Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published November 23, 2007 The Food Poisoning Season Thanksgiving leftovers are, if you ask me, dangerous. If it weren't for the fact that my wife seems to actually prefer leftovers to freshly-cooked food, I'd throw out every bit of the massive amount of food we always have when the last guest leaves on Thanksgiving. (Except, of course, the small amount of ham and the turkey carcasses, both of which go into the essential turkey gumbo). The peril comes from the flagrant breaking of many food safety rules. A lot of the food sits out there are warm room temperature for a long time. Many people are digging in it. Some of it is noptorious for harboring bacteria, turkey being the worst offender. Getting sick from the things you eat comes up frequently in my conversations with diners. It's time to get a few facts into the mix, because the problem is very widely misunderstood. I am not a medical professional, and so I won't get into the details of all the kinds of food poisoning, nor what has to be done to avoid them. Instead, I've found a good site on the web that gives you all that from authoritative sources. I am, however, not without knowledge of the subject. I've done a lot of research on it. And I have direct experience, having had food poisoning more than a few times in my life. (Most often in the days before I did much cooking at home.) The symptoms of the most common form of food poisoning are very much like those of flu--except that they fade away after a day or two. It's not just the obvious vomiting and/or diarrhea, but also the feverishness and the achy bones. Another symptom of food poisoning is the mental search for who or what gave it to you. The first suspect will always be a restaurant. Which brings me to a story. It's true, but I've changed many details to protect the identities involved. A few years ago, someone called me on the radio show and, before I could stop her, complained that a pizza parlor had poisoned her. It was one of those great places that were quite old and well-used--a style of restaurant we seem to prefer in New Orleans. This lady was completely convinced that the pizza place had given her the problem, because everybody in her family got it, and they'd all shared the same pizza and salad. End of story. I happened to know the owners of the place, and the next time I went in (note: I was not deterred by what I'd heard) I asked them if they heard about the incident. Oh, yes, they said. Customers told them about it all week. At least the ones that came in. After two months, they were still only at 80 percent of their pre-incident business. I asked them whether anyone else had complained of getting sick. Not in a long time, they told me, and no others that night. There is much missing from this story. What did this family do the rest of the day? I don't know. But here are some possible scernarios: 1. Before eating dinner, the family stopped at the store. There was someone frying samples of catfish, and all four of them had some. What they didn't know was that the cutting board was earlier used to cut the raw fish, and had just been wiped before the fried fish was cut on it. 2. The littlest kid in the family (this is gross, but if you have little kids, you know it happens) didn't flush the toilet the night before. The next morning somebody does. It stopped up, and runs all over the floor, splashing around. Dad wipes it up and wrings out the sponge in the sink. The toothbrushes are a foot away. 3. The family went to Grandpa's house the night before. Grandpa just finished cutting up the chicken for his famous gumbo, and he hasn't washed his hands yet. He shakes hands with or kisses everybody. The above happen all the time. All are at least as likely a source for food poisoning as the pizza. Except that we don't know what happened before we got to the point of infection. And we forget we were even there. The truth is that we trust everything in familiar places (most particularly in our homes), even when the conditions are terrible. When we get something like this, we blame the less-familiar place. It seems obvious, but not when the rest of our less-than-perfectly-sanitary lives are added to the story--as they should be. It's true that the source of a food poisoning outbreak can be traced. But this is not done easily. It's also true that you cannot know for sure where this sort of stuff comes from--unless other people whose only intersection with your life is that they ate in the same place also got sick. And sometimes that's not even a sure sign. Finally, food poisoning symptoms sometimes don't appear until a day or more later. What you did two hours ago becomes much more suspicious than what you did yesterday, so you blame that. I'm not trying to apologize for restaurants. Many of them--including some very well-respected, expensive places--have substandard sanitation. But don't tell me you know exactly where you've been poisoned, because you don't--not for certain. Not until the research is done, anyway. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com