Is this "rule" followed in the UK.

[Onetwistedsista]

So I've worked in the USA and this rule about food not being refrigerated within over 2 hours drives me nuts! Do people in the UK do that? For example, bake cottage pie, leave to cool, then forget about it ( by mistake) but toss it out for possible baceria. Here in South Africa they'd just laugh at me. I've not followed it till now simply because of my DS but its stressful. So cook a pot of food, but takes forever to cool then dip it in a cold sink of ice so it cools faster! What a schlep! Has anyone here actually really gotten 'sick 'by eaten something that hasn't been refrigerated within 2 hours?

Never heard this "rule" living in the States but agree that the climate is completely different in the US. If you live in a warm humid place your food storage habits dramatically change.

Related aside: met a man who'd worked at Nabisco (a large snack food company in the US) who told me the reason you don't see many chocolate coated biscuits like chocolate digestives etc. in American supermarkets is due to weather - in summer they can't stand up to the heat without refrigeration in shipping and storage. Oreos have the chocolate baked in so they don't melt in the package or onto your fingers.

LoafofSellotape - except, of course, not everyone was wealthy enough to have space for a larder. There was an awful lot more of having stew pots on the stove being regularly reboiled, though. Tbh, there was also an awful lot more food poisoning. You cannot protect yourself from every eventuality, anyway, and a lot of modern behaviour is protecting yourself from an already exceedingly remote possibility.

Do people think people threw away so much food in the days when there weren't any fridges?

No - they visited the greengrocer, butcher, fishmonger etc every single day and ate what they bought that day.

I think previous generations were less concerned about food hygiene - I remember my grandfather cooking in a kitchen that I don't think had ever seen antibacterial spray, scraping the mould off the top of jam and on one particularly stomach-churning occasion tipping lumpy milk onto his cornflakes and declaring that it was just halfway to being cheese (money wasn't the issue at all!). He also firmly believed that use by dates were an invention of the supermarkets to make you throw away perfectly good food and buy more (admittedly I have a slightly liberal attitude to use by dates myself now and though I didn't see it at the time I think there was a grain of truth in that opinion).

None of us ever got sick (and I ate there regularly as a child - to this day I've only had food poisoning once and that was on holiday) and he made it into his 80s before dying suddenly of something that wasn't lifestyle related.

I wouldn't eat something I accidentally left out all day, but it's a case by case basis, some foods are more dangerous than others - 2 hours sounds about right. But it weather dependant too of course

I don't time it but if we have left over dinner from say 5pm it would certainly be in the fridge by 7 or 9. I wouldn't eat anything that had been left out much longer than that. I've had food poisoning before, ended up in hospital for 2 days severely dehydrated.

"in the USA and this rule about food not being refrigerated within over 2 hours"

Weird. I'm from a never-frost place in USA & never heard of this. Huge family parties, I see the food is left out for many hours. I'm not aware of anyone ill yet.

Even modest houses /flats were built with cool cupboards or larders.

Yes as a pp said,food was bought daily and eaten on the same day.

I can't get my head round why you would leave food out. I can understand completely forgetting but to regularly leave food out in the saucepan or rice on a table- don't you clear up/wipe down after eating?

A friend of mine just posted the meme about how 13yos are worried about relationships today "when I was 13, I used to close the fridge door slowly to see if the light stayed on". Another friend replied "when I was 13 we didn't have a fridge". Living memory and she seems to have survived.

I often (last night for example) leave food out overnight and in covered and we eat it. Today's lunch on my daughters left over shepherds pie that she didn't touch. Neither of us put it in a dish let along put it in the fridge but I'm still eating it.

I've only ever had good poisoning once and that was from an event and nothing to do with my cooking.

I don't eat meat or fish which possibly cut down the chances of bacteria? I also eat rice that is room temp...,

Loaf only speaking for myself I leave curries / stews/ bol etc in the pan out was cooked in on the hob, with lid on.

So cook, dish from pan on table or from hob. Put lid back on, leave on hob.

I do this because it's how my mum does it I suppose, never really thought about it.

As an aside my parents are both medics and I hace endured many lectures about germs/ microbiology over the st9ve when young. This is safe / this is not. This is why etc. Also we always had to go and watch her d8smantle squid before cooking 'and here's the cartilage!!!' and then on about that.

TBH not sure it was worth it for the convenience of leaving a saucepan overnight rather than sticking in fridge 🤣🤣🤣

I think there is a point somewhere about people having lost touch a bit with food, it's it fresh, safe, edible, on the turn, safe but not tasty, dangerous. It profits the food companies if we chuck lots of food because the label says so. That's another thread though (and one that has been done to death!).

DH does this. Drives me insane.

And I would never suggest that anyone eat anything they don't feel 100% comfy with.

But. Like, yoghurt. Found some in fridge 3 months old. Sealed. Opened it, sniffed it. No mould, looked fine. Tasted a little bit, yummy. It's fine. Eggs last way past date as well.

I think that it would be good to, in general, regain some of this 'common sense' which isn't common sense at all really but learnt and passed down.