[r1ch]

From my understanding, this article is only about professional dishwashers used in restaurants and hotels etc. that use much higher concentrations and less rinsing than consumer dishwashers. They specifically mention that they could not repeat their findings on consumer dishwashers.

[sschueller]

Yes but isn't this even worse? I can control what I use at home. I can't when I eat or drink out.

So I get to pick between PFAS soaked throwaway single use cardboard cups or epithelial barrier damaging glass/ceramic ware.

[indigo0086]

There's a lesson in that first few sentences. Of course eating out is risky as it's a black box where you get food for putting money in it. You're not guaranteed quality or safety in the more subtle sense

[james_david]

I have to disagree, a person should be (and, at least to an extent is) guaranteed safety when dining out. Food safety regulations serve this purpose. They are probably not sufficient, admittedly, and ought to be updated to address such concerns as this paper raises, but every so often it impresses me that we have found a way for total strangers to create a thing that you voluntarily ingest without a second thought. We've accomplished an pretty astonishing modicum of safety and thereby trust in food service.

[sshine]

Your statement is different in that it contains a "should":

The reason food safety regulations exist and are much stricter than what you need to apply at home is partly because it affects people at scale, and partly because individuals have no control of it.

So exactly because dining out can be unsafe, food safety should be strictly regulated ("guaranteed").

It seems that the disagreement is mostly how many expectations someone can put into a "guarantee".

> We've accomplished an pretty astonishing modicum of safety and thereby trust in food service.

I completely agree. But I also want to add that it's an unstable equilibrium:

Some years apart you get some scandal where someone kept meat mostly frozen for 30 years.

[mckn1ght]

Some people don’t understand that there are the letter and spirit of the law, and then there are the application and enforcement, and there is some flux in the middle of it all. People are imperfect, and people are the ones washing dishes, preparing food, and enforcing the health code. Things slip through the cracks at a nonzero rate.

If that bothers you, you just have to remember the old adage: “if you want something done right, diy.”

[hughesjj]

So far, to my knowledge, I've gotten food poisoning from something I cooked for myself exactly once, and that's because my 12 year old dumbass brain thought microwaving a steak for a few minutes was a valid was a valid way to cook it

Almost every time I've actually gotten sick from food has been eating out. I've also seen some close calls like when my fiancee was served 'rare' pork... Which isn't a culinary thing.

[clan]

Rare pork is most certainly a thing! You are missing out.

The scare of pork is the risk of trichinella. To such such a degree that some speculate that is why Muslims have codified it as haram.

Trichinella is practically non-existant in domestic pigs in EU due to regulation/industry.

In the US you should take more care. You should however remember that cooking food safely is not a magic temperature but a function of temperature and time. The threshold for pork is then 63C because mostly everything unwanted is dead at that temperature.

But if you keep it at a lower temperature but for a longer time you will have the same effect. An easy way to do this is using "sous vide". Simply put a water bath at a constant temperature. This has the advantage that if you vacuum your meat it can go into the water straight from the freezer without defrosting first. I usually add one hour to the sous vide time to allow for defrosting time.

So I usually sous vide pork chops (from the neck) at 54C for some hours and then pan sear to finish the crust. With quality pork I honestly find this superior to a regular bovine steak!

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella https://douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html#Safety

[steveBK123]

Exactly. It is surprisingly hard to give yourself food poisoning if you cook for yourself.

On the other hand, like you, essentially every food poisoning I've had was dining out. Suburbs with lax food safety enforcement, city with some of the most rigorous inspection regimes in the country, wherever.

Once my wife & I both got food poisoning ordering completely different food, as though the entire food station was contaminated.

[crazygringo]

> It is surprisingly hard to give yourself food poisoning if you cook for yourself.

It's not hard at all if you're cooking chicken. All it can take is reusing the cutting board without washing.

If you're careful about it, it's hard. But plenty of people aren't careful. They think the risk is "overblown", they assume salmonella in chicken is as rare as salmonella in eggs.

This makes it pretty easy. And then they think they caught a stomach flu or something.

[steveBK123]

At that point why not just lick raw chicken? I mean if you stick your finger in an electric socket you'll get hurt too.

Just suggesting a basic level of hygiene.

[DerekL]

It actually is “stomach flu”, because that's the common name for gastroenteritis, even though it's not related to influenza.

[potatopatch]

It's extremely common to get food poisoning at home, and for many people/cases it is indistinguishable from the flu.

Who separates meats in their fridge and on their cutting boards, dates the opening times of items, etc? Similarly, a home dishwasher doesn't actually sterilize anything, which is why its safer AFA chemicals. It's just providing the hope that small doses of something you've already interacted with won't cause sickness.

But once you've been sick from some contamination you won't really notice it, but guests might. Some restaurants run the same way as typical homes, and will be universally contaminated and someone who eats out regularly with variety is going to have similar consequences to being a guest in houses all over town..

[XorNot]

Everyone I've ever known? Who doesn't separate meat in their fridge, and who's keeping so much in there at one time that this is a problem?

Dating opening times is going too far IMO: if it's open, and longer then 7 days in the fridge you toss it. Which is to say, if you can't remember when you opened it, that's also a good sign not to eat it.

It's not like any of this is hard to do.

Although this:

> a home dishwasher doesn't actually sterilize anything,

is not really a statement on anything. "Sterilize" is a very specific term which means you did a process which is guaranteed to kill extant micro-organisms and viruses. But the reason hand-washing is so effective at preventing disease is that it doesn't necessarily kill them, but soap will wash them off surfaces very effectively. They're still alive, but they're in the sewer. Commercial dish washers aren't designed to sterilize either - they're designed to get things clean as fast as conceivably possible (i.e. single digit minutes, not hours).

The converse of this is the problem with old rice: reheating rice is periless, because while it will kill the bacterial contamination, the toxins remain and that's what will make you feel sick if you eat it.

[tzs]

> Similarly, a home dishwasher doesn't actually sterilize anything

What do you consider to be sterilization? Even my old dishwasher, which was made in 2002, has a sani-rinse option that adds a 10 minute rinse with 160℉ (71℃) water which the manual says satisfies the NSF Protocol P153 for sanitizing in household spray-type dishwashers. Unfortunately I can't find a free copy of NSF Protocol P153 to see what that actually accomplishes.

Looking at a few dishwashers that I'd consider to replace mine when it eventually breaks--and I'm a cheapskate so that basically means what I can find at Home Depot or Lowes or Best Buy in the $500-800 range rather--it looks like sanitizing or high temperature cycles are still common, although nowadays what they are saying they meet is "NSF/ANSI 184: Residential Dishwashers" [1].

That requires a minimum 5-log (99.999%) reduction of bacteria and a final rinse temperature of at least 150℉. The 5-log bacteria reduction is only required if you run the sanitizing cycle.

For commercial dishwashers the required reduction in bacteria is the same, although they are required to reach at least 165℉ rinse if they are stationary rack single-temp dishwashers or 180℉ otherwise. For commercial dishwashers the 5-log reduction is required on the regular cycles.

[1] https://www.nsf.org/consumer-resources/articles/dishwasher-c...

[lnsru]

We separate meats and cutting boards. The ones who were used for meat are being washed very carefully with lots of chemicals and hot water. Dishwasher runs at 65 degree Celsius. That’s enough for disinfection in my books. Plus cleaning with chlorine every 3 months. We have only couple things open in the fridge and don’t keep them for long. That means if pesto is open we eat noodles more often. There is no rocket science in keeping home kitchen in good shape.

Don’t let me start with a stories from a friend who worked as an interim manager at Burger King. It’s scary! But even worse are smaller industrial kitchens without strong control from state and franchise representatives.

[s1artibartfast]

>It's extremely common to get food poisoning at home.

What does that mean to you? That it will happen to an individual multiple times a year? That it will occur in a large city a few times a year?

The risk is hugely overblown in my opinion.

Home dishes don't need to be sterile, they just need food and grease removed.

[bilekas]

On that note I'm reminded hearing from a chef actually that if you've ever had diarrhea, its most likely you had a mild form of food poisoning.

[Avalaxy]

> I've also seen some close calls like when my fiancee was served 'rare' pork... Which isn't a culinary thing.

Don't let the Germans know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett

[Xylakant]

Some teams I worked with would ritually celebrate Mettwoch every Wednesday (Mittwoch).

[ceejayoz]

Rare pork is absolutely a thing.

https://www.seriouseats.com/case-for-raw-rare-pink-pork-food...

Food safety is a matter of both temperature and time (https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-s...), and we’ve all but eradicated trichinosis in commercially available pork.

[fedeb95]

exactly, you can have problems also with rare beef

[MichaelRo]

I'm self-administering (unwittingly) mild food poisoning pretty regularly because I can't throw away food, particularly food that I spent precious time on cooking it myself.

Like a big pot of soup, some fried meat and whatever side dish like cooked cabbage. The idea is to spend the unpleasant cooking time once, put it all in the fridge then for a few days at least the whole effort is just to retrieve servings and heat them before eating.

Most of the times I finish what I cooked before starting to spoil but even spoiling isn't very sudden. Like I ate 5 days old soup yesterday and tasted a little funny but it was all good, no side effects. There's still a bowl left at the bottom of the pot today and by the time I'm hungry it's too late to start thinking and waiting for alternatives so what the heck. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger I guess. Therefore it happens sometimes that I wakeup at 2 AM with an acute feeling that a bowel evacuation is imminent if you know what I mean :)

[NumberWangMan]

The trick is to once every couple of days when it's starting to get to that point where it'll go bad soon, take it out, and re-cook it somehow to kill any bacteria. This could be tossing soup back on the stove, or microwaving veggies steaming hot.

Also, it helps a lot to have strict sanitary standards for yourself, like always using a clean, fresh utensil to scoop out your servings. Or if you use the same one, start from the most-recently cooked food and end at the oldest, so you're not potentially introducing bacteria or mold from older stuff into newer stuff.

I eat leftovers sometimes up to maybe 10 days at max, but I am pretty good at avoiding any issues from it.

[saltcured]

For soups and stews, a useful approach is transfer into smaller single-serving containers to freeze. Then you can take out one serving at a time to thaw and reheat while the rest can stay frozen for many weeks.

You just have to cool it first so you don't overload the freezer with too much energy at once. We cool the pot, then divide and refrigerate the smaller containers overnight before transferring to the freezer the next morning.

We put our whole soup pot into a cold water bath to rapidly cool it. When the water warms appreciably, drain and replace with cold water again. Sometimes we put ice or those sealed gel ice packs into the bath to really accelerate the process.

[glitchc]

That's called the sous la vie style of cooking, gaining popularity in busy North American households every decade.

[saiya-jin]

I presume you meant 'sous vide', aka stewing stuff in plastic bags. When talking about various chemical crap in food and around it, I find it hilarious that folks consider baking food they eat in plastic bag as something to not even pause and think about healthwise

[civilitty]

If you’re concerned about the plastic you can use reusable silicone bags.

[tremon]

Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous-vide or am I missing the joke here?

[drcongo]

I have a shellfish allergy, every meal out is like a game of Russian Roulette

[Two4]

you microwaved a steak?!!

[adrian_b]

Roasting meat in a microwave oven (without water in a covered glass vessel) is a valid cooking method, which provides tasty meat in a perfectly reproducible way and in a shorter time than traditional cooking.

Nevertheless, for good results it must be done at a low power (I use 440 W in a 1000 W oven) and a long time, e.g. 20 to 25 minutes for chicken, about 30 minutes for turkey and more for pork/beef. For organs, e.g. livers, hearts, gizzards, a somewhat shorter time is enough.

When done for the first time, experiments are needed to determine the optimal power and time, which depend on the type of oven and on the amount and kind of meat. Once determined, the results will always be the same and the meat is very tasty, because it loses nothing, except a part of the water content (roasted meat has typically 2/3 of the weight of raw meat, due to water loss).

The meat should be microwave-roasted after removing the bones, and preferably after being cut in bite-sized pieces, which will avoid too violent steam expulsions if the power level is set too high.

[bilekas]

This is an uncomfortable amount of information around microwave cooking meat for me..

[sigilis]

It’s a reasonable thing to try for someone who doesn’t know how to cook a steak and may have been expressly forbidden from using the stove.

Plus he was twelve, definitely in the age range where such errors are the expected product of experimentation in an unfamiliar world.

[carlob]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4tIPFD7W3Q

Somebody microwaved a whole brisket, and it was surprisingly good.

[Two4]

I'm shocked, I would never expect a microwave to make anything other than grey, chewy meat

[lupusreal]

People get unreasonably squeemish about microwaves. There's nothing wrong with them. Frozen TV dinners suck but that's something different.

[dghughes]

You sound like you have the traditional Hughes sensitive gut. Welcome to the family.

[arghwhat]

Note that it is a professional blackbox with regular oversight and heavy regulations (depending on area). Cooking at home is certainly transparent in comparison, it is also the work of a usually incompetent amateur with no proper training, zero oversight and zero regulations to adhere to.

Where I live, the former is far more trustworthy, with home dining only winning on price and ingredient choice - not safety.

[ahartmetz]

Not a general solution by far, but for takeaway coffee I like to use a reCup reusable plastic cup: https://recup.de/mehrwegbecher/ that I never exchange and wash myself - Germany only so far, but you might find a similar product. Some places give a small discount for bringing your own cup.

[lupusreal]

> I can control what I use at home. I can't when I eat or drink out.

Of course you can, just pack a lunch. If your trip is longer than a day, then stop at grocery stores instead of restaurants. It's easy to avoid restaurants, so the failure to replicate this finding with residential dishwashers is good news. How could it be "even worse"?

[Eumenes]

> I can control what I use at home. I can't when I eat or drink out.

the same can be said about the enormous amounts of salt they put in food ... how do you insure people wash their hands when cooking? eating out is an exercise in trust.

[mikecoles]

No. You use the third choice, that you already mentioned. Eat at home. The quality is better. The price is cheaper. The service is personalized.

[whalesalad]

Seed oils served on a platter coated in rinse aid, welcome to the future!

[mikkom]

> They specifically mention that they could not repeat their findings on consumer dishwashers.

this should be the top comment

[mirekrusin]

Yes, but let me add my personal but - bottles for kids often have complex non leaking valves where detergent accumulates - as in you can see pieces of undissolved tablet every single time inside it. If missed it’ll affect little kids, every day, so be aware.

[pohl]

Also personal, but not every member of the family thinks about how water behaves — like how it pools — while loading the machine.

[bluejekyll]

Constant debate between me and my significant other. She’s always annoyed that I go through and reorganize everything so that things drain and rinse properly.

[TedDoesntTalk]

I did not see that in the article. Where is it?

[0x00_NULL]

This is not correct. It is about all dishwashers, but professional ones seem to lack a cleansing cycle after rinse aid is applied, thus the concentration of resulting rinse aid is higher. A consumer dishwasher is also used in their tests, but the concentration was much less than the professional dishwasher - however, they tested with 20g of rinse aid and used assumptions of the number and volume of washing cycles from their test dishwasher. A deviation of 10% difference in since water could increase the concentration significantly, by a factor of ~2 or more depending on the final rinsing stage.

So, in their example, the results in consumer dishwashers fell in the 1:40,000 - 1:80,000 dilution range. But, that does not necessarily apply to a different brand of dishwasher with a different method of rinsing. A 10% savings in the rinse cycle water might move that ratio into the 1:20,000 - 1:40,000 range (which is within the range of having an significant effect). So, I interpret this as not dismissing of consumer dishwashers, but rather indicating more careful study is needed.

[brundolf]

Every once in a while I grab a water cup, usually at a coffee shop, and I notice the cups smell a bit like bleach. Always struck me as weird, but I figured they wouldn't put them out that way if it wasn't safe

I might be more careful now

[AndrewKemendo]

Almost universally, the people handling your food at time of service have the least amount of training in the food delivery chain.

Upscale restaurants will generally do a better job here with temperature control and regular inspections.

Having a food handlers card as a chef is generally required but not for expo or servers and questionable for line chefs outside of higher end establishments.

Bottom line, unless you’re at a Michelin or Beard restaurant you should expect you’re being exposed to more harmful stuff than you’d expect.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

I doubt most minimum wage earning coffee shop teens will know any better.

[red-iron-pine]

why would they? if you wanted someone trained in food chemistry then your coffee would cost 2x. hell, chances are the manager doesn't know much more, either.

they have dishwasher, they put cups in dishwasher, they run, they serve in clean cups.

it's clear from the article that this is an issue across the entire food service industry, and has nothing to do with whether or not your pimply faced barista knows what the safe level of rinse aid in pre-made clears is.

[fuzzfactor]

They know better than to drink out of the machines which were supposedly cleaned when they weren't there to know for sure.

In the best-run high-turnover locations where cleaning agents are used according to a rigorous schedule proven to prevent slime and bacteria, it might be even more likely to have exposure if the chemicals are habitually incompletely rinsed from the apparatus afterward.

[mint2]

At a small coffee shop they may not have a dishwasher and instead have a few buckets in series starting with a sanitizer solution bucket followed by a few progressive rinse buckets

[the-dude]

I had over 10 years of eczeme/sensitivity between my fingers after operating a professional dishwasher for under a year.

I always thought the reason was the handling of the hot, sprayed tableware. It set on pretty quickly too : couple of months.

[thfuran]

It probably is. There's no indication that these results mean anything about the effects on skin.

[the-dude]

> There's no indication that these results mean anything about the effects on skin.

I didn't claim that, but I think it was a combination of the temperature and the (rinse) spray. One could feel the spray.

[rmellow]

How did your eczema go away?

[the-dude]

At the time I got some 'hormone' ointment from my doctor ( this is really scary and amazing stuff btw, apply it before bed, next morning : completely restored fingers ).

I noticed the eczema returned as soon as I did wet cleaning in the house, so I converted to a staunch cleaning gloves wearer.

[chiefalchemist]

> When individual components of the rinse aid were investigated separately, alcohol ethoxylates elicited a strong toxic and barrier-damaging effect.

To clarify a bit, it's not professional dishwashers (the machines) but the soap / chemicals used for commercial dishwashing. Minor but important when thinking about the broader problem.

Mind you, it gets diluted but those end up in the water supply, as does many other knows and unknowns. For me, the question has not be what effect does Compound X or Compound Y have individually, but when in the wild what happens when you combine A to Z+? Then what?

[XorNot]

That entirely depends on the stability of the compounds in waste water. They break seem to break down sufficiently quickly[1] that it was evaluated as a potential problem in sampling waste water to even determine their content.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11227547/

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Did you do the 'sniff-test'? I did, and do again from time to time, when elsewhere. In my experience I can smell that stuff on the dishes and glassware, even after having cleaned them by hand before, and even after a second run without detergent. On every consumer dishwasher, so far.

That alone was reason for me to avoid them, since decades. And this hasn't changed. And I have no 'super-nose'(I think).

[Turing_Machine]

I knew a guy who had an ugly, painful ulcer on the top of his foot for a few months after dripping some liquid commercial dishwasher detergent on his sneaker while refilling the dispenser.

That stuff is nasty.

[nottorp]

Another interesting question is what countries they got their detergents from. Formulas may vary across the world based on what's allowed and what's not.

[z7]

Correct, but the question remains if the lower concentrations in consumer dishwashers might also affect health on some level.

[TedDoesntTalk]

I don’t see any mention of that in the article. Where did you read it?

[bluejekyll]

“… in concentrations used in professional dishwashers.“