In laws playing it fast and loose with refrigeration - who is right?

[spatchcock]

Went to stay with the in laws this weekend. Got up on Saturday morning and went to have some toast with jam. MIL points me towards the cupboard. In the cupboard there are four pots of jam - three are mouldy and one has just been opened. I cleared out the green jams and after using the unmouldy one went to put it back in the fridge but MIL says 'Oh no - it goes in the cupboard.' Right, ok... not going to argue, not my house or my jam.

At midday, FIL comes back with the shopping. Everything gets tidied away except for a joint of pork, which gets left on the side. A few hours later MIL and I are pottering about in the kitchen and I see the pork is still out and ask if I should put it away. "Oh I've got it, don't worry," MIL says. She puts it in the (unlit) oven in preparation for the Sunday roast.

I go to bed thinking about the pork, imagining the bacteria multiplying endlessly and wondering if any of it could possibly harm my incubating (31-week) PFB. My own mother is absolutely fastidious about refrigeration to the point of obsessive. A ten minute trip to the supermarket necessitates several chilly bins and a game plan. Bacteria is Satan and Mum is a missionary of hygiene. I thought I was nothing like her (I eat things off the floor), but something has obviously rubbed off on me because it takes me a while to get to sleep.

The next day the oven is turned on at midday - 24 unrefrigerated hours after the pork first made its appearance in the kitchen.

I ate it - MIL cooked the shit out of it so any bacteria (along with any nutrients) were probably killed off. MIL has also raised three strapping sons. One of them, my DP, says he can't remember any incidents of food poisoning, and that meat has always been treated this way in his house.

I find this bizarre. It seems completely abnormal to me to leave meat lying around for a whole day in warm spring temperatures but DP thinks I'm overreacting.

So who is being unreasonable? Me with my bacterial awareness or MIL with her germy breeding grounds?

This wouldn't bother me.

What does bother me is a half-finished roast turkey left out on a worktop that has a radiator directly underneath it. For 24 hours. In my in-laws' kitchen. I did turn that one down.

When I first met dh he lived with his parents and they also used to leave stuff out and eat mouldy food etc.

Dh was never well and he was always picking up bugs and getting diarrhoea. I soon educated him and he's been fine since we've lived together.

He now sees the wisdom in keeping food properly and has started to nag MIL and throws some of her food out when he visits her flat.

I would say that common sense is the key. 30 years ago people were a lot more thrifty, and we didnt have the nanny state of labelling and being over-cautious, and basically removing the need for people using their own sense in what is edible and what is good hygiene practice.

The amount of perfectly good food that is wasted these days is ridiculous, but it is because people panic and have no awareness of what is and isnt safe to eat.

We live in a country where we are bombarded with instructions on how to live a sterile germ free life, and dosed up with anti-biotics for no good reason, and we are no reaping the rewards of that with superbugs and a nation of allergy sufferers and food intolerances.

And no, I am not saying that applies in all cases, but it certainly makes up for a hell of a lot of them.

Riddzy - PILs met late in life and have adopted the lifstyle of born-again hippies with accordingly nomadic lifestyle. They're a bit bonkers but harmless enough until it comes to matters of hygiene. They have no toilet or running water, either. Staying there is, erm, an experience.

Mackerel - they sound amazing. Visiting them must be like old school camping! Where do you ... um... shit?!

They have a dirt toilet for shitting in - you have to shovel some mud over afterwards. Apparently they added the seat for 'people like me'. Honoured! Thankfully we usually stay at DPs aunt's massive beautiful house when we go there and just 'visit' their crazy hovel home.

They are bloody lovely really and I'm really lucky but I just dread going there, it's too far away for a day trip so they food/toilet/shower thing is unavoidable!

As a child we had no refrigerator but just a meat safe in a cold cellar - no food poisonng either.

While I agree about the amount of food we waste nowadays and th eobsesison with being germ free, as compared to 30 - 50 years ago, the food supply chain is unrecognisable compared to those days as well.

I well remember a pathologist talking on TV aout 20 years ago and saying that the invention of cook-chill would lead to far more food borne disease. The food supply chain now is so complex and the point of consumption so far removed from the point of initial production that the opportunity for contamination is orders of magnitude higher.

In the old days, meat was produced, slaughtered/harvested and consumed locally apart from in very big cities like London. Now, something as simple as a bagged salad might have travelled thousands of miles before it is consumed rather than being produced at a local market garden just down the road, washed and prepared by the consumer for immediate consumption.

Joanna Blythman 'Bad Food Britain' and Felicity Lawrence 'Not On The Label' are both very good on what Beta describes.

Snowfalls - what do you mean when you say the sniff test is completely useless? If you mean it doesn't pick up all risky food, no of course it doesn't - AFAIK contaminated rice doesn't smell any different from normal. But if you have a piece of meat which ought to be ok according to the best before date but it is stinky so you throw it out, the sniff test is doing its job pretty well.

none of these things - BB dates, fridges, smell - are going to prevent food poisoning on their own, but they all help. Saying the sniff test is useless is as wrong as saying dates on food are useless - they're not, but they're not the whole story either.

cook-chill leads to far fewer people starving though.

My IL's are fast and loose with meat related issues too.
Makes me want to vomit. Turkey crowns left out for 24 hrs before Xmas dinner (because kitchen is "cool"), gravy left in a pot on the counter for use the next day, roast joints left in oven all night for next day's lunch.
And yorkshire puds and creamed rice too. YUCK.

My stomach is turning at the thought of a pork roast left uncooked in oven for 24 hrs. I would not eat that - no way.

I skipped most of this, but YANBU about the pork. Jam is fine in the cupboard, but pork in particular needs to be refridgerated. The origins of pork being forbidden to Jews and Muslims lie, in part, in the fact that it does not last well at all in hot weather. In England, before fridges became common, the rule was 'only eat pork when there's an R in the month'. May-August, in the warmer weather, it was considered a risk. Why do you think we are a country of bacon sarnies? Curing the pork makes it last longer.

Yuk!

I work with a woman who keeps foods like yoghurt, milk and mayonnaise on her desk all day every day, in her scorching hot little office (she munches all day long so I suppose she thinks this is more discreet).

I don't know how she isn't ill all the time.

We keep everything in the fridge, eggs. jam, mayo, ketchup, meat. I tried to put Peanut Butter in there too but DH said it was not necessary.

The meat thing is rank left in the oven and what is the point of eating it when it has been cremated, I cannot imagine there is anything good left then.

I'll go out on a limb here - jam is FINE not in the fridge. It is a "preserve"....it has a high sugar content so that it KEEPS

Uncooked meat is also fine left out/ in oven for 24 hours or more...in fact if you like your beef rare this will help as it starts the cooking process at more like 18C throughout rather than 4C in the middle and so it is easier to get it right...obviously it needs to be protected from flies etc so a vacuum wrapping is ideal (I use a fly cover) or keeping it in a cold oven. Being out allows the muscle fibres to relax and the meat to tenderise. Cooking it kills the germs. My family were in the wholesale meat and poultry business for London's top restaurants and I can assure you that LOTS of the best chefs prize meat that has been hung for quite a while (as in 3 weeks in a cool room) and is even quite whiffy.

Now, cooked meat is a different matter and should never be left out in the warm (where germs that will not be killed off by later roasting will multiply).

So I am with your MIL being reasonable.

OP, haven't read all of the thread but you are not being unreasonable.

I have similar food storage issues every time I visit my mother-in-law, and it has caused me so much stress and worry over the years.

Once she had a chicken breast in the fridge that she had part defrosted in the microwave so some of it was cooked and some of it probably still frozen. I can't remember if I had to eat it once it was cooked again - I've blocked that bit out of my memory!!

If jam is the low sugar variety it does 'go off' quite quickly once opened unless kept in a fridge.

morebeta true, but that is not really jam, then, is it? It is some gross diet food masquerading as jam

some of the high fruit/low sugar conserves that we used to get from health food shops are very nice actually. They're not gross diet foods in the way that, say, low fat creme fraiche full of thickeners is.

MIL fed me some low fat pesto the other week. vile beyond belief.

Bonne Maman jam is a high fruit/low sugar jam that they recommend you refrigerate after opening. I sometimes make jam in a microwave (MN recipe) and also refrigerate and eat up within a week for fear of contamination.

The jam wouldn't bother me.

The meat would.