Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren foc obamb here day old pizza can be a welcome staple to college students, starving artists, and anyone who thought it was a brilliant idea to order that extra large double meat after coming home from the bar at two am, only to have sleepiness catch up with them halfway through the first slice. Cold pizza is a bona fide breakfast of champions. If refrigerated, leftover pizza will stay
good for four days. But what about room temperature pizza? Will you get sick if you eat a few slices of the pepperoni that's sat in a greasy cardboard box next to your bed for the last eight hours? The official answer, don't risk it. The U s d A, that's the United States Department of Agriculture, published some food safety guidelines for students in which it answered this very question.
According to them, you should throw away any leftover food that's been sitting out at room temperature for two hours or more, whether or not it contains meat. The reason is that harmful bacteria grow the fast just on foods that are in the danger zone temperatures between forty and a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit. That's four point four and sixty degrees celsius. In that range, bacteria double in
number every twenty minutes. Does that mean that every pizza is contaminated with pathogenic bacteria that will explode a number if the pie is left out for more than two hours. Absolutely not. Benjamin Chapman, a food safety specialist at North Carolina State University, told Life Hacker that leftover pizza hasn't made enough people sick to count as a public health risk.
Chapman says that's probably because pizza toppings and crust are generally too dry to be bacteria friendly environments, and that tomato sauce is too acidic. Not all toppings are created equal, though Pepperoni is dry cured so it's built to last, but eating old veggie ingredients or moist chunks of chicken is probably pressing your luck. To get a sense of the general risk level of pizza, we turned to a
public health report from Ontario, Canada. According to its review of global food poisoning data, aces, pizza has been implicated in a number of food born illness outbreaks worldwide, and that includes pizza of all types plain cheese, meat, and veggie in both restaurants and homes. For some perspective, though, that report cited a few hundred individual cases of food poisoning over more than a decade of worldwide pizza eating. In the U. S Alone, we eat an estimated three
billion pizzas every year. So should you finish off those last two pieces of stuff? Crust Hawaiian from last night's of Poker game. The odds of getting sick are probably similar to the odds of drawing a royal flush, So the real question is are you feeling lucky? Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other toothsome topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.