[HN Gopher] Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of ...
___________________________________________________________________
Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Expert
Guidelines
Author : OpsManager
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-03-30 15:37 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (residentcontrarian.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (residentcontrarian.substack.com)
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Though the article reasonably paints the "conservative" (in the
| small-c/non-political usage) position as driven by "science" or
| at least fear of being "anti-science", there is in fact nothing
| scientific about it. It's just a plain appeal to authority.
|
| 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 that, in fact, the chance of an Adverse Event is
| no worse than ~10%. (Pedant note: quick, dirty, wrong calculation
| because the exact value doesn't matter here.)
|
| Science, the process, really does work. Even if many of those who
| practice it don't look like TV or press release scientists. And
| even if many "Real Scientists" aren't really anything of the
| sort.
| MAGZine wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| It was Alex Jason not Adam Savage, and it wasn't such crude
| language.
|
| https://www.tested.com/making/557288-origin-only-
| difference-...
| showerst wrote:
| (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.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| grumple wrote:
| > 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.
| weeblewobble wrote:
| 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.
| allturtles wrote:
| 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?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Same reason I often leave pizza out even though I'm years
| removed from college. Pizza box big, refrigerator small.
| cafard wrote:
| I agree. If nothing else, a community of the young and
| hungry might mean that there never is any leftover pizza.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| 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.
| weaksauce wrote:
| 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-...
| lupire wrote:
| "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.
| boatsie wrote:
| 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.
| andagainagain wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _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.
| wccrawford wrote:
| 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.
| Moosdijk wrote:
| >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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
| danaliv wrote:
| 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.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >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 degF.
| stormbrew wrote:
| > 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| Exactly _how precise_ do you want the CDC guidelines to be?
| [deleted]
| noxToken wrote:
| 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.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| 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.
| ansible wrote:
| 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.
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| > 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.
| wnissen wrote:
| 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".
| lamontcg wrote:
| > 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.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| 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?
| barkingcat wrote:
| This person needs to be introduced to ChubbyEmu:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0d6Dpx2li4
| canadianwriter wrote:
| The article is basically saying that you shouldn't blindly trust
| authority, which is totally fair. The example is also fair,
| though without the nuance of the guidelines being for commercial
| restaurants and the like.
|
| The issue though is that the "replacement" answers don't come
| from anywhere trustworthy either. The issue is the data simply
| isn't there.
|
| The only "real" answer would be proper testing but if you think
| there is a chance of illness and death that gets into a huge
| ethics issue.
|
| Instead the author points to common sense answers, while these
| are generally fine (talking about each ingredient and it's shelf
| life) I would argue that each ingredient is very different than
| when combined. Flour has a much longer lifespan than bread for
| example.
|
| I don't have any answers myself, but it's certainly something to
| be discussed.
|
| Though, no one should trust the "I did a bunch of times and I'm
| fine" argument, cause that's just silly for obvious reasons.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Lovely article, plain sense made entertaining. However, the
| entire argument arises from an error in living conditions: these
| people lack hounds.
|
| A proper lifestyle shared with loyal hounds ensures that silly
| sanitation issues such as these never even arise. "5 second
| rule?" hah! food don't bounce twice, even if the hound was
| outside when it was dropped.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Cats also.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I'm having to teach the rescue collie what "oops" means, and
| that it's ok to eat things that I point out on the floor.
|
| I've cared for many dogs in my time, and this is unprecedented.
| clairity wrote:
| ha, my rescue dog was quite reticent about many common and
| natural dog behaviors like that, which led me to conclude she
| was over-disciplined (or perhaps worse) by her previous
| owners.
|
| nearly 3 years on, she still hesitates eating what i
| explicitly give her for meals in bowls, even with much
| fanfare and encouragement, but easily welcomes treats given
| by hand. she won't eat anything on the ground indoors without
| permission. it's so uncharacteristic of dogs in general.
|
| she knows by now not to eat random things off the ground on
| our walks, but sometimes she'll sheepishly sneak a munch
| anyways when i'm not paying attention. she was found
| wandering the streets so maybe that explains some of this
| behavior.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Yeah, ours was found straying, no collar, no chip, nothing
| known about her before that.
|
| She's been trained, (like, she walks on the left, just
| behind the last person in the group, with a slack lead or
| no lead at all) and she was afraid of _everything_ to start
| with. Throwing anything, fast movements, anything that
| looked like hitting would send her scuttling with a tucked
| tail.
| clairity wrote:
| oh wow, that sounds eerily familiar! mine spent the first
| 2+ months having anxiety diarrhea at 3 in the morning,
| worried that i would hit her for breaking some impossible
| to discern and arbitrary human rule.
|
| i actually detrained my dog from walking on the left
| behind me because it otherwise reinforced anxiety, low
| self-esteem, and a strict dominance relationship, which
| just made me sad (and her too, i'm sure). i now let her
| walk freely to engender self-confidence as well as a
| measure of independence. she's still very obedient so
| will take direction quite willingly (sometimes getting
| anxious even now when she can't figure out what i want,
| though much less frequently).
| h2odragon wrote:
| In truth we too have a command: shout "Crumbs!" and they come
| hoover up anything nearby, including things we didn't notice.
|
| Those who say "dont share food," do have a point; it's also
| important to teach the hounds civility about sharing food.
| It's important to teach the hounds civility about
| _everything_ tho so I think some make too big a deal of food.
|
| When we cook dinner we're surrounded by an adoring, attentive
| audience, eager to assist and suggest the addition of more
| curry sauce.
| [deleted]
| bluthru wrote:
| Chain pizza probably contains preservatives. I wonder if homemade
| pizza is less safe if it's left out overnight.
| tzs wrote:
| > In the specific case, I want to eat pizza the morning after
| ordering it. My track record clearly shows I'm not going to
| remember to put it in the fridge.
|
| A much more interesting article would have been about string
| cheese [1]. It too is something you aren't supposed to leave out.
| Yet it is very common to put it in packed lunches that won't be
| eaten until hours later, or to carry it in a backpack all day to
| use as an afternoon snack, or to take it on camping trips.
|
| With string cheese it is not just about people who can't remember
| to use a fridge ("Alexa, remind me in two hours to put the
| leftover pizza in the fridge" would deal with his problem).
| People are deliberately and on a large scale using string cheese
| that has been out beyond the recommended time.
|
| Yet illness from string cheese gone bad seems to be very rare.
|
| Is this because string cheese is generally sold packaged as
| single serving sticks in a tightly sealed wrap and comes from the
| factory with little or no bacteria, so it is not until you
| actually open a stick that the clock starts running?
|
| [1] There are several different things called "string cheese". I
| am referring to what is commonly sold in the US as that [2].
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_cheese#United_States
| thebean11 wrote:
| I doubt illness would be common even eating opened string
| cheese after 4-8 hours. Cheese doesn't breed harmful bacteria
| very quickly from what I understand.
| aranchelk wrote:
| I know a guy who regularly takes them backpacking, multiple
| days, no refrigeration, no negative effects.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I suspect that there is a lot of variability in the category of
| "cheese" as to what needs to be refrigerated. We just say it
| all does because we don't know where the line is.
| ericpauley wrote:
| Anecdotally, cheese can often be kept out for a very long time;
| it mostly just gets slimy. I often take cheddar camping in warm
| weather for a day or two without issue, or even more days if
| it's packaged string cheese. Of course your mileage may vary.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Cheese developed as a way to preserve calories such that they
| last a long time (also, is already effectively mold). If you
| don't mind a bit of continued growth, it can be stable for a
| long time.
|
| Source: I've taken blocks of cheese on multi-week camping
| trips with no issues. Wrap and seal them well, cut off the
| newly blue bits if you aren't comfortable eating them them,
| you'll probably be fine.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| I drunkenly ate a two week old Papa Johns pepperoni pizza one
| time - literally sitting unrefrigerated in the box in an office
| for ~ two weeks - and suffered no ill effects.
| Palomides wrote:
| calling it a lie seems disingenuous when it's a guideline based
| on worst-case bacterial multiplication rate, and food safety
| guidelines are primarily relevant in commercial situations where
| it's reasonable to be more strict
|
| if you want to argue the advice should be based on how often an
| activity actually makes people sick, that's reasonable (though
| hard to measure), but is obviously a way lower safety standard
| koblas wrote:
| The last two paragraphs are exactly where I undid all of my
| reading.
|
| > In the USDA's standard this is probably a net benefit - you
| basically know they are lying at all times, ...
|
| Equating the USDA recommendations to lies, because their
| conservative recommendations are meant for easy understanding
| and practice undermines any of the above research. Since now
| you're left wondering what viewpoint the author is advocating
| any why I'm reading yet another science bashing writer.
| weaksauce wrote:
| And yeah it's absolutely not a lie. it's talking about
| recommendations of an entire population of people all with
| varying levels of immune system response to pathogens of all
| ages and sizes and pre-existing conditions. Their guideline
| is there for the late stage cancer patient as well as the
| high school athlete in peak physical form. To call it a lie
| is disingenuous at best and outright malicious at worst.
|
| sure in a vacuum that food might not harbor enough bacteria
| to make you sick but you don't always grab that food with
| clean hands and separate the slice from one another with
| clean hands or if someone sneezed near to the time the box
| was open and some bad stuff landed on it and then grew like a
| petri dish. it's good advice to follow in general. just like
| the fda guideline says cook your chicken to 165oF they also
| have a more nuanced outlook on it too with appropriate charts
| for pasteurization schedules and risk management guidelines
| for restaurants.
|
| why do they say 165 is the best temp? well that's the temp
| that if your chicken reaches internally there will be a large
| log reduction in salmonella populations within mere seconds
| of reaching that temp. you can cook chicken safely when you
| do so at a lower temperature but you need to cook it longer.
| 165 for seconds is safe and a good phrase to teach the
| general population about.
| peytn wrote:
| How do you know? Do you have any evidence that that's the
| underlying motivation for _all_ of their recommendations?
|
| For at least one recommendation, the Food Pyramid, many
| allege the influence of lobbying groups played a role. Do you
| dispute their claims?
|
| I'm wondering because I've been noticing a trend that I've
| read happened towards the end of the USSR: as the rulemakers
| made ever more nonsensical rules, educated people invented
| explanations since calling the rules nonsensical wasn't
| allowed in polite company.
| newman8r wrote:
| > about the closest I can come to a document case of tomato sauce
| related food poisoning is this 20-year old who died from eating
| spaghetti. His case is not a lot help though, since he had
| apparently left the spaghetti unrefrigerated for five days, and
| since the toxins they found were in the noodles, not the sauce.
|
| I think the interface between the sauce and the crust in a pizza
| has some similarities to a noodle. Reading the study linked in
| the article makes me more hesitant to eat 'aged pizza' (as I used
| to call it in my college days)
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think his argument that the USDA puts out these really broad
| rules because they "don't trust us to be smart enough" is unfair.
| It isn't about trust or intelligence. It is about practicality.
| They can't put out guidelines for every single possible type of
| food, combined with every possible temperature and bacterial
| environment.
|
| They have to make conservative, broad statements that say "do
| this and you will be safe." They aren't saying "don't do this and
| you won't be safe", just that they can't be sure.
| boatsie wrote:
| Does anyone in this thread have school age children? Or ever
| packed a sack lunch? Lunch meat, mayonnaise, cheese, cut fruit,
| even pizza are all common in lunches. These are always out for
| over 2 hours and very rarely packed with ice or a cold pack
| (those that do are likely only doing it to adhere to said
| guidelines). This should make it obvious how comically
| conservative the food safety guidelines as given by the
| government are. As the author states, there's almost no benefit
| to the guidelines being relaxed, because, hey, maybe someone does
| get sick.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Thus this is simultaneously "a dangerous food safety thing
| people commonly do" and "relatively high risk" (Conor regrettably
| does not say what this risk is high relative to; it's almost
| certainly high compared to eating a fresh saltine, less so
| compared to doing wheelies on a motorcycle in traffic)._ "
|
| This is a problem.
|
| I've met people who advocated feeding their pets cooked, bone-in
| chicken. That's kind of a bad idea, but you can get away with it
| for a very long time. Or, if you get unlucky, ....
|
| Risks are frequently presented on a "relative risk" basis; do X
| and your risk of cancer Y is 20 times greater. Except that your
| risk of cancer Y is minuscule and 20 times more is only slightly
| less minuscule. On the other hand, there are 300+ million people
| in the US; 300 million times something minuscule can still be a
| noticeable number.
|
| So when the USDA says, " _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. Discard it, even though it
| may look and smell good,_ " they do that because if they don't,
| hundreds or thousands of restaurants in the country will keep
| perishable food, perhaps much longer than overnight, and the
| result will be a daily death toll.
|
| So, allow me to rephrase one of his interpretations: "some foods
| might be a significant risk after several hours, but we can't
| trust [a 16-year old minimum wage employee or that sketchy dude
| whose food truck keeps changing names] to sort out which ones
| [given that specifying which ones would require several thousand
| pages of fine print], or to keep close track of your cut-off time
| [which varies by local atmospheric conditions, among other
| things], so we are saying two hours is the limit for virtually
| all foods to keep [even someone immune-compromised] safe and our
| smart asses covered".
|
| You can call that a lie, if you like. Kind of like how "if the
| net force on an object is zero, then the velocity of the object
| is constant" is a lie, too.
|
| Do I eat pizza that has been left out overnight? Sure. Heck, I'll
| eat stuff that's far enough along to be visibly sketchy. But I
| have a functional immune system and the worst case is that I get
| sick (or die). But I'm a lot more cautious when I'm cooking for
| someone else, and I tend not to cook for large numbers of people
| because I don't know all those stupid rules.
|
| But when someone says something like, "USDA's bullshit mega-
| overcautious-standard", I'm calling their opinion horseshit.
| Because that is _exactly_ how you get anti-vaxxers and measles
| outbreaks.
| boatsie wrote:
| As I mentioned in another comment, should schools be throwing
| out unrefrigerated perishable foods found in children's
| lunches? I think this is reasonable to think it is extremely
| over cautious.
| hedora wrote:
| I think the core issue here is adverse selection. The scientists
| that are most likely to hold decision making positions in
| government or that are most likely to speak to the press are also
| most likely to be the ones that protect their careers, even at
| the expense of scientific rigor and basic honesty.
|
| The US congress used to have a team of non-partisan scientists to
| help inform policy. They hired scientists with stellar
| reputations, and were known to respond truthfully regardless of
| the political implications (as was their job).
|
| Eventually both parties got lazy, and decided it was easier to
| disband the group than to craft reality-based legislation.
|
| Things have gone downhill since.
| danaliv wrote:
| _> they don't get in trouble for you throwing away good food, but
| they potentially get in lots of trouble if you eat bad food on
| their recommendation. Their incentive in that situation is to be
| almost comically conservative_
|
| This seems like a common failure mode of bureaucracies. It
| reminds me in particular of the FAA's medical division (just
| because that's one bureaucracy I butt heads with a lot). They'll
| never get in trouble for saying no; "comically conservative"
| doesn't even begin to describe it.
| mcguire wrote:
| Could you remind me what the absolute risk of travel by airline
| is, again?
| danaliv wrote:
| Unless you've had personal, repeated experience dealing
| directly with the FAA on aeromedical matters, I suggest you
| listen to someone who actually has. I know how to do a risk
| analysis, and aviation is a much more varied field than just
| scheduled air carrier operations.
|
| I'm a professional flight instructor. I also sit two desks
| over from a non-FAA-affiliated flight surgeon at my day job.
| I watch student pilots go through the medical process all the
| time. It is infuriating to see the outlandish and expensive
| hoop-jumping nonsense that these folks get put through. I'm
| talking thousands of dollars of exams in some very common
| cases that have absolutely no evidentiary basis for increased
| risk. And those are the ones that don't just get denied
| outright, with no avenue for appeal.
|
| On the rare occasion when aeromedical does see the light,
| it's pulling teeth. It took _years_ for the American Diabetes
| Association to convince the FAA that they were wrong about
| diabetes. And when they finally relented, they dragged on
| their feet on actually issuing the medicals.
|
| The aeromedical division has become so hostile and ossified
| that _Congress_ has had to tell them to cut it out.
|
| It's a problem. And it's exemplary of what happens when an
| authority has the kind of incentives under discussion here.
| They will never get in trouble for saying no, even when
| saying no flies in the face of all actual evidence.
| awillen wrote:
| This kind of thing always reminds me of a rule I was taught in
| sixth grade English - you may never start a sentence with the
| word and.
|
| This is, of course, totally incorrect both from the usage and
| grammatical perspectives. Nonetheless, most people (especially
| when the people in question are sixth graders) will be better
| served in terms of the quality of writing they product by simply
| following the rule rather than spending the time to try to fully
| understand the nuance behind it.
| cafard wrote:
| The example I always think of is from Lincoln's Second
| Inaugural:
|
| "Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war
| rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept
| war rather than let it perish. And the war came."
| colpabar wrote:
| > _Nonetheless, most people (especially when the people in
| question are sixth graders) will be better served in terms of
| the quality of writing they product by simply following the
| rule rather than spending the time to try to fully understand
| the nuance behind it._
|
| Maybe. I remember being taught the no-and-rule, and I remember
| some people just started using the word "also" instead.
| Technically they were following the rule, but since they didn't
| understand the reasoning behind the rule, they made the same
| error but in a different way.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| With pizza, here's my thought process. Firstly, overnight has no
| special significance for food. If you order a pizza at 9 PM and
| wake up at 7 AM, then that is roughly the same as ordering pizza
| at 11 AM and eating it later at 9 PM. So just thinking in terms
| of hours, I think I've seen bad pizza (ie, pizza with visible
| mold growth) at 48 hours. I do not remember having any bad
| experiences with pizza that has been out for 12 hours or so.
| Usually my rule-of-thumb is around 12 hours, but if I'm desperate
| maybe 16 hours. If old pizza is just one of many food options,
| probably 8 hours.
|
| However, I think the author is being a bit silly with painting
| this as a matter of liar vs truth-teller. The truth is that
| without much more detail about the food and your environment,
| estimating time to spoilage is just an educated guess.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| An old friend of mine has a saying: "If you know why you're not
| supposed to stick a fork into a toaster to get a piece of stuck
| toast out, you're allowed to stick a fork into a toaster to get a
| piece of stuck toast out."
| loxias wrote:
| "Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for kings."
| lupire wrote:
| "Make the rules, then break them all 'cause you are the best"
| -- Prince, Cream
| twic wrote:
| When i first started working in a lab, my boss told me i had to
| do safety training first, and then gave me a pile of documents
| explaining in detail how all the lab's methods worked. There
| was nothing in them about safety. But, he explained, if i
| understood all the materials and equipment i was going to use
| in miniscule detail, then i would naturally know how to use
| them safely.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| On the other hand, wooden chopsticks are safer and work better.
| Similarly, I like my pizza slightly soggy after being bagged
| and refrigerated, though I don't always bother.
| wavefunction wrote:
| Or you can just unplug the toaster.
| Arrath wrote:
| LOTO!
|
| Secure that energy then do what needs done.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I have unironically LOTO'd power boxes in laundry rooms
| before.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| That doesn't protect from accidentally bending or damaging
| the heating elements, which can lead to shorts or
| malfunctions, which is much easier to do digging around
| with a pointy piece of metal than a blunt stick. Always
| frustrating when you realize why it has a hot spot, and
| that knowing your tools better should have led you to
| anticipate that failure.
| anaerobicover wrote:
| That's a good (and pithy!) take, although it does seem like a
| bit of a Dunning-Kreuger tarpit. There's a _lot_ of implicit
| context packed into that "why", depending on the subject.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I'm not sure which category I fall in...
|
| Is the reason that the outlet might be reverse polarity, and if
| that's on your mind you've probably checked that it's safe?
| modeless wrote:
| The reason is that old toaster designs had unpolarized plugs
| and therefore a good chance of uninsulated live wires inside,
| even when off. Modern toasters don't anymore, but folk wisdom
| lasts forever. Although you make a good point that if your
| outlet polarity is reversed, you might still have a problem.
| I don't know if modern designs are robust to that...
|
| I learned this from a video about old Sunbeam toasters that
| was unexpectedly fascinating: https://youtu.be/1OfxlSG6q5Y
| solarmist wrote:
| Wow! That's amazing! Thank you for sharing that video.
|
| Now I want a toaster like that.
| visarga wrote:
| Depends on where you're touching on the resistor. Maybe
| you're lucky and touch the part closer to the null. Or you
| wear shoes and don't touch anything else.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| >I'm not sure which category I fall in
|
| If you aren't sure, he would say you're not allowed to stick
| a fork in toasters.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| Duly noted!
| kgin wrote:
| I absolutely got extremely violent food poisoning from eating
| pizza left out overnight. While this is not sufficient to build a
| policy on, it is my personal mission to tell everyone who will
| listen to please just put the pizza in the refrigerator.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _from_
|
| How do you know it wasn't just "after" instead of "from"?
| meepmorp wrote:
| That happened to me all the time in college, and the drinking
| had nothing to do with it.
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