Re:Need emergency advice!

[Steven]

The fact you didn’t get sick, doesn’t mean the meat was fine nor that it was necessarily a prudent decision to eat it.

Note that food poisoning toxins and organisms do not generate detectable odors. If it smells spoiled, it’s definitely had the chance to grow pathogens, but the reverse is not true.

There are no hard and fast rules about when food poisoning occurs because it’s dependent on so many factors. The USDA guidelines are meant to roughly indicate a safety zone within which food that is not unduly contaminated to start with won’t grow sufficient numbers of additional organisms/toxins in the time/temp envelope provided based on scientific study of how fast the bad bugs are able to multiply.

If you start to set aside that safety protection by eating meat that’s been at 60F for 8 hours, then you start to shift your fate more onto the winds of whatever particular array of bacteria happened to land on that particular piece of meat during its particular journey through the processing plant and supermarket and ride to your home, as well as the current strength of your immune system, etc.

You noticeably increase the odds of getting food poisoning. For illustrative example, taking into account 60F for 8 hours isn’t the worst conditions in the world, and the bag offers protection, and the fact that you immediately froze it and later trimmed away the exterior, I’d WAG the odds of getting poisoned might go from something like 1 in 10,000 to something like 1 in 1,000. Now 1 in 1,000 isn’t an extremely high probability, but given the downsides of food poisoning, I think it’s a safer decision to toss the meat and I would not be upset with someone who advised me to do so.