Wouldn’t bacteria also grow in the water left out and release toxins?
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Soups and teas have organic compounds added to them that are much more nourishing for microorganisms.
Water’s just water. If you leave it out long enough, it’ll become unsafe to drink, but that’s because you have to wait for enough dust etc. to fall inside it for there to be something to kick off an environment where a self-sustaining biome can happen.
Think about being trapped in a grocery store for a week vs. being trapped in a water treatment facility. Being surrounded by all that water won’t do you much good if there’s no food!
the nutrients in tea or soup create an opportunity for bacterial growth. pure water has a considerably lower risk of that.
If you make a pot of soup you have to let it cool completely before you can put it in the fridge. I almost always leave my soup out overnight before refrigerating unless it’s milk based.
A lot of Americans are psycho over refrigerating things and killing bacteria. Leaving tea out or even soup overnight is going to do nothing in a standard 70° room. It’ll be fine the next day to drink or eat.
It completely depends on how many bacteria are present when you start.
Tea/soup have a lot more than clean water and will therefore become unsafe much quicker.
Also: A fridge doesn’t kill bacteria. It only slows down their reproduction.
Bacteria will still grow (very slowly) in a fridge and eventualy spoil the food after days/weeks.
“a few hours” – unless it’s fish on a hot day nothing spoils in a few hours.
Tea isn’t going to go off; there’s very little in there that a bacteria could make a home out of.
Soup might start going sour after 12 hours or so. Probably won’t do you any harm but might taste weird. Use your senses: if it looks and smells like soup you’re likely okay. If it looks and tastes like something has gone wrong, it might make you sick.
Source: I regularly make stock, leave it on the stove overnight still full of chicken bones. If I don’t have time to strain and fridge it in the morning I just boil it hard for half an hour and leave it out all day to deal with it in the evening. Probably wouldn’t recommend this in summer though.
Food isn’t trying to kill you as much as you think.
Well. It kind of is. But not the food you cook and make from ingredients – just the food you buy in a pouch from the convenience store. That shit is gonna kill you in the end.
What about when you make homemade ice tea the old fashioned way, and leave it out in the sun all day? Grandma used to make it and never hurt anyone, like ever
Bacteria needs five things to grow.
Food. Bacteria eat the same things we do.
Temperature. Bacteria like the same temperatures that we do, and grow fastest around 75-95 degrees freedom units.
Water. Bacteria need water to survive. This is why dried rice will stay good forever, but cooked rice grows mold in a day.
Time. Bacteria need time to multiply. The longer something is left out in the above conditions, the more bacteria. And it is exponential. It can go from perfectly fine to eat to making you sick very quickly.
Starting population. Bacteria multiply, but there has to be bacteria in the first place. Every single object humans interact with has bacteria. When we cook food, it kills the vast majority of bacteria. A raw piece of chicken has a lot of bacteria and a high probability of making you sick if you eat it. If you cook the chicken to 165, it kills 99% of the bacteria and suddenly it is safe to eat.
If you leave out cooked chicken, the remaining 1% will start to multiply. There will also be bacteria from the air, the plate it is sitting on, and your hands/utensils you touched it with. There is now a ticking clock on the time before that bacteria multiplies to a large enough population that your immune system gets overwhelmed.
Also to consider, there is some bacteria (and fungus) that doesn’t really harm humans. It’s easy for our immune system to keep in check. Bacteria and fungus in the air are usually pretty mild. Letting a cup of tea sit out *will* get infected… but it’s no big deal. If you drink from it, the bacteria in your mouth will colonize the tea and if it is a sufficient environment with the 5 things above, it will start to multiply. If the environment isn’t very hospitable, such as there being no sugar, it multiplies very slowly.
There is also bacteria that is really really bad. E. Coli is really bad for us and can overwhelm our immune system. This is why we take so much precautions over food that has e. coli, such as chicken.
There are other bacteria that don’t hurt us directly, but leave byproducts that are toxic. This is especially true for meat and grains. Once enough bacteria have reproduced and created their waste, no amount of cooking to kill bacteria is going to matter. The toxins are going to remain.
Now, there are a lot of interesting exceptions. But that’s beyond the scope.
Unless you’re *severely* immunocompromised, leaving virtually anything on the counter out for a few hours is going to be perfectly safe. If you cooked it properly, whatever bacteria were populating it are already dead; several hours is simply not enough time for the bacteria in your kitchen or wherever to reproduce enough to cause you harm.
For *years* in my early 20s, lazy bachelor that I was, I’d leave soups and the like on the stove overnight all the time. Never once had a problem, not so much as a tummyache. Perhaps avoid leaving things out overnight and then eating them as I did, but a few hours? Perish the thought. Discarding perfectly good food just because government guidelines are designed to accommodate literally everybody, including people who would die from the common cold, is just unreasonable.
Also, tea is totally non-nutritive, I have no idea where you got the idea that bacteria might grow in it as they would in food.
Lol I’ve been leaving my soup out for 2/3 days and just scooping out a bowl when I’m hungry, I keep a lid on it? Maybe it’s why I never get ill or sick cause I’m basically dead lol.
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