What people don't realize is that the USDA and FDA operate on guidelines such that the most basic cook can follow them. J Kenji Lopez-Alt points this out in his book Food Lab. There are graphs that show that there are safe temperatures for foods below the often quoted temperatures. 165 for chicken is quoted as the minimum safe temperature, but that's actually the instant temperature. Holding chicken at 155 is safe as long as it's done for the recommended amount of time.

The USDA just wants to prevent wide-spread food borne illnesses that are easily preventable. Hence why the small scale experiments where someone eats chicken only cooked to 155 turn out successful all the time.

Note that this isn't to discredit what you're saying. I just wanted to point out that there's more to the guidelines than the parroted parts.

I think many just misunderstand what the food safety guidelines are. The USDA gives you instructions that if you attempt to follow, you will (almost certainly) be safe from any remotely common sources of problems. What it isn't is a set of rules that you absolutely will get in trouble if you violate any of them, or the only possible way to be safe.

> I think many just misunderstand what the food safety guidelines are. The USDA gives you instructions that if you attempt to follow, you will (almost certainly) be safe from any remotely common sources of problems.

I agree with this. But the reason that "many misunderstand what the food safety guidelines are" is because of how they're worded. They're worded as if, if you don't follow them then you will definitely get in trouble.

Yes, the point of the rules is not that you can just skirt the edge of safety.

The intention of the rules is that they be easy to understand, easy to follow, and you won't be in danger if you mess up a little bit.

Yes, this is what's being left out. The standards are not designed for someone who is capable about writing an essay discussing the tradeoffs and and evidence for various standards. The standards are designed for someone who is not capable of writing, period. Not that people working in commercial kitchens are unintelligent or untrained, but some are, at least in the language in which they're working. "Only use stuff that says NSF, keep cold under 40, hot over 140." That can be conveyed in a few seconds, to almost anyone.

Furthermore, it provides you a margin of safety. 165 for chicken is going to be pretty dry for white meat, but I'd choose that over medium rare!

If the guidelines occupied a poster-size tree it would be much more difficult to follow them and the consequences would be much more severe.

I also make it a point never to take food safety advice from anyone who doesn't know the difference between "sanitized" and "sterilized".

(Note i still think the author is right) -- If eating that pizza kills one in 100,000 though, you'd have no idea. But the USDA saying "Go ahead, eat the pizza!" would kill dozens of people a year.

Advice to huge numbers of people skews the odds of "this is probably fine", which I think is the root of this. Aside from the fact that quantifying just how many zeros are in front of that probability hasn't (can't?) be done. It probably _is_ reasonable to estimate based on prior science that if 300,000,000 people leave pizza out a few times a year, there's a one in a billion chance of warm cheese making someone super sick.

I also wonder how much lawsuit culture plays a part in this, it only takes one bad luck case.

If eating that pizza kills 1 in 100,000 we would absolutely have an idea. Apparently about 3 Billion people buy pizza year in the US alone. Probably 1 Billion of those pizzas, at least, are then eaten cold overnight. But we don't have 10,000 people or more dying of cold pizza a year.

> Apparently about 3 Billion people buy pizza year in the US alone. Probably 1 Billion of those pizzas, at least, are then eaten cold overnight.

If by “cold overnight” you mean unrefrigerated, I doubt that anything like 1/3 are.

here's the thing too though... even if it doesn't kill you there are many food borne illnesses that don't show their effects until many days later some even over a month later so the pizza borne illness wouldn't be tracked back to that. it's almost impossible to track those back to their sources unless you have an outbreak of it. now a quick acting food borne illness would have a more quick cause and effect that would aid in diagnosis.

https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/what-you-need-know-about-...

"Lawsuit culture" is mostly a myth created by wealthy corporate defendants who don't like being held accountable for their negligence, and partly due to the lack of socialized healthcare in the US.

I had a friend try to sue a company. It turns out it has sizable out of pocket costs, the lawyer fees are steep, and you aren’t compensated for the time you have to spend on the case, even if you win. But the worst part is, most issues you can sue over, the most you can recoup is what you can prove as damages. So if a company literally steals $500 from you, that is all you can recoup after dealing with all of the hassles of the lawsuit, chance of losing and being out thousands of dollars in costs, the time (years usually), etc. And if you settle, those proceeds are also income taxed.

If anything, there should be more lawsuits against companies and they should be punished punitively.

It seems more reasonable to me, and with a roughly equal amount of evidence, that lawsuit culture was created by a mixture of media sensationalizing a couple of lawsuits and lawyers capitalizing on the fear.

> If eating that pizza kills one in 100,000 though, you'd have no idea.

I'm going to guess this is wrong. I went to a large private university of around thirty thousand. I'd estimate, on any given week, the average student has eaten leftover pizza in the morning once. This alone puts us at a hundred and twenty thousand overnight pizzas consumed per month. Millions per year. At just one university! Surely we'd hear cautionary tales of overnight pizza at 1 in 100k or even 1 in a million, as deaths from it would be far more common than binge drinking.

My estimates may be off a bit, but probably not by as much as you'd think. Student organizations buy copious amounts of pizza because it's popular and cheap.

To offer a counterpoint, college students aren't exactly a randomly distributed sample. They're young adults who are (on average) in the prime of their lives from an immune response perspective, and self-select for a certain minimum level of health besides that. One would expect their responses to food-borne illness vectors to skew dramatically to the less severe side than the general population.

I'm fascinated by the assumption by many in this thread that eating pizza left out overnight is common. I've never done it, and I went to college. We had refrigerators. I mean, if you have a refrigerator why not put the pizza in there?

Same reason I often leave pizza out even though I'm years removed from college. Pizza box big, refrigerator small.

I agree. If nothing else, a community of the young and hungry might mean that there never is any leftover pizza.

It's cheese and cured meat and bread. If its covered I'm not too worried about it.

I think your estimates are way, way off. I doubt the average college student eats leftover pizza once a week, let alone pizza that's been left out all night.

It is not ‘scientific’ to base risk entirely on experienced probability, especially without taking into account the relative scale of the cost.

A 10% chance of something bad happening could be an acceptable risk or not, depending on how bad the bad outcome is. Is it death? In that case, 10% is way too high... eat that old pizza seven times, and you already have a greater than 50% chance of being dead from food poisoning.

This is the problem with using personal experience for low probability/high cost events. Drunk driving is like this; I know too many people who say “drunk driving isn’t dangerous! I’ve driven drunk dozens of times and have never had anything bad happen!”

Most of the time you are fine, but the extreme cost of what happens when you aren’t make it a risk that should not be taken.

Except as the author points out, we have more than just our own personal experience to go on. We have the experience of millions of college students, who, as the author notes, are not being dragged out in body bags by the thousands or even hundreds due to eating day-old pizza. Maybe the evidence isn't organized, easily referenced, or particularly well-controlled, but it exists, and to ignore it is just silly.

We're also talking about two different things here, one being the scientific method, the other being risk analysis. Output from the former can be an input to the latter but they're otherwise orthogonal.

On the subject of risk, I don't think the drunk-driving comparison holds because the numbers are completely different. We can point to innumerable cases of drunk-driving resulting in death. But day-old pizza? I'll be surprised if you can find (just picking a number out of my hat here) even ten cases of day-old pizza killing anyone.

This, along with "belief" in supposed scientific facts, drives me insane.

The best is when someone tells you that 100 scientists agree on it, so it must be true, but it turns out that a few claimed it and a bunch of other scientists back them up without actually doing any science.

Don't even get me started on all the fraud we've been seeing lately in scientific journals.

I no longer really fault people that don't believe what a scientist tells them. The ones that make the news are the least trustworthy and usually have some bias towards what they're saying.

If I didn't understand science as well as I do, I'd be tempted to join them in disbelief.

>The best is when someone tells you that 100 scientists agree on it, so it must be true, but it turns out that a few claimed it and a bunch of other scientists back them up without actually doing any science.

Im not looking to get into an argument, so I'm going to be short. These 100 scientists' opinions are based on a lot of collective years practicing as a scientist and everything that it entails, so them agreeing with a scientific fact has a _lot_ more weight behind it than >people that don't believe what a scientist tells them.

What's weight?

>In fact the "hick" position is the scientific one.

It is not. It is evidence-based, and experiment-based, but this is not enough for it to be scientific. For that, it also needs to fit with previous experimental data, and not contradict an existing scientific model (expanding on it and replacing it with a more general model is fine).

You can say the experts in this case are being overly cautious, but there's no denying that

>If a perishable food (such as meat or poultry) has been left out at room temperature overnight (more than two hours) it may not be safe.

This is a fact, as established by scientific studies. The problem is the danger 'threshold' that leads one to behave in accordance with the drawn conclusion:

>Discard it, even though it may look and smell good. Never taste a food to see if it is spoiled. Use a food thermometer to verify temperatures. Never leave food in the Danger Zone over two hours; one hour if outside temperature is above 90 °F.

> This is a fact, as established by scientific studies.

It's also an incredibly weak claim. It makes an extremely qualified statement about a very broad set of things.

You could just as easily say "any object left on the kitchen counter overnight may poison you" and that would be true even if the incidence of poisoning by recipe card in kitchens is approximately zero. Let alone the meat products that literally exist to be stored in the open.

Something loosely deriving from scientific studies is no more 'science' just for that fact than something deriving from uncontrolled empirical evidence is. In this case the statement is so obvious as to be kind of useless for prediction.

Exactly how precise do you want the CDC guidelines to be?

adam savage, who many probably now grew up with on television, has always emphasized the point that "the difference between science and fucking around, is writing shit down."

it lowers the barrier of entry to science. anyone can do science. it should be easy and accessible. don't let good be the enemy of perfect. not everything has to be done by academics in lab coats—anyone can participate. I think it's important to keep the scientific process open and understandable to everyone.

It was Alex Jason not Adam Savage, and it wasn't such crude language.

https://www.tested.com/making/557288-origin-only-difference-...

> If someone eats unrefrigerated pizza ten times without any Adverse Events, then in fact that's an experiment providing (admittedly crude) scientific data that, in fact, the chance of an Adverse Event is no worse than ~10%.

Except that the article posits one specific type of pizza where only really the tomato sauce and cheese could cause a problem.

Sure, if you get your standard pizza from Domino's with tomato sauce with preservative and synthe-cheese, it will probably stay edible for decades.

However, did you get fresh mozzarella on that pizza? Or did you order chicken?

Or, did you order something with ranch dressing which has both cream and mayonnaise? Room temperature mayonnaise (generally in picnic potato and macaroni salad) is one of the classic food poisoning sources.

There is a lot of variance here.

"If someone eats unrefrigerated pizza ten times without any Adverse Events, then in fact that's an experiment providing (admittedly crude) scientific data that, in fact, the chance of an Adverse Event is no worse than ~10%."

Is that a statistically valid sample?

Let's say the "chance of an Adverse Event" is 0.000001%; literally 1 in a million. There are about 330,000,000 people in the US, all eating leftover, unrefrigerated pizza every morning. That means roughly 330 people get sick every day. If I've got the numbers right, ~0.3% of those who get sick are hospitalized. That is about 0.88/day, or ~6/week. 2.3% of those die, or about 7/year. Sounds perfectly acceptable to me (although those numbers are based on the current USDA regime, not the "try it a few times and if you don't die, you're good to go" approach).

"quick, dirty, wrong calculation because the exact value doesn't matter here"

It kinda does.

> In fact the "hick" position is the scientific one. If someone eats unrefrigerated pizza ten times without any Adverse Events, then in fact that's an experiment providing (admittedly crude) scientific data

I'm going to strenuously disagree with this one.

"I've done it 10 times and it has been fine for me" is the logic behind the normalization of deviance and the Shuttle disasters and (in my world) cave diving fatalities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o

As a cave diver I also see this leading to fatalities where divers cut corners on the rules of cave diving, see no immediate consequences and continue to do so up until they wind up dead some day (there are often very binary outcomes for breaking the rules in cave diving).

The author of this article does provide a fairly compelling science-based _hypothesis_ though as to why eating-8-hour-cold-pizza is safe though that goes beyond his personal experience. He does argue that the N is actually very large due to reasonable assumption that many college students do this and there is no evidence of a plague of college students in ERs. He also argues that pizza specifically should be pretty safe after 8 hours due to most of it being composed of things with longer shelf lives and tomato sauce having a low pH.

That is still mostly all the kinds of rationalization that NASA did though. So those should be at least somewhat scientifically tested. A simple survey of college students could determine their practices of how often they ate morning-after pizza that had been left out, along with surveying hospitals and ERs. Then you could lab test actual cold pizzas. That would provide some better scientific basis rather than anecdote and gut checks.

We all expect that if you did this that you'd find that it was substantially more safe than the expert guidelines suggest for those reasons.

HOWEVER leaping all the way to "I did it 10 times and it didn't hurt me" is precisely how cave divers wind up dead. That isn't scientific at all.

And in fact this article suggests a broader connection to the normalization of deviance. There are times where you can get away with it over and over again and nothing bad happens. Many other people can do so as well, because it (presumably) turns out that expert guidance in this case is way too overcautious and dont-sue-me-generalized. What this reinforces is that the normalization of deviance doesn't have any consequences because you can get away with it. And you rationalize using anecdotes as scientific evidence as you just did. That builds confidence to do it in other ways. Then one day you're in charge of the shuttle program or go cave diving and you find out why anecdotes actually aren't scientific the hard way.

That does suggest why those kinds of rule are bad though. Because you find some rule like this and build up a tolerance to breaking it over and over and over again and getting away with it. Then you wind up making a category error at some point in the future and applying that logic to some other rule where you can't do that.

Seriously. In decades of riding in cars, I have never once been in a situation where a seatbelt would have prevented injury. Does that make seatbelts a bad idea? Is that even remotely scientific, even though I have a significantly larger sample size?

Bad analogy, seatbelts aren’t intended to operate in the course of normal driving rather their effect is observed during accidents. It’s a weird nuance but easier to see if you take a step back - it’s obvious why “I take a shower everyday and I’ve never needed a seatbelt” is flawed, namely, there’s no causal linkage between showering and seatbelts. The same is true for driving in this case, driving may be a necessary condition for an accident but it’s not sufficient.

To put it another way, your sample size for the test case of seatbelt value, i.e. an accident, appears to be zero rather than large as stated originally.