Can I eat this? Italian sausage edition

July 14, 2021 7:31 AM

I made Italian sausage and peppers last night and forgot to put the leftovers away. Particulars: made with fresh Italian sausage, lots of veggies, put it from the pan into a covered Pyrex, left it on the counter for 12 hours. Can I eat this?
posted by tatiana wishbone to Food & Drink (29 answers total)

I’d eat a lot of things, but I wouldn’t eat this. Sausage=ground meat=lots of chances for bacteria to get inside and multiply.
posted by Night_owl at 7:37 AM on July 14, 2021 [9 favorites]

There's a solid chance it would make you quite ill. I hate throwing away tasty food, but I would toss it.
posted by theora55 at 7:38 AM on July 14, 2021 [9 favorites]

Covered is good. The only thing you didn't do is make the leftovers colder.

Unless they smelled bad, I'd eat the leftovers after reheating in the microwave.
posted by emelenjr at 7:41 AM on July 14, 2021

How hot is it at night where you are? Assuming its somewhere in the 60s/70s, I'd eat this (provided it doesn't smell) but re-cook it somehow (say in a pasta sauce). Perhaps worth noting I have a fairly strong stomach from eating like an animal.
posted by coffeecat at 7:48 AM on July 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I wouldn't.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 7:57 AM on July 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I would eat it. I do this more often than I am going to admit here. I wouldn't feed it to someone else, but the adult occupants of this house would eat it and be fine.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:01 AM on July 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

I would eat.
posted by supermedusa at 8:03 AM on July 14, 2021

Absolutely not. This is food-poisoning roulette - there's a chance you'd get lucky, but the risk isn't worth it. Toss that in the garbage.
posted by infodiva at 8:14 AM on July 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

MeFi seems fairly split. If nothing else you can follow a guideline I use: If you have to ask, it's probably the answer you don't want to hear.
posted by Meldanthral at 8:14 AM on July 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

I acknowledge that no food safety professional would agree with this assessment, but I would totally eat that. It was a regular occurrence when I was growing up that we would leave leftovers out overnight to cool before packaging them up and putting them in the fridge so I don't tend to fear that sort of thing as much as I probably should.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:18 AM on July 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

Hell no.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:27 AM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Just eat it. Try a little, put the rest in the fridge, if it's tasty and doesn't make you ill then eat the rest. NB: I also have an iron stomach.
posted by olopua at 8:28 AM on July 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

The ground meat angle is irrelevant assuming they were properly cooked. If you used tomatoes or other acids that would be a point in favor.

Yes this is far outside the USDA danger zone, but yes I have safely eaten that and similar a number of times. I'd not feed it to guests or elderly or small children.

If you want to avoid throwing it out but want to be more careful than charging in, you can heat it gently to a safe internal temp and then test a few bites. If you're fine after half a day, then you'll be fine to eat it all, imo.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:28 AM on July 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

I would definitely eat this, and I eat stuff like this pretty frequently. But I would definitely not recommend doing so to anyone else.
posted by skewed at 8:33 AM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’m pretty shocked some people would eat this but that’s neither here nor there-just think, if you get food poisoning best case scenario is you never want to eat sausage and peppers again…worst case you become extremely ill. I would choose neither option.
posted by sparringnarwhal at 8:39 AM on July 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

Growing up, my parents did not really refrigerate leftovers, so I would have eaten this after heating it in the microwave as a kid. As an adult? No thank you. Food poisoning is not fun.
posted by twelve cent archie at 8:45 AM on July 14, 2021

I grew up in a household with parents who had earlier lived through difficult times, and they hated wasting food. I've eaten worse and not suffered any adverse effects.
posted by alex1965 at 9:31 AM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Absolutely not.
posted by General Malaise at 10:23 AM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

So -- it was cooked, presumably to the point of being Safe To Eat. Then it sat for twelve hours covered at room temperature. The risk is that some bacteria or mold spore got into the covered container after cooking, and reproduced enough within that time period to be Not Safe To Eat.

I'm going to take this as an opportunity to do some Internet Science™, i.e. googling up plausible-looking data and doing math on them with a complete absence of expertise on the subject!

As a ballpark, under "ideal conditions" e coli will double every 20 minutes, so if your kitchen was body temperature overnight and there's sufficient oxygen in that covered dish, a maximum of 36 generations of bacteria could have theoretically lived out their lives in your sausage by the time you came back to ask "can I eat it?".

This means in the worst case you'd be consuming up to 68 trillion e coli (that's 0.06g if you're following along at home).

If we guess the lower overnight temperature means they reproduce half as fast, that goes down to only 200,000 bacteria (0.0000002g).

The "safe" level of e coli is apparently defined as 235 "colony forming units" (which I'm interpreting as one viable bacteria) per 100 mL. Assuming you have about a liter of food, at half ideal growth rate, you're potentially about 100 times over the "safe" limit. At full growth rate, worst case is almost 3 million times the "safe" limit.

And yet even after doing all the math, I'd eat it anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This, too, is an important aspect of Internet Science™: on the internet, conclusions come before data, not the other way round
posted by ook at 11:12 AM on July 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I would not. I'm willing to flex the USDA 2 hour rule, but not to 12 hours.
posted by tchemgrrl at 11:20 AM on July 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

as I read it, it wasn't cooked and then left covered. It was cooked; then a portion was eaten (i.e. it was uncovered, touched etc) and THEN it was covered and left at room temperature for twelve hours. Is that right?

I'd eat a meal that had been long cooked, not touched, and LEFT covered for a while -- like when you make a pot of chili and leave it to come to room temp before putting in the fridge.

I would not eat something that had been messed with while it was at eating temperature, then left at room temp for twelve hours, especially if your room temperature is warm.
posted by fingersandtoes at 11:33 AM on July 14, 2021

I wouldn't eat this.

Your food has been left out way too long to be safe, but not too long for it to be guaranteed to make you sick. That's why you're getting different answers. People have had different experiences and have also have different reactions to risk.

Personally, I tend to follow the same food safety rules I would follow for guests. That is, if I wouldn't feed it to you, I won't eat it myself. It would be highly irresponsible and wrong to feed this to someone else.

So into the trash it would go (with some sadness and regret). I just would rather waste a few dollars than risk being miserably (and possibly seriously) sick.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:45 PM on July 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

I would certainly never eat this, but if you do, please report back!
posted by oxisos at 1:21 PM on July 14, 2021

I almost always say yes to the "Should I eat this?" questions, but this...no way. Nope.
posted by grateful at 1:30 PM on July 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

Depending on what the food is, I am often comfortable eating leftovers that have sat at room temperature for a few hours, especially if covered...but 12 hours is far too long. Toss.
posted by desuetude at 2:04 PM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

The risk is that some bacteria or mold spore got into the covered container after cooking

No, this is wrong. Bacterial spores are not killed by cooking at normal room pressure! That's the whole point of spores; they're made tough, like seeds, to survive challenging conditions. Only pressure cooking, at high pressure, gets hot enough to kill bacterial spores. Any spores that were in the food before cooking are still there, ready to grow whenever that food is left for more than a few hours in the "danger zone" temperature range between 40°F and 140°F.

The bacteria don't always grow to dangerous levels, so it's all completely unpredictable. People say, "Well, I did it, and nothing happened." That may be true, and yet next time something very unpleasant may happen, given the exact same conditions. Just because things were okay one time doesn't mean that it won't make you very sick the next time.
posted by metonym at 2:06 PM on July 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

Strong pass. Store bought sausage isn't made from their freshest cuts.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:22 PM on July 14, 2021

I would totally eat this.

Years ago, I read here that half of Metafilter would eat something that’s sat out for days, and the other half would toss something out after a few hours. I haven’t tallied up up the replies here but, just scrolling through the replies, it looks like that split remains roughly similar now.
posted by altcountryman at 4:29 PM on July 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

I would leave it in the microwave for an extra minute or two to make sure it gets above 165 everywhere then eat it. It's incredibly unlikely there has been enough bacterial growth that their metabolic byproducts or spores have built up to unsafe levels.
posted by hermanubis at 4:32 PM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]