regarding food hygiene

[fishcake84]

Two weeks ago I made a big spag bol. We ate half that night and I left the rest out to cool in a tupperware with the aim of putting it in the freezer. Got embroiled in the telly and forgot all about it. In the morning I couldn't see it on the counter and realised DH must have put it away. Good stuff.

We ate it two days ago. Now and only now does DH tell me he forgot about it being left out to cool too, and found it on the counter at 8am the next morning when he went downstairs. Then he stuck it in he freezer. So it had been out at room temperature for about 13 hours before being frozen.

We suffered no ill effects of eating it the other day and he is now crowing about how I am over anal about food hygiene and should chill out about stuff like that as nothing bad happened, where my stance is more 'we're bloody lucky not to have food poisoning'.

So who is BU? I totally think he is!

If it was still bubbling hot when served and covered at that stage agree with pp, safe for a couple of days. But if you picked up a utensil, even from the "clean" drawer and gave it a stir to help it cool, then potential problems.

Did a season in Val d'Isere and the "put in snow by back door" was great, unless there was a big dump of snow that night. Quite a few meals, assumed stolen by neighbours/animals reappeared in the spring.

To all those saying to be more relaxed, how did people survive in the past, etc.:

My dad grew up very poor, with no refrigeration, but in a "Western" country. One of his sisters died at 4 years old from food poisoning. This was in the 1940s.

My mum recalls that when she was at school, also 1940s, it was a lot more usual than now for kids to have "tummy bugs", i.e. diarrhea and vomiting, or just a pretty much constant level of low-grade "feeling unwell in the stomach."
One of the things they used to do was bring a cooked lunch in a metal lunch box, and place it by the heating to keep warm until lunch time. She now thinks that perhaps this was one of the factors leading to them being unwell.

DH had to be on immunosuppressants for years. When we went and stayed with relatives of his (who we later found out routinely leave food out because they don't get sick from it), he ended up in hospital for a week.

" Even then if you reheat the curry pot everyday without fail it doesn't go off. "
Surely the advice is only to reheat once? How many times do you reheat this curry?

There has to be safety guidelines and of course Restaurants and all eating establishments have to have high level hygiene standards.
So long as food is cooked properly and not just 'warmed up' later, but reheated properly, it is probably perfectly safe to eat the food the next day whether it has been in the fridge or not if it is not kept warm overnight.

You are probably at more risk from your own hands, or your mobile phone and handbag than from day old food.