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A few weeks ago Dear Abby ran a letter about a boy who had a severe allergic reaction after eating pancakes made from moldy mix.

We have lots of old boxes of muffin mix and pancake mix. Those boxes have been sitting in the cupboard since the kids moved out — oh, about six years now.

I haven’t baked much since that time weevils infested the Bisquick. (Not that I did much baking before, either.) The Bisquick lived in a clear plastic container, so I didn’t even have to open the box to see weevils lived there too. Ugh. Turns my stomach remembering how they crawled around inside that container. It looked like an ant farm, but less appetizing. I couldn’t stand to have that container back in the house even after the weevils were gone and the container scrubbed.

But… Muffins. I had to have some muffins after reading about those pancakes.

The muffins tasted pretty good. No weevils, no mold.

I’ve been working on the rest of the mix boxes since then. Haven’t found any toxic mold yet, but I’ll keep looking.

At my local library, people who check out books get a printed receipt listing the books. Sometimes they return the books with the receipt tucked inside.

It’s kind of fun to see what books other people check out. How’s this combination?

• The writer’s market
• Generation me: why today’s young
• Evidence of harm: mercury in vac
• Objection!: how high-priced defe
• The forest for the trees: an edi

Too bad there isn’t room on the receipt for the whole title.

Why do the young do what?

Mercury in vacation spots? Mercury in vacuum tubes?

High-priced defense lawyers, probably, but the book could be about defecators. I’d object to that one.

The last one is easy: that’s the book I checked out, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers.

Ever made huge pots of beans or soup or whatever and wondered whether to let the pot sit out before sticking it into the refrigerator? Here’s a useful piece of advice from the Sacramento Bee’s food section:

Basically, you want to get the food below 40 degrees as soon as possible. There are a few ways to do that. You can spread the food out in a wide, shallow pan, to expose as much of it to air, cooling faster, or you can put a sealed double plastic bag filled with ice into the center, which also helps get rid of some of the fat (it sticks to the bag when you pull it out). Or, if you’ve got a free sink, fill it with ice water and float the pot in the middle. Then refrigerate it once it’s cool.

Basically, I want to laugh. Dirty up more dishes? Waste plastic bags? Fill the sink with ice water?

Who on earth do they really think is ever going to follow this advice? It’s a lot easier to just heat up leftovers enough to fry the bacteria before eating it, and the CDC says that 160 degees F works.

The way that food is handled after it is contaminated can also make a difference in whether or not an outbreak occurs. Many bacterial microbes need to multiply to a larger number before enough are present in food to cause disease. Given warm moist conditions and an ample supply of nutrients, one bacterium that reproduces by dividing itself every half hour can produce 17 million progeny in 12 hours. As a result, lightly contaminated food left out overnight can be highly infectious by the next day. If the food were refrigerated promptly, the bacteria would not multiply at all. In general, refrigeration or freezing prevents virtually all bacteria from growing but generally preserves them in a state of suspended animation. This general rule has a few surprising exceptions. Two foodborne bacteria, Listeria monocytogenes and Yersinia enterocolitica can actually grow at refrigerator temperatures. High salt, high sugar or high acid levels keep bacteria from growing, which is why salted meats, jam, and pickled vegetables are traditional preserved foods.
     Microbes are killed by heat. If food is heated to an internal temperature above 160°F, or 78°C, for even a few seconds this sufficient to kill parasites, viruses or bacteria, except for the Clostridium bacteria, which produce a heat-resistant form called a spore. Clostridium spores are killed only at temperatures above boiling. This is why canned foods must be cooked to a high temperature under pressure as part of the canning process.
     The toxins produced by bacteria vary in their sensitivity to heat. The staphylococcal toxin which causes vomiting is not inactivated even if it is boiled. Fortunately, the potent toxin that causes botulism is completely inactivated by boiling.

Posted in Writing because someone’s bound to get a story idea about food poisoning.

One day my little friend Sydney caught a bird and left its bleeding carcass at the back steps. (She loves me, oh yes she does.) It lay there for several hours before I found it, and by that time the blood had soaked into the concrete.

I washed the spot with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner, and still the bloodstain remains. You can see how the cleaner killed the lichen and bleached the area immediately around the stain.

(The lichen is a welcome guest, by the way, and grows on the vertical sides of the steps and in broad patches on the patio itself. It will eventually eat through the concrete, but I enjoy watching it change through the seasons. The lichen gets a little furrier during the winter, flakier in the summer.)

Why on earth did I file this under Writing? Research, of course. You never know when you might need to know what a pool of blood — and that bird had an amazing amount of blood for a critter so small — does to concrete.