When growing up, my mother kept things like jams and jellies, kethup, mustard, etc. in the cupboard, even after opening them. Today I put some of these in the fridge. While I still leave others out. For the longest time I treated mayo (miracle whip) like a sacred object which needed to be treated with great care lest it kill me for mishandling it. One day I heard a food expert on TV say that mayo will last a lot longer so long as you keep food debris from remaining in the mayo. So that is all I usually worry about now. Clean cutlery.
Today, I realize I had left my mayo out overnight. Actually a little longer. About 18 hours. It’s the squeeze bottle, which means no concern about foreign debris in the mayo. I put it back in the fridge, uncertain of it’s fate. I googled and ended up here. So I thought, “maybe I’ll get sick… but I really want to find out if it will go bad that quickly.” So I am on hour 6 since consumption of sandwich with a healthy dose of the mayo… which smelled and tasted fine. Usually food poisoning takes about 12 hours to turn my gut… or at least, that is how long it has taken the 2 occasions I have been poisoned (by restaurants). However, shortly after eating, I remember dealing with an after taste and felt something was wrong both times. So I’m taking the present good feeling as an indication that the mayo is fine. If I do not follow up, it means that I have either died or there is no problem. Hmm… that really doesn’t help anybody, does it? Okay… I’ll report tomorrow.
BTW, my grandmother was known to put KFC (fried chicken) in the cupboard for several days. Difficult to imagine now. But my cousin used to eat it all the time and never got sick.