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Premium: Surviving Christmas Dinner with Gary Kennedy · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up
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  at uncomfortableconversations.substact.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.
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  G'day, humans. Welcome to the same space.
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  Nothing is more dangerous than having your post Christmas,
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  ham, or turkey, leftovers, and efficient around in the fridge a week after the fact,
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  maybe a couple of weeks. And you're scratching your head and thinking
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  yourself, can I still have this leftover turkey carcass? How would you know?
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  And how would you know how to prepare the thing in the first place that you're not going to poison
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  your guests when you're at a summer barbecue or a picnic? How long can you leave the salami sitting
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  there sweating in the sun next to the sweaty melting cheese before you need to throw it out?
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  One of the most popular segments on my ABC radio show, Rest in Peace, was with the one and only
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  Gary Kennedy, who knows more than almost anybody else in Australia about food safety. Neither
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  world. I would say more than anyone in the world, but he doesn't like to be big-noted. He's a
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  humble man, although he is a media slut, the one and only Gary Kennedy joins me on the uncomfortable
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  conversations. Coach, hello, Gary. Hi, Josh. Lovely to have you here before Christmas. When is
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  there an uptick in Poisonings before? Absolutely, there is. Yeah, my daughter is this time at the
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  year. In Australia, unlike the Northern hemisphere, we have the double whammy down here. So we have
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  the hottest days of the year. And when I want to, you know, if I'm trying to incubate a bacterial
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  food poisoning culture in an incubator in, you know, my office, I'll incubate at 37 degrees,
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  body temperature, because that's the temperature which food poisoning bugs grow best.
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  And also happens to be the average maximum temperature in Sydney and New South Wales in summer.
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  And we match that with the time of the year where we're most casual about food preparation,
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  and we do things we don't normally do, like take eskis on long car trips and take a barbecue on
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  the beach and get too many drinks and leave the food sitting out for four or five hours.
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  And have a Christmas lunch where everything is just split out. Like when else do you leave everything
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  on the table for five hours while everyone's in the backyard having beers and then coming back.
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  Cricket and beer come back and think, oh, we'll just have another bite of that. So yeah,
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  we get the double whammy. We get the slackest food preparation, because we're having a good time,
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  combined with body temperature, hot temperature of the year. So food poisoning in Christmas with
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  spikes in December, January. Okay, the most important, the most, the most revelatory thing that you
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  have enlightened me on is like the two hour rule and the four hour rule. I can never quite
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  remember, but once the listener or the viewer understands this simple principle, their lives will
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  forever be changed in understanding the ambiguity of whether or not they should, they can eat
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  something and juggling like does the Mongolian lamb that has been in the fridge for three days,
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  is that going to kill me enough to seven days? Is it going to kill me? What's the two hour and the
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  four hour rule? Right. Basically what it says, and this is food standards are showing New Zealand
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  requirements. It probably applies in similar ways elsewhere. Oh, yeah, this applies all around
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  the world. Right. What it says is if a food isn't meant to be frozen or it's meant to be cold
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  or it's meant to be hot, so not a cracker, you know, or piece of bread. If it's something that's
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  meant to be in a fridge or a freeze or meant to be kept hot, then if you let it sit out at room
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  temperature, after two hours, you've got to make a decision. And after two hours, you can cook it
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  again or you can put it back in the fridge or back in the freezer or you can let it sit out.
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  But if you let it sit out after four hours, you've got to bin it. After four hours. Four hours.
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  So there's a two hour window between the two hours when you have to make a decision.
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  So after two hours, you've got to make a decision and after four hours, if you didn't put it in the
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  fridge or the freezer or recook it after two hours, then after four hours, you should bin it.
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  You see that in operation without realizing lots of times. So if you do a long flight and you
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  have an Asian, you meal, you'll see the flight attendants, they will take your meal and when you
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  want a new one, press. So the meal doesn't sit there. Right, but they come a lot quicker than two hours.
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  They whisk that away from you out of your face as you're just scooping up the last piece of chocolate
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  moose in a little meal zone wheels do delivery runs within two hours. So when the food leaves,
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  by the time it comes, by the time the car comes back, it's within two hours.
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  Why isn't it insulated there? What if what about Uber Eats and like home delivery where they've
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  got it in an insulated bag? Well, that's why you remember when would the big pizza chains when
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  pizza hut set up? I like how we can mention names here. Yeah, we can. Yes. For listeners who don't
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  know on the public broadcast, you're not really allowed to talk about corporate, among the many
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  limitations of working at the public broadcast, you can't mention corporations here. We can, hey,
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  pizza hut. You want to sponsor the show? Come on in, baby. We'll have pizza all the best
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  pizza. So when pizza set up in Australia, there was their delivered in 30 minutes or it's free.
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  Right. Was one of the claims and one of the reasons that pizza hut did that was not so you get hot
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  pizza. It was so if ever there was a store that said, well, just make a whole lot of pizzas in
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  advance. They couldn't do that. I see. Right. So there's a whole lot of systems set up around
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  this two hour for it. Even things like wet, that's why backyard spit rows, you have a higher,
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  you know, something for a christening, they all set up and within four hours, everything's pulled
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  down. And if you say to them, we keep the leftover potato salad, they're going, no, sorry,
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  we have to take it away. So all of that is meaning this two hour four hour. Gary, you'll be
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  pleased to know that when I was in my late teens or early 20s, I went to a visitor friend in
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  Munich and he and his friends were having a Schreiner party, which they go into the Bavarian woods
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  in summer. They take tons of mushrooms of psychedelic mushrooms and someone brings a pig, a dead pig
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  and they put, they put it on a spit and they have this kind of almost Lord of the Flies style
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  rave in the Bavarian woods where everyone rolling off their faces on psilocybin and roasting a pig.
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  And I regret to inform you that the four hour rule was probably not observed on that occasion.
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  What they probably did had they kept the temperature up. We're keeping the pig above 60 degrees.
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  So if they can keep the pig hot, right. So then it's still being then it's still hot. So the four
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  hour two hour four hour rule doesn't apply while food is still cold or why food is still hot.
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  So if we go into a petrol station or a fast food store and things like a pie warmers,
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  bain maries, soup to reans, chafing dishes, you know, things with little netto burners,
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  all of those hot dog steamers, all of those are meant to keep the food above 60 degrees.
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  And if you've cooked the food properly, can cool down to 60. There's no bugs grow below 60
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  that cause food poisoning. Right. And you can sit there for years. So, you know, the pie and the
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  track, you know, my job involves me going sometimes to roadhouses at three in the morning.
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  Right. Because you get employed by institutions or governments to
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  audit the industry and make sure they're not going to kill somebody.
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  Yeah. That means travel and sometimes you're stuck in remote places at very odd hours where
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  petrol stations where you buy food, you know, a 24 hour place. And if the food's above 60 degrees,
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  it can stay there for years and nothing will ever grow. Is that right? So the people would probably
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  have been safe. This is why had they kept it up to temperature. I believe there was a hairy
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  armpit, a little elephant woman rolling off her face on psychedelics who was stoking the fire
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  underneath this bit. She was probably their compliance officer. I know that, for example,
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  I've got a Greek relative who does the lamb. And him and I, he looked at it and said,
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  just check it out. I mean, no, it's all fine. It's, you know, because he was really nervous,
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  because he, you know, it's an in law found out what I did for a living was extremely nervous
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  cooking the lamb. But no, he cooked it up to the right temperature and provided there were
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  coals underneath the kept warm. That's fine. I mean, just to take an aside about like
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  year-offs and cababs at takeaway joints. Like people might be familiar with, you know, the meat,
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  the sometimes process, but sometimes actual fillets of chicken if it's chicken or strips of lamb
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  that are all coagulated together into this gigantic cylindrical block with a metal spit through
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  the middle of it. And it rotates slowly. And there's a heat burner on one side of it. And they
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  shave it off with an electric knife. And they put it in a cabab roll, a pit, a piece of pit, a bread,
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  and right. I've always wondered in that cylinder of flesh, there must be a point at which between
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  the cold center or the room temperature center and the flaming outside, it's at a perfect 37 degree
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  microbial funhouse where everything is growing like crazy. You are absolutely correct. And so it
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  must be horrendous, like deadly germs and bacteria at some point in that thing. Do they then just
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  get burned off when it wrote when they come to the surface? But what if they're going through it so
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  quickly that they're shaving the thing off too far so it doesn't get time to get burnt off?
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  That's why in some cababs store, you can tell when it's raw or cooked. So if there is a massive
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  trade in it, you can see that they will put it on a grill and cook it on the grill.
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  So they're often going to burn off that and you often see the reverse. So the meat doesn't dry out
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  if they're slow-trade, they'll often shave some of the outside stuff off and they will keep it in a
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  tray because it's cooked meat so it's relatively safe and they keep it warm.
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  Right. And then they might cook it again if it's been.
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  Yeah, they'll warm it up again and make it cough.
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  Okay. There is a cabab industry code of practice.
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  Sure there is. Did you help write that one too?
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  No, I didn't. But I had to have cabab shops that are clients. So I know the system.
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  Cababs are on the radar of some of the government authorities because they are potentially risky
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  because when they come out, they actually are a frozen product to start with. So when they're
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  supplied to the cabab shop by the meat manufacturer, they're actually frozen on the middle pole
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  and you return the pole. So somewhere in the middle, it's actually frozen while the outside
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  is red hot. So you're right. In the middle, there's the gold zone for bacteria.
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  Okay, so back to Christmas. So we're doing all this. So two hours, two hours and one minute,
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  I can decide to either put the stuff back and put the hair or the turkey or the prawns.
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  Or prawns even. Two hours seems like a long time to lay prawns out. But you said room temperature.
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  What if it's 35 degrees? We're talking in Celsius here, but we're talking between five degrees.
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  So it hits 5.1 degrees. Some bugs will start growing. It hits 59.9 degrees. Some bugs will start
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  growing. So five and 60, which is slightly different to Europe. They have five to 63.
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  We have five to six. What do the Americans have? Do you know?
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  Well, this is in Faraday, but yeah, they would be the equivalent.
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  Yeah, they do five to 63 as well. We're slightly tighter here.
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  Okay. And so at two hours, I go, all right, I'm going to commit to eating this within the next
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  hour and 59 minutes. And if I don't, then I'll throw it out. And then after three hours and 59
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  minutes, I can still eat a prawn that's been sitting outside on a hot day.
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  Yeah, it's to do with something that they call the lag phase. And what in microbiology,
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  if you think about when you move into a new house, you don't instantly feel at home there,
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  and it takes you all while before you're happy there. So in an evolutionary sense, that happens
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  in microbes. So suddenly a microbe is cold and in a fridge, and all of a sudden you put it in
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  37 degrees. There's something I call a lag phase, which means all microbes, all microbes,
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  whether they're viruses or bacteria or molds, don't instantly start growing. They sit there for
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  a while thinking, is this right? Is this going to change? I mean, the perfect conditions.
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  And then after about two hours, they go, oh, I'm at the right temperature now. And they
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  will start growing. Now two two hour four hour is a good scientific rough guide. You will get
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  some growth before two hours, but not enough to kill you will make you sick. Right. So it's in
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  that two to four hour range, when everything goes. But by the end of four hours, we're going
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  exponentially. Right. We're in that sort of growth phase. And they're saying after four hours,
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  yeah, if you started off at a very low number, you could have a dangerous dose after four hour.
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  Okay. What is the main way? What is the main mistake that people make then, especially at
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  Christmas time? Well, there's a couple of things. One of them is they forget four hours and come back.
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  So the food's been sitting there the other. And people think that I can just take it in and out
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  at the fridge five times. That doesn't work. Why not? Oh, because you've already used up two hours
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  of your four hours, if that makes sense. So say you start off with one bug. And at the end of
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  two hours, you've got a thousand bugs. When you put it in the fridge, they don't die off. So when
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  you pull it out next time, you're already at a thousand bugs. So you've only really got a short
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  period two hours left. It's four hours in total, not four hours each. Go. Yeah, it's not very
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  easy. So if you take it out for 45 minutes and you put it on the table, everyone serves themselves,
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  you pop it back in. Then you're basically holding the growth of the, the bacteria,
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  putting it in the fridge, be it used up nearly an hour. Right. So then you've got an hour,
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  15 minutes out of the fridge. And can I say, in commercial establishments, you know, restaurants,
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  hospitals, the airlines, the people who do this regularly, they keep control of that to the minute,
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  but in the home, no one knows. Well, I mean, presumably the other thing they do in commercial
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  environments is that they have ridges that they know will be at a particular temperature. So
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  they're going to be that three and a half degrees or four degrees Celsius. They'll be blast,
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  fan-forced air. These are industrial units. So we'll actually pull temperature down.
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  One of the problems in your fridge at home is most people don't actually run their fridge cold
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  enough. So you and I have had discussions at the ABC about butter. Yeah. Whether you need to
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  chew butter or not. But if you're one of my strange quirks for people who don't know is that I'm
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  a rabid fan of not putting butter in the fridge at all, you don't need to. For safety reasons,
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  not a problem at all. Yeah. Just leave it out of the fridge. Yep. The issue, if your fridge is
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  running cold enough, you shouldn't be able to spread the butter. And sometimes your letter should
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  freeze is a good clue. Right. A fridge needs to run at less than five degrees for these bugs.
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  So some of the bugs we're talking about will start growing at six and seven degrees.
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  So and some of them will grow very, very slowly in a cold fridge. We'll start growing quickly when
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  you get into a warmer fridge. So most people don't keep their fridge cold enough. And at Christmas,
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  you've got the added bonus that you're constantly opening and closing the fridge to get things in
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  an hour. And you've also tempted to put hot stuff in the fridge. And hot stuff also heats up your
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  fridge. Yeah. So what should I do if I've got fun?