Holding pulled pork in water bath for serving

This is good info as always @Theophan, but i have a clarifying question:

the rule itself makes no reference to this, but doesn't it assume that the food is leftover, or at least handled and had human contact or a source of re-infection?

as with you soup example, i'm thinking of beer making. The reason people drank weak beer (in the period before clean available municipal water), and (one of the) the reason(s) we can make beer at home legally, is that boiling the wort sterilizes the beer. 

The vast majority  is fermented at room temp, and the alcohol doesn't kick in quickly enough to be the antiseptic to keep it safe. 

Is the assumption that we are talking about food which has been out on a tray and served, coughed over, etc?  Or undercooked and maybe harboring bacteria because it was incorrectly cooked?

i can think of other exMples of food which are sterilized by cooking and then left out at room temp for extended periods and are perfectly safe.  Home canned fruits and vegetables for example. I don't mean pickling or cured foods either. Pears in syrup, for example. Granted, we're talking about environments with no air. But would anaerobic bacteria thrive atroom temp if they were there after boiling?  

So the only difference appears to be an opportunity for reinfection

this also doesn't square with foods left out all the time at room temp and which might even be expected to be 'compromised '. Butter, cake, breads, olive oil,etc

i'm asking fir my own education on this, and none of this is a debate or questioning your knowledge. 

But my interpretation is that the 'rule' is one constructed to convey the simples information to the simplest user covering themajority of conditions. And that it is based on assuming multiple levels of failure (as opposed to reauiring only one for things to go wrong). Kind of like requiring foods to be cooked to 160 when pasteurization is achieved at temps not nearly so high. It's 160 that's recommended not because that's the real temp, but because they assume you will take it in the wrong part of the meat, or your thermo is miscalibrated, or any of a few other possible errors in reading it 

to pose a more applicable scenario for BGE-ers:  

you have a pork butt whose internal is 160, in an environment that is 225. The fire goes out and five hours later (hey, you got drunk and slept in) the internal temp is down to 120 or something. Maybe it's cold out. 

Untouched and previously pasteurized, in a pasteurized cooker. More than four hours lossibly at 40-140. Internal temp and even longer externally 

this is a legit question, not antagonism:  what event took place to the meat in that time which would cause there to be a (bacterial) safety issue?

atthe end of it all, it's my belief that the science is of course solid. But that the rule makers cannot parse every condition and circumstance. So they, as a benefit to the most people covering most scenarios, develop a general rule which they apply to all situations so that people do not have to 'know' anything so much as simply remember the rule and apply it

safer for everyone, but in the details, not always iron clad 

again. I am posing this so i can learn. Not to question the science (i tend to be a science-leaning guy myself).  And i am not asking this as an undoing of the logic behind the rule. Just asking "but why?"

Darby_Crenshaw said:

This is good info as always @Theophan, but i have a clarifying question:

the rule itself makes no reference to this, but doesn't it assume that the food is leftover, or at least handled and had human contact or a source of re-infection?

as with you soup example, i'm thinking of beer making. The reason people drank weak beer (in the period before clean available municipal water), and (one of the) the reason(s) we can make beer at home legally, is that boiling the wort sterilizes the beer. 

The vast majority  is fermented at room temp, and the alcohol doesn't kick in quickly enough to be the antiseptic to keep it safe. 

Is the assumption that we are talking about food which has been out on a tray and served, coughed over, etc?  Or undercooked and maybe harboring bacteria because it was incorrectly cooked?

i can think of other exMples of food which are sterilized by cooking and then left out at room temp for extended periods and are perfectly safe.  Home canned fruits and vegetables for example. I don't mean pickling or cured foods either. Pears in syrup, for example. Granted, we're talking about environments with no air. But would anaerobic bacteria thrive atroom temp if they were there after boiling?  

So the only difference appears to be an opportunity for reinfection

this also doesn't square with foods left out all the time at room temp and which might even be expected to be 'compromised '. Butter, cake, breads, olive oil,etc

i'm asking fir my own education on this, and none of this is a debate or questioning your knowledge. 

But my interpretation is that the 'rule' is one constructed to convey the simples information to the simplest user covering themajority of conditions. And that it is based on assuming multiple levels of failure (as opposed to reauiring only one for things to go wrong). Kind of like requiring foods to be cooked to 160 when pasteurization is achieved at temps not nearly so high. It's 160 that's recommended not because that's the real temp, but because they assume you will take it in the wrong part of the meat, or your thermo is miscalibrated, or any of a few other possible errors in reading it 

to pose a more applicable scenario for BGE-ers:  

you have a pork butt whose internal is 160, in an environment that is 225. The fire goes out and five hours later (hey, you got drunk and slept in) the internal temp is down to 120 or something. Maybe it's cold out. 

Untouched and previously pasteurized, in a pasteurized cooker. More than four hours lossibly at 40-140. Internal temp and even longer externally 

this is a legit question, not antagonism:  what event took place to the meat in that time which would cause there to be a (bacterial) safety issue?

atthe end of it all, it's my belief that the science is of course solid. But that the rule makers cannot parse every condition and circumstance. So they, as a benefit to the most people covering most scenarios, develop a general rule which they apply to all situations so that people do not have to 'know' anything so much as simply remember the rule and apply it

safer for everyone, but in the details, not always iron clad 

again. I am posing this so i can learn. Not to question the science (i tend to be a science-leaning guy myself).  And i am not asking this as an undoing of the logic behind the rule. Just asking "but why?"

@Darby_Crenshaw

I am going to call you next time I get into an argument with my wife to be my proxy....you can clearly articulate better than me...

Darby_Crenshaw said:

... i have a clarifying question: the rule itself makes no reference to this, but doesn't it assume that the food is leftover, or at least handled and had human contact or a source of re-infection?  ... Is the assumption that we are talking about food which has been out on a tray and served, coughed over, etc?  Or undercooked and maybe harboring bacteria because it was incorrectly cooked?

From a "common sense" standpoint, again it just seems obvious, inescapable, that cooked food "must be" sterile, so your question is completely reasonable -- if there was a problem in "sterile" food, it must have been re-infected.

But no, the Servsafe book I mentioned and quoted from isn't for home cooks, but the food service industry, so what they're dealing with is large quantities of food prepared for many people, and not just food that's out and coughed over by the public.

The basic concept, it seems to me, is that it's almost never 100% deadly or 100% safe.  We can do it wrong and no one will get sick most of the time!  It's just it's not a small risk of catching a cold, but a small risk of making some people really desperately sick.  If you remember the first Jurassic Park movie, Jeff Goldblum's character kept saying, "Nature will find a way."  In this context, it means that our cooked food can NEVER truly be considered 100% sterile.  One easy example is bacterial spores. Clostridium perfringens is just one of many bacteria that produce spores under "adverse conditions" that are likely to kill the bacteria. Bacterial spores are dormant, but normal cooking temperatures will NOT kill them.  Then, once the conditions are no longer adverse (like the food is cooling, the spores can germinate and now you have active, growing bacteria.

Another issue is the amount of time a massive amount of food can take to chill or heat up.  Procedures that really are safe for a family's amount of food might be very UN-safe if the quantity is very much larger.  For example, cooking to a certain temperature to a certain amount of time might reduce the number of bacteria so drastically that the likelihood any that remain might multiply to a dangerous level under normal family conditions might be nearly zero.  BUT a family's leftovers put in the fridge might take an hour or a few to chill all the way to the center, but a large gathering's worth of food put in the same fridge might take SEVERAL DAYS to finally reach a temperature that slows bacterial growth nearly to zero.  So a really tiny amount of bacteria (again, think "nature will find a way") might never reach a dangerous level in a family's leftovers, but when cooking for a large number of people, while using the same procedures that were safe for a family quantity of food, that same tiny amount of bacteria might now have so much time to exponentially multiply that they can reach dangerous proportions.

... at the end of it all, it's my belief that the science is of course solid. But that the rule makers cannot parse every condition and circumstance. So they, as a benefit to the most people covering most scenarios, develop a general rule which they apply to all situations so that people do not have to 'know' anything so much as simply remember the rule and apply it 

safer for everyone, but in the details, not always iron clad...

I completely agree!  But before we suppose that we can ignore the guidelines provided by studying real-world events of foodborne illness, we need to have a reason to suppose our circumstance makes it safer.  Restaurants that are preparing large quantities of pulled pork, for example, are required either to keep the pork above a certain temperature until it's served, or to chill it rapidly, and then reheat it rapidly, and they have commercial equipment and trained staff to do all of that.  If we at home are taking on the task of cooking a restaurant quantity of food for a large number of people, the safest assumption is that the commercial rules DO apply to us if we want to be safe, because we're cooking a restaurant quantity of food!  To suppose that we don't have to follow procedures that have been demonstrated to be safe in this context, we need to have a reason to believe our circumstances somehow make our food safer.  I can't think of such a reason.  If a really large quantity of pulled pork need to be kept above a certain temperature, or chilled below a certain temperature within a certain amount of time, I'm not sure it matters whether it's a restaurant or me at home.  I fought with people at my church, for example, about doing a fund-raiser by selling BBQ.  We don't have a commercial kitchen, and we aren't trained to safely prepare and serve large quantities of food.

I feel crummy about these posts of mine -- I don't want to be a buzz-kill!  Realistically, again, most of the time everything will be fine.  But I've talked to people who had food poisoning who said if they'd had a gun they would have put themselves out of their own misery.  And elderly people and young children sometimes die from it!  The idea that "I've been doing this for years and nobody's ever gotten sick" is simply a demonstration that the risks are relatively low, even when doing it wrong.  All of these guidelines came about by studying real-life cases in the real world of people getting sick, and sorting out what will lower the risk of that happening THIS time.

Cross contamination of cooked food (including handling) and uncooked (raw) or under-cooked foods (that are contaminated) are the main causes of food poisoning. 

Cooking some pork butt to 200F and throwing it into bags (without cross contaminating it when cool), letting it cool in the fridge (with good air flow) and reheating is an unlikely scenario for food poisoning.  

That lovely looking bulk-prepared salad is exponentially more likely in the real world to make you sick.  Cook all your salad to 160F.