Hard cheeses are fine if you just scrap one or two millimetres in the worst cases. Soft cheeses are supposed to have a thriving mould population from the beginning, which prevents a lot of nasty things to develop. The riskiest are cheeses you are supposed to eat very young like cottage cheese. These can be aged with the right culture, but it’s unlikely to happen by chance and they get foul very quickly otherwise.
You should be more upset that a simple ER visit could cost you any money at all, to be honest.
It isn't like I'm going to start playing Food Poisoning Roulette any time soon. But if I happen upon some bad food, there is a limit to the expenses occurred.
If they determine the benefit of eating something outweighs the risks, they might do it. Reducing the financial part of the equation reduces potential risk. It’s as simple as that.
I accepted some degree of health hazard for a pleasant meal. Let’s say someone managed to convinced me I was also at risk of losing a great deal of money in the process. I might have declined the vendor’s offer then…
There are now more than 8 billion people on this planet. And many (though not as many as you might think) billions before that.
Not a single one of them has ever decided, "Fuck it, this might give me 2 days of violent vomiting and involuntarily shitting liquid, but our HEALTH CARE system will cover so WHOO HOO YOLO BABY!!!"
And overall, I'm OK with this. I'd rather help folks when they need it even if they didn't make perfect choices than leave folks suffering - and make sure their kids aren't growing up watching their parent physically suffer because the parent messed up when they was younger.
That said, many cheeses that keep well just end up tasting like amonia if you allow them to ripen too long. As a cat owner, that's just a no-go for me.
This was a meme in the past causing a lot of rice you be disposed of; is that disposal justified?
https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/can...
Every few years you get a story like "man dies after eating rice stored on the counter for two weeks." But most people aren't doing that. But some people, I guess, don't understand that cooked rice is a food that requires refrigeration.
Now imagine someone being particularly sloppy about cleaning up and refrigerating leftovers and reheating the rice multiple times (or at least removing it from the fridge multiple times) over the course of a week. Fatalities are extremely rare but food poisoning doesn't have to be lethal.
My point was just that dodgy cheese is less risky because you have to go out of your way to ignore various signs that would normally flag food as unsafe to eat and the cheese might still be fine whereas cooked rice (and pasta) may not seem particularly unsafe after having been left unrefrigerated long enough to cause health issues.
Basically a lot of people seem to be under the impression that most cooked food is relatively safe to leave unrefrigerated for extended periods of time as long as it doesn't grow mold or start to smell rotten. Usually meat and dairy are the only obvious exceptions but rice and dry pasta are considered "non-perishable" so it's not clear that they're also risky once cooked because they seemingly just go back to drying out. Also there are occasional influencers on social media (often the same kind advocating for quackery like "black salve" - don't google that, it's basically a caustic "skin salve" sold as a cancer cure - and other unsound medical/health advice) telling people not to refrigerate most of their food, often (incorrectly) appealing to history.
I am so glad I don't live in US.