?
The CDC says no more than two hours for perishable food, and one hour if ambient temp is 90°F or above.
For the 96% of the world that aren’t stuck in the 1700, that means 32°C
The CDC to which I was referencing happens to be part of the 4% stuck in the 1700s.
I mean, if you aren’t stuck in the 1700s, you can just google what it converts to…
Alternatively, we could put units in something the majority of internet users use and let the minority take that extra step…
The temp was on a website by the CDC, an American agency within the federal government…
Why would they use Celcius to convey information to their own citizens, who primarily use Fahrenheit, to appease the rest of the world? Do countries that primarily use Celcius have their government agencies post all of their temperature recommendations in Fahrenheit for the Americans around the world?
Americans can use both so we just… use what is easy. How hot will it be today? 97F. How hot do F1 brakes get? 1000+C, and tyres 100C. They reach over 200 mph. The race distance is around 300km.
They did, and they shared it for people who aren’t stuck in the 1700s.
It’s also more efficient for one person to do it, rather than everyone having to do it
People don’t read articles 'cause they don’t want to spend a click, and you suggest opening a new tab and doing a web search?
Yeah, like, what is this? The 1700s?
Save someone else having to look up the conversion: 1700 metric years is roughly 3092 years fahrenheit
be serious.
5 days is fucking absurd
nobody ever accused bacteria of making sense
5 days without putting it in the fridge? Hell at 5 days I’d even freeze it.
I was doing something similar and even in the fridge at day 5 I could taste that it was borderline ok. At 5 days on the counter it must have tasted so fermented it was bubbling.
Pasta and kimchi all in one.
I wonder if it was like closed with a lid and wet or if it was kinda open an dry. Either way, after 5 days I would not eat either one. Fucking yuck!
It was sealed in an airtight container, Tupperware or something like that.
Best case would be put it into a clean, dried container when the pasta is still steaming hot and seal it right away. But I still wouldn’t touch it after 5 days.
“That’s flavor patina.”
Shoot I’ll leave rice on the counter all day sometimes… I should stop doing that.
I leave mine in the rice cooker but no more than a day. It’s starts to get slimy after that and clearly inedible.
I had a Vietnamese roommate who used his rice cooker so that he made a bunch if rice and always when he wanted more he just clicked the cooker on to reheat it. And it took him sometimes like five days to eat it.
Five days of rice sitting in room temperature and occasionally being heated. Mental. That’s not food prep that’s a science experiment.
Dude was also often opinion that meat only gets better when it starts to smell a little in the fridge and you’ll just pour a lot of soy sauce on it and down it goes with the forever rice.
Apart from being a biowaste eating lunatic he was a good roommate.
Having originally come from Asia, I can tell you Asians aren’t exactly good at critical thinking. Yeah, there is stereotype of Asians being smart, but it is more like being good at memorisation and rote-learning instead of applying the theory in practice. Many Asians have engineering and medical degree, but many are still very superstitious (like my parents are). You’d think someone with a scientific background would apply the scientific method outside of work, but not really.
I don’t blame Asian folks, the blame is squarely on the education system that forces individuals to become unquestioning and obedient workers, who are not encouraged to think outside the box. The Asian education is cutthroat and very much similar to the old Prussian education system. However, the latter is now obsolete, but the former is still thriving.
I’ve heard many stories like that over the years.
I’m of the (possibly wrong) theory that their gut bacteria have adapted to handle it. The same way you’ll get sick if you travel to India or Mexico, etc and drink the water but locals are fine…
Chubbyemu on YouTube. Watching his videos will change your approach to food safety as well as a lot of the ordinary things we often do or think about doing that are, in fact, extremely dangerous.
I just realised … The bacteria is … Seriously … Called B. Cereus?
I am serious, and don’t call me bacteria.
The name’s Cereus, Bacillus Cereus
Why so Cereus?
Before her death in 2023, actress Cindy Williams auditioned for the role of Harry Potter’s godfather in The Prisoner of Azkaban. Of course she was completely wrong for the part, but she was invited to the audition just so that the casting director could say to her, “Shirley you can’t be Sirius.”
But her name is Cindy.
But she’s most famous for her titular role on the hit 70s sitcom, “Laverne and Shirley.”
Bacillus cereus
Yep.
Sounds like a Harry Potter spell
Does Bacillus Cereus look like a bitch?
Itty bitty rod shaped things. More like a bunch of really little dicks.
I spent WAY too much time on this
The specific name, cereus, meaning “waxy” in Latin, refers to the appearance of colonies grown on blood agar.
Removed by mod
Cuper Cereus.
Hell yeah chubbyemu
