Seasoned Advice Asked on May 27, 2021
I have asked the following question before: Is it safe to only rinse visible residue from container if I then refrigerate the container?
I’ve gotten some great answers to it which help me further understand the variables at play here, but I stubbornly suspect a large part of their final conclusions was influenced by gut instinct, rather than genuine consideration of the scenario vs. other more traditional practices that are considered food safe.
(EDIT: I was wrong! It appears the defining factor here is the bacteria that would be introduced by eating – specifically the stuff in the saliva that would be transferred into the container via cutlery.)
I’ve then decided to ask a more specific, more rigorous question, which would hopefully help me decide whether I am wrong in this analysis, and if so, why. I propose two scenarios:
Say I came up with a hypothetical monster recipe that included some scrambled eggs, pot roast, broccoli with cheese, steak, and black bean chilli. Then I took half of it, had a horrible time eating it, and left the rest in the fridge until the end of the night, when I reluctantly ate the rest.
(Wow, that wouldn’t be a very good recipe! Yes, I agree.)
Say the next day I decided that all that stuff would taste better separately, and prepared each meal individually throughout the day. I then ate each meal off the same dish, rinsing it afterward in a manner that would remove all visible residue from the dish.
For the purpose of the question, assume I rigorously measured the total sum (food+container) of time spent in the temperature danger zone, including transportation, preparation and storage, and taking into account time to cool down in the fridge etc, and it added up to exactly an hour and thirty minutes in both scenarios. I am aware it would be more difficult to perform such a calculation in Scenario 2.
I know Scenario 2 sounds more gross, but are there factors that make it worse from a food-safety perspective than Scenario 1? Would Scenario 1 be considered not food safe by government standards (due to cross contamination and mixing a lot of foods)? If not, why would Scenario 2 be any less safe? One could argue it would be even more safe, given that there is way less food in the container most of the time (a microscopic amount).
The only thing I can think of that would make it worse is the potential presence of saliva in a dish I’ve eaten in vs one I haven’t, which would interact with the microscopic residue left on the dish – but I imagine the water would readily rinse away the spit.
The answer is exactly what you speculated - the spit. Well, not the spit itself, but the microbial contaminants from your oral cavity that you are introducing to the food when you eat.
Your mouth (and rest of you too) contains a whole bunch of microorganisms (around 700 species in the mouth). Each time you put an eating implement in your mouth and return it to your plate, you are introducing some bacterial components that can multiply in the food residues. If you used your fingers to pick up some of the food or touch the plate at all, you introduced a different set of bacteria, which may be good or bad.
When you rinse a plate all you are doing is removing gross (see definition B) contamination. There is still microscopic contamination there, particularly oils and other non-water soluble components.
Bacteria in general are very small - most are around 0.5 - 5 micrometers (that's 1000ths of a millimeter or 0.00002 - 0.0002 inches). These are so small that no matter how well you rinse there will be some left on the surface of the plate you ate off and these can multiply in the presence of the food residues also left on the plate. How much they multiply depends on the temperature (that's why cold used for storage), nutrient source (how readily metabolizable they are) and which strain of which species they are.
When you ate the meal the night before, you introduced a bunch of bacteria. Every time you take the food out of the fridge and it reaches the "Danger zone" then the bacteria are multiplying. This then leads to the question of dose.
In scenario 1 you have a bulk meal that is all sitting in the danger zone for 1.5 hours, which could provide a massive inoculuum of bacteria when eaten. This is not directly comparable to eating in scenario 2, where it seems that it is only the plate that is in the danger zone for the whole time.
If in scenario 2 you are taking each component and reheating it separately on the same plate, such that the sum total of time for all the food components is 1.5 hours, then this is likely less risky than having a bulk of food all sitting in the danger zone for 1.5 hours. In this case the plate could be providing an inoculum to the food that enhances growth once the food is reheated, but how big a component to the risk this is, is very hard to say as it will depend on the bacterial species (and all the biological complexity there) and just how much of it is there before the food is added, and what food components it is multiplying on.
However, and this is the important bit: We can't tell for sure which of these scenarios is more likely to be a problem. It would take extensive scientific testing to prove it. Take all that we say on the internet with a grain of salt because we are not all food safety experts (I'm a virologist for instance)
Correct answer by bob1 on May 27, 2021
Get help from others!
Recent Questions
Recent Answers
© 2024 TransWikia.com. All rights reserved. Sites we Love: PCI Database, UKBizDB, Menu Kuliner, Sharing RPP