20-Year-Old Dies From 'Fried Rice Syndrome' After Eating Leftover Pasta
20-Year-Old Dies From 'Fried Rice Syndrome' After Eating Leftover Pasta
His story can serve as a warning to others to be careful with their leftovers. | iHeart
Ripped parts of the post:
The bacteria is best known for causing a type of food poisoning called "Fried Rice Syndrome," since rice is sometimes cooked and left to cool at room temperature for a few hours. During that time, the bacteria can contaminate it and grow. B. cereus is especially dangerous because it produces a toxin in rice and other starchy foods that is heat resistant and may not die when the food it infects is cooked.
And
Unfortunately, that was the case for a 20-year-old student, who passed away after eating five-day-old pasta.
His story was described in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology a few years back, but has since resurfaced due to some YouTube videos and Reddit posts. According to article, every Sunday the student would make his meals for the entire week so he wouldn't need to deal with making it on the weekdays. One Sunday, he cooked up some spaghetti, then put it in Tupperware containers so that days later, he could just add some sauce to it, reheat it and enjoy it.
However, he didn't store the pasta in the fridge, rather he left it out on the counter. After five days of the food sitting out at room temperature, he heated some up and ate it. While he noticed an odd taste to the food, he figured it was just due to the new tomato sauce he added to it.
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This made me really anxious about how long I tend to leave food out up until the moment I read that he left it out on the counter FOR FIVE DAYS
Same lol. 5 days is absolutely insane.
I lived with a flatmate that used to pull this sort of shit.
Typical process:
She would remove the frozen chicken from the fridge, put it on the outdoor table, then go to class. Would come home to a defrosted chicken, which she would take and chop in half on the kitchen floor. Then she would put one half back in the freezer, usually on top. Lovely going to get ice to find it's covered in frozen defrosted chicken blood. She would then use the other half to cook up a soup in our one big pot we had. This pot would live on the back corner of the stove for a week. Or two. Each day she would take a ladle full and warm it up to eat. The big pot wasn't kept warm or in the fridge.
I got to the point where as soon as we saw the mould growing out of the pot, we would biff the entire contents and water blast the pot outside. Much to her annoyance.
She would then just repeat again the next week.
what the fuck??? how did you not pull her aside and say "hey, not ok"??
Oh we did.
Regularly.
But as poor students, it was pick your battles. Her dick boyfriend used to drive them both home drunk as, then cook chicken nuggets at 3am setting off the smoke alarms on a Tuesday...
The despair I felt reading that was awful. Also it was super gross; I had to pause halfway through.
Good times.
Man, fuck share houses!
My MIL does this, to this day, regularly, and it baffles me how she doesn't get food poisoning.
She most recently let a chicken carcass hang out at room temp for 36 hours before boiling it to make a soup, which, okay, boil it long and high enough you're probably fine. But then after it was done the stove was turned off and it sat out for another 18 hours before being put in the fridge.
Also she doesn't believe that hard boiled eggs need to be refrigerated, I've seen a batch sit for 7+ days.
She also thinks I'm wasteful if I toss something that's moldy, she scrapes the mold off and eats it. But based on what I've read, there are unseen spores you're just ingesting so screw that.
Why is she alive?
Kitchen floor you say??
When's the funeral?
Man she just really wanted to see if her body could take it. Imagine the confusion at the horrible shits she must've had regularly. Couldn't have anything to do with those food practices.
Where was she from?
Cambodia
I wonder if that's common practice, where I grew up in Australia it wasn't uncommon to see meat hung up outside under a tree and people just cutting off the rotten bits
Maybe.
This was Dunedin, NZ, so it was cold enough during the day to not be the end of the world, but still...
Yeah In today's day and age with what we know about bacteria and refrigeration i see no need for what any of these people were doing
For meat, that's actually OK. Many meat curing processes involve mold.
On the other hand, don't eat moldy bread.
That's Wolverine level of self-healing if she didn't get ill.
Did she like, mop the floor first? Was it vinyl or tile?
No.
Vinyl.
It was a bit of an anxiety ride for me as well, being a frequent rice and pasta consumer.
Good yeah, I passed out after dinner last night, woke up 4 hours later and scooped up the left over spaghetti from the pan and fridged it. Ate* it for breakfast.
Edit
The CDC says no more than two hours for perishable food, and one hour if ambient temp is 90°F or above.
For the 96% of the world that aren't stuck in the 1700, that means 32°C
Save someone else having to look up the conversion: 1700 metric years is roughly 3092 years fahrenheit
I mean, if you aren’t stuck in the 1700s, you can just google what it converts to…
People don't read articles 'cause they don't want to spend a click, and you suggest opening a new tab and doing a web search?
Yeah, like, what is this? The 1700s?
Alternatively, we could put units in something the majority of internet users use and let the minority take that extra step...
The temp was on a website by the CDC, an American agency within the federal government...
Why would they use Celcius to convey information to their own citizens, who primarily use Fahrenheit, to appease the rest of the world? Do countries that primarily use Celcius have their government agencies post all of their temperature recommendations in Fahrenheit for the Americans around the world?
Americans can use both so we just... use what is easy. How hot will it be today? 97F. How hot do F1 brakes get? 1000+C, and tyres 100C. They reach over 200 mph. The race distance is around 300km.
They did, and they shared it for people who aren't stuck in the 1700s.
It's also more efficient for one person to do it, rather than everyone having to do it
The CDC to which I was referencing happens to be part of the 4% stuck in the 1700s.
Never fails to amaze me how so many people don't understand basic food storage.
My clients, constantly: "What do you mean I can't just throw this open bag in the fridge?", "What do you mean, 'foil isn't airtight'?", "I don't know how long it's been in there! What do you mean it expired a month ago?" and my absolute favorite, "You can't throw my moldy food away! You owe me money for that!"
Are you a fridge-contents-consultant or something?
Likely some kind of aide or in-home help. I have family that works in that field and a lot of it is just helping people with "normal" routine things we all do, but that they're unable to for whatever reason.
Foil isn't air tight?
How are you making foil air tight?
Crimping and folding it around the edge of the pan or the foil itself. Foil can hold in the steam of a pan in the oven or a foil pack on a campfire, for practical purposes that's air tight. If you're trying to contain superheated helium then it's a different story.
Not air tight enough for extended storage purposes, too air tight for cooling in the fridge. It's all relative as your examples demonstrate.
Hm. I now wonder if it depends. But I don't wonder enough to do an experiment, lol
What are your clients?
Er, better question to ask is probably, what do you do for work? Lol
I'm a residential counselor. Basically what someone else described, I work with people out of the hospital to reintroduce them into the community. I teach life skills, coping skills, appropriate behavior, that sort of thing.
My clients are middle functioning adults, primarily male, right now 30s and up. Think a grown man, but with the comprehension skills of a middle schooler or lower.
Lot of patience, lot of repetition, lot of getting yelled at, hit occasionally. Fun times.
Thank you for doing what you do.
I think I see a lot of your clients hanging out in the comments sections of Facebook and Instagram!
Yup. This exactly. After 2, and I feel like I shouldn't even go that far lol, I toss out. Safe than sorry and all that.
You'd eat food that's been sitting on the counter for 2 days? Maaaybe 2 hours.
I once ate a slice of pizza that sat in a ziploc bag for three days inside a truck when the outside peak temp was near 110f.
I love me some day old room temp 'za, but even at 22, I knew that was risky.
Needed a day off, I guess.
Yeah it's normally just some diarrhea, maybe some vomiting, maybe some immunocompromised people will have more serious symptoms. 5 days is a long time, but so is killing a 20 year old in 10 hours.
It's probably helpful to think of it as increasingly bad results from increasingly bad practices, and still seek to avoid the milder non-deadly results too.
I leave out my soup in room temp for days, while regularly boiling it every meal time to prevent it from spoiling. Am I screwed?
That's bad but you're not screwed. Just stop doing that. Get some Tupperware, put it in the fridge between uses.
There are two vectors for food poisoning: Active harmful bacteria in your food, and toxins which are produced by harmful bacteria. When you boil it again, it removes the former threat but not the latter. Yes, this is very dangerous and you could die.
I mean I've done that. But my reaction after I realise how long I've left it out is not going to be "sure, I'll eat that."
Our local food-info government body advises max 2 hours outside of the fridge, that should be enough for most foods to cool down for the fridge, right? No need to go days on end 🤣