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My partner and I made some shrimp pasta last night and forgot to put the leftovers in the fridge. The next morning I promptly proceeded to throw it away, but my partner stopped me and said it was still good to eat. I was very surprised and told him no way should we eat this, and he in turn was very surprised that I would think it was unsafe. He claimed maybe it's a culture thing - he's from Japan and said people do it all the time there, but noticed his friends in the UK (where we live now) are much more careful. He claims it's also common practice in other places he's lived. I told him it's definitely not considered best practice in my home country, but to be fair, food freshness in the US is sometimes questionable (e.g. it's not necessary to store eggs in the fridge in most parts of the world).

Am I missing something? Is he just taking a massive risk, or have I been raised with overly sanitised food safety practices?

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  • Hi Ryan, this is a larger problem for which our site has no good solution. I'll try to stick it into a nutshell: There is no such thing as absolute "safety". There are only different systems of deciding what is safe, and you can compare them to each other (e.g. the FDA food safety rules are more restrictive than whatever my grandmother learned from her mother) but not to some kind of golden standard. So the question whether your system is "too restrictive" and the other is right, or yours is "right" and the other one is too loose is purely opinion based. Our site...
    – rumtscho ♦
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 11:32
  • ... does not allow opinion based quesitons, not on this topic or on any other, so I had to close it. The way we deal with food safety questions is to define that only formally available food safety rules systems are allowed to be used in answers, for practical reasons basically always the FDA ones, and to suppose that everybody knows we are talking about rules systems and not about something unknowable like the true risk of eating X. Not a great solution, but we don't have a better one.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 11:34
  • @rumtscho FWIW...my interpretation: "Is he taking a...risk?" That is not a matter of opinion. The answer is yes. There is a risk, as I point out below. "Should I take the risk?" (which was not asked) would be a matter of opinion, and thus not answerable here.
    – moscafj
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 16:26
  • @moscafj every one of us is taking a risk, every time we eat. Food safety rules don't mean thre is no risk, they mean the predicted risk is below the threshold the rule setter is willing to tolerate. The question here asks us to qualify that risk ("massive risk" vs. "overly sanitised") and this qualification is a matter of opinion.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 19:25

2 Answers 2

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I know I'm going to get panned for this… ;)

Eating something left out overnight can only kill you once; every other time it doesn't.

If bacteria were growing in it they've had sufficient time to build to harmful levels. This is not a 'good thing'.

However, people have been eating last night's leftovers for today's lunch since time immemorial & most of them lived to tell the tale.

Food safety authorities write guidelines for restaurants & commercial kitchens, reducing the potential risk as far as is possible. Restaurants must follow these guidelines because not doing so can kill people.
If it goes awry in a restaurant it can kill many people.
Killing people is not good for business.
These authorities say that keeping food at higher than 4°C & under 60°C for more than two hours [cumulative] is no longer guaranteed to be safe.
This is true.

If it's your own leftovers, it's your call.
Most people do it, most people survive. Some don't.
It's a numbers game. The only one at risk is you.

Right - time to microwave last night's curry leftovers…

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    No pan from me, I agree with you. When food is scarce you take more chances, when it isn't you don't need to. I've had food poisoning from shellfish and the idea of eating last nights shrimp makes my stomach churn!
    – GdD
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 9:59
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    I've had food poisoning from a few things over the years - none of which I cooked myself [& actually most of which were abroad on holiday]. I was looking at UK stats, ⅔ of food poisoning comes from restaurants or takeaways. So, out of your 1000 meals a year [3 a day] what's the percentage chance of home-cooked food killing you? ;-)))
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 10:02
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    I've never had food poisoning from something I've made myself @Tetsujin, partly because I don't take chances.
    – GdD
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 10:05
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    & partly because you simply don't have the contamination potential of a large walk-in fridge, even one with good practices [& I've seen a few that don't have good practices]
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 10:07
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    "most of them lived" ... [citation needed]
    – tripleee
    Commented Sep 22, 2022 at 9:00
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He...and anyone else who violates food safety protocols is clearly taking a risk. There are simply too many variables at play to make any other claim. We can share personal anecdotes all day, but the fact is, food kept between 40F (4.5C) to 140F (60C) for more than a couple of hours provides a hospitable environment for bacterial growth. That bacterial growth is accelerated at the warmer end of the scale, and it is a logarithmic progression.

By the way, refrigeration of eggs in the US is not about their freshness, but their farming and treatment between the chicken and the supermarket.

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