Almost every working day of my life for the past 7 years i’ve taken my meal prepped lunch out of the fridge around 5am and put it in the passenger seat of my car – not in a fridge or esky/cooler.
It will then sit there in the car until i am ready to eat my lunch which is usually 1pm but on busier days could be as late as 4pm-5pm.
I do this year round, summer or winter and have never had an issue or ill affect such as food poisoning or salmonella, regardless of it being chicken, fish, beef or pork.
Several times on a Sunday night i have meal prepped 7 meals containing chicken or beef for the week, and headed to bed before remembering to put them into the fridge.
The meals would then sit on the bench overnight until i found them in the morning and then put them in the fridge to still be eaten.
I have also on more than one occasion, been grocery shopping for meat/chicken/fish items and after purchasing, forgotten to take them out of the car until 6/7/8 hours after purchasing.
I proceeded to cook these items and use them for my lunch or dinner through the week with zero issues.
I think the cautions around food poisoning are overblown and I think it’s perfectly fine to leave my chicken and veggies in the car on summer days for 8+ hours without a fridge or esky and still eat it without getting sick.
Or perhaps i’m just lead bellied…
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Was this written by RFK’s brain worm
It’s important to understand that with these “cautions” we are fighting PROBABILITIES of something happening, not the inevitability. The second important thing is that we should do all we can to remove the probability of something bad happening, if we can do it with fairly low effort – and keeping your food in the fridge is fairly low effort in todays society.
I think most cases are prior to cooking (i.e, hands not washed) or how they’re cooked or reheated rather than storage after being cooked.
Plus some people are more susceptible to issues if they have weakened immune system or general digestive issues.
They are to a certain extent, but you have to understand that every time you eat risky food, you’re rolling the dice on food poisoning. Same as driving without a seat belt. Every time you do it, you’re rolling the dice and leaning on the laws of probability. You drive without a seat belt once, you’ll be totally fine. Twice, totally fine. 100 times, now it’s getting seriously risky. 1000 times, 10,000 times, now you’re just being stupid.
You roll the dice once, twice, three times, you’re probably going to be OK. But the more often you roll, the greater the chance becomes that you’ll roll snake eyes and end up with food poisoning that could cause permanent nerve damage or even death. Or getting into a car crash and sustaining a brain injury and needing to learn to walk again.
Lab Medicine worker: Fun fact, alot of the things that are warned about for food poisonings are actually endo and exotoxins that are released by bacteria and will not be killed by heat. If its in the food then its there and the proper cooking may not always kill it if the toxins have already been released. These will have been released regardless of food preparation which is why washing your hands is the more important factor here. Not saying that bacteria will not grow and make you sick but the common food poisons we think of are from the toxin and not the bacteria itself. You also may not always get sick if you prep the food yourself and do not wash your hands because your body recognizes that as your own bacteria but you can still get someone else sick from the same meal. Just to reiterate I am not saying that the risks are not there but that food poisoning understanding is not in its completeness for the general public.