[astura]

The concern with rice is the bacteria spores that lives in rice (and pasta) survive the cooking process and multiply rapidly in prepared rice at room temperature. So you just have to store the rice in the refrigerator immediately (which most people do).

https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/can...

Every few years you get a story like "man dies after eating rice stored on the counter for two weeks." But most people aren't doing that. But some people, I guess, don't understand that cooked rice is a food that requires refrigeration.

[pbhjpbhj]

Thanks for expanding on the issue. Now I need to find out why these spores don't die from being boiled!?

[hnbad]

To be clear: not only do they neither die from boiling nor freezing but they also merely "hibernate" in refrigeration. The problem I was referring to is typically associated with Indian takeout in Britain because there is already a lot of time between the rice being cooked (in the restaurant) and eaten (at home), is then often left out for a considerable time before being refrigerated (which simply pauses the process rather than resetting it) and may be mistaken to be safe to leave unrefrigerated because it doesn't get moldy or obviously "go off" before becoming unsafe to eat.

Now imagine someone being particularly sloppy about cleaning up and refrigerating leftovers and reheating the rice multiple times (or at least removing it from the fridge multiple times) over the course of a week. Fatalities are extremely rare but food poisoning doesn't have to be lethal.

My point was just that dodgy cheese is less risky because you have to go out of your way to ignore various signs that would normally flag food as unsafe to eat and the cheese might still be fine whereas cooked rice (and pasta) may not seem particularly unsafe after having been left unrefrigerated long enough to cause health issues.

Basically a lot of people seem to be under the impression that most cooked food is relatively safe to leave unrefrigerated for extended periods of time as long as it doesn't grow mold or start to smell rotten. Usually meat and dairy are the only obvious exceptions but rice and dry pasta are considered "non-perishable" so it's not clear that they're also risky once cooked because they seemingly just go back to drying out. Also there are occasional influencers on social media (often the same kind advocating for quackery like "black salve" - don't google that, it's basically a caustic "skin salve" sold as a cancer cure - and other unsound medical/health advice) telling people not to refrigerate most of their food, often (incorrectly) appealing to history.