Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Expert Guidelines
residentcontrarian.substack.com
residentcontrarian.substack.com
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.
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.
https://www.tested.com/making/557288-origin-only-difference-...
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 anything, there should be more lawsuits against companies and they should be punished punitively.
If by “cold overnight” you mean unrefrigerated, I doubt that anything like 1/3 are.
https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/what-you-need-know-about-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Secure that energy then do what needs done.
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?
I learned this from a video about old Sunbeam toasters that was unexpectedly fascinating: https://youtu.be/1OfxlSG6q5Y
Now I want a toaster like that.
If you aren't sure, he would say you're not allowed to stick a fork in toasters.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I've cared for many dogs in my time, and this is unprecedented.
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.
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.
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.
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).
He will by default leave anything he sees that we drop, but out of sight all bets are off.
How do you know it wasn't just "after" instead of "from"?
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
> 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.
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.
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.
Eat the pizza if you want, and most the time you'll probably be fine. But the author's depiction of the risk model (college students in body bags) isn't what I'm thinking about when I make the decision.
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)
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.