"Thus this is simultaneously “a dangerous food safety thing people commonly do” and “relatively high risk” (Conor regrettably does not say what this risk is hig

"Thus this is simultaneously “a dangerous food safety thing people commonly do” and “relatively high risk” (Conor regrettably does not say what this risk is high relative to; it’s almost certainly high compared to eating a fresh saltine, less so compared to doing wheelies on a motorcycle in traffic)." This is a problem. I've met people who advocated feeding their pets cooked, bone-in chicken. That's kind of a bad idea, but you can get away with it for a very long time. Or, if you get unlucky, .... Risks are frequently presented on a "relative risk" basis; do X and your risk of cancer Y is 20 times greater. Except that your risk of cancer Y is minuscule and 20 times more is only slightly less minuscule. On the other hand, there are 300+ million people in the US; 300 million times something minuscule can still be a noticeable number. So when the USDA says, "If a perishable food (such as meat or poultry) has been left out at room temperature overnight (more than two hours) it may not be safe. Discard it, even though it may look and smell good," they do that because if they don't, hundreds or thousands of restaurants in the country will keep perishable food, perhaps much longer than overnight, and the result will be a daily death toll. So, allow me to rephrase one of his interpretations: "some foods might be a significant risk after several hours, but we can’t trust [a 16-year old minimum wage employee or that sketchy dude whose food truck keeps changing names] to sort out which ones [given that specifying which ones would require several thousand pages of fine print], or to keep close track of your cut-off time [which varies by local atmospheric conditions, among other things], so we are saying two hours is the limit for virtually all foods to keep [even someone immune-compromised] safe and our smart asses covered". You can call that a lie, if you like. Kind of like how "if the net force on an object is zero, then the velocity of the object is constant" is a lie, too. Do I eat pizza that has been left out overnight? Sure. Heck, I'll eat stuff that's far enough along to be visibly sketchy. But I have a functional immune system and the worst case is that I get sick (or die). But I'm a lot more cautious when I'm cooking for someone else, and I tend not to cook for large numbers of people because I don't know all those stupid rules. But when someone says something like, "USDA’s bullshit mega-overcautious-standard", I'm calling their opinion horseshit. Because that is exactly how you get anti-vaxxers and measles outbreaks.