That sounds about as deranged as Miss Haversham. Knowingly serving spoiled food sounds like asking for a lawsuit.
Or at least the loss of trust and friendship.

I'm pretty relaxed about what I eat myself. If it doesn't stink or have any visible mold on it, I'll usually eat it (as long as it's been in the fridge and not left out). Serve it to my children, wife or company. No way. I don't take risks with other people's bowels. Not cool.

If no one got sick, it wasn't "spoiled" then...? Are we just going by "Sell by" dates here?

It's probably because there was nothing wrong with it.

You get scum on the top when you make stock, and based on the description, that seems to be what happened.

I am astounded that any of her guests actually at the stuff. I wouldn't have!

yeah... kind of a dick move on her part, but great article! very educational.

I hope this was a fictional narrative.

How could she think writing about that was a good idea? I think she just lost a lot of friends- probably not a lot of people are going to come to her next party either....

this is disturbing. who can be okay with themselves after intentionally trying to poison your "friends". what a sicko

I absolutely agree with Kate and jess13. I guess all her guests were very healthy before they ate the gumbo because someone with a defective immune system wouldn't have had such luck. Now, I was taught in Microbiology class that most E.coli strains are harmless. A few strains do cause illness, but for the most part E.coli is used as a marker to find contamination in food because it's easier to spot E.coli than other extremely harmful bacteria that might be present in the samples but in much lower numbers.

I am grossed out. Yuck.

My rule is, if in doubt, throw it out.

I agree with bens.

The article doesn't describe anything that would make one think that there was anything spoiled at all. All she says in regard to her chicken stock is that, "a strange scum appeared. It was gray, bubbly, and slightly fetid."

It's not unusual to get a strange gray scum after boiling chicken parts (or other proteins, for that matter). Most recipes direct people to skim it off the top (and there are tools that do this, too).

Was it the "slightly fetid" smell? Maybe that was the scum she was supposed to remove.

hmm, that's interesting !, maybe this "food blogger" had never made stock from scratch because yes, you do get gross looking scum. as for the terrible taste and smell, it could easily be blamed on her terrible recipe.

this person still sucks though.

Ugh, as a cancer patient with a compromised immune system, something like this could literally kill me.

This article is disgusting and irresponsible. As someone who suffered life-long damage from a food borne illness as a child I am deeply disappointed that it was even published.

Hmm.. well it is kind of a d*ck move, but its not like she was shoving the stuff down their throats. I would have personally been way to embarrassed to serve anything that wasn't up to my standards but I guess it just depends. There have been times when I've failed horribly on the presentation of a dessert for example and just threw the whole thing away while I doubt any of my guests would have even cared. Though bad presentation is a bit different then spoiled food

Yeah, it sounds like the food was perfectly fine to serve and she was just being dumb calling it spoiled, but if you think you have prepared dangerous food and you decide to serve it anyway that is still pretty unacceptable. Basically she just made herself look like an inept cook and a jerky friend/host, though I can't say I am mortally offended by the article. Hopefully the fact that she didn't poison anyone despite her best efforts doesn't make her even more careless and dumb in the future.

I'm with those calling her a bad friend. I worked at a small catering business for a couple years in high school, and our rule of thumb was "if you wouldn't eat it yourself, don't serve it." It's something I still live--and serve--by.

Oh so that's why when I eat that 5 days old chicken breast, nothing ever happens to me. Good to know.

I honestly believe the post referred to was done tongue-in-cheek to make her point. If she really and truly believed it was "poisonous," she would not have fed it to her guests nor taken one bite of it herself.

The scum is, if I'm not mistaken, from blood not drained or rinsed off the meat. Very normal. The "putrid" taste was more than likely from the recipe itself. Though she doesn't give us the recipe, there could be any number of reasons it didn't taste right. In fact, given that others enjoyed it, it was probably really only a matter of taste and not spoilage.

My conclusions.

Reminds me of food critic and writer Ruth Reichl who writes candidly about her childhood growing up with a mother who regularly poisoned her family and guests with rotting food. (Mother had some issues.) It's black humor at is bleakest.

Read about it in her memoirs "Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table."

This is a good idea, or admirable, or funny - why?

Our immune systems can beat off impressive attacks from bad food - but you should never assume your friends are in perfect immunological health.

Imagine if you served rotten food to a friend and then found out later that she was pregnant, but in the early stages before she was supposed to tell anyone. Or perhaps your other friend just finished a round of antibiotics and has no good bacteria in his system to help fight off invaders. Heck, maybe someone is under massive pressure at work (stress can also lower immune response).

The fact is that there are many things that can compromise the immune system that your friend may not have shared with you, or even be aware about themselves.

Has everyone read the article? The use by the author of the word "putrid" is sensationalist.
A foamy scum does not indicate bacterial contamination. It's just some chemistry going on. As we know, real food poisoning can't be seen. Therein lies the danger.

The problem wasn't that she served bad food (thankfully, no one got sick) but that she blurted it out to the entire world.

Ain't gonna eat at her house again...

First off, this story is a farce.

Anyone who has ever boiled meat over a long period of time knows that scum will form on the top. It's called coagulated proteins, and it's something that any good chef knows exists.

Second, she mentions 'stirring a quintuple batch of roux' for over an hour... meaning she knows nothing about cooking gumbo. If this seems like such a great task, she should stick to macaroni and cheese out of the box.

Lastly, she should leave the microbiology to people who actually understand it. "Fully versed in the effects of enteric bacteria" does not equate to "I got a case of the runs once in Mexico...". Want to talk fun? Let's talk about vibrio cholerae, listeria mono. or any of the shigella sp.

The slate article was a total sham, and you all fell for it.

Please, do your research and use your head before you react to articles like this! Articles on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt and not accepted as truth. This article is ridiculous, and I'm embarassed that thekitchn.com would even choose to reference it.

Didn't she taste the food as she was cooking it?

@spicygyoza: Ha ha exactly!

ugh..even if it ended up not being rancid, the fact that she thought it was and still served it is just plain wrong..that should be illegal or something...like someone knowing they have aids and having unprotected sex is illegal!!

She should be ashamed of herself. As someone who's had food poisoning and ended up in the hospital from it, I would never wish it on my worst enemy let alone my friends! Food poisoning for me entailed hours of vomiting and shitting, sometimes at the same time, having to be wheeled into the emergency room because I was too weak to walk, and begging doctors to hurry up with the I.V. despite a deathly fear of needles.

I'm sure that if one of her so called "friends" would have actually gotten food poisoning they would be her friends no more! Seriously, what a bitch!

@ spicygyoza: so you know for sure that this article was satire? Did the author or Slate or Kitchn ever state this? I read the entire thing and saw no such cleverness, only one dumbass exploring microbiology at a very low level. I understand all of your points there, but for me that just adds up to a stupid person who happens to have access to a large audience.

Just because she is an extremely ill-informed cook and wrote about the stupid things she did doesn't mean the article was written in jest.

Spicygyoza, I totally agree with you. It was an obvious shock piece to me from the get go. Because what real friend would serve spoiled food believing that it would make their friends sick? Sorry, that just doesn't happen in real life. It's getting harder and harder to find good journalism on the internet, it seems.

Wow...feeling really good about my decision to go Vegan right about now. Yet some people don't even wash their produce which can carry deadly bacteria.

As a licensed food handler (yes, an actual license), I can tell you that the most potentially hazardous bacteria do not offer signs of spoilage. That said, foodborne illness can be fatal which is not worth taking a chance on, and this "host" is now capitalizing on the high risks she subjected her guests to. Disgusting.

Hey Bx, why are you so angry? I pointed out that veggies can carry deadly bacteria. Maybe you didn't read that part and then decided to curse me out for no reason. Also, the license I have is not "ServSafe," and my training was different--regardless, pointing out the license was not an attempt to brag, but an effort to support the previous comments that foodborne bacteria usually offer no warning signs.

Way to have a disproportionate response. It must feel great to make assumptions about people you don't know and be defensive about comments that were never directed at you in the first place.

If it tastes or smells out of the ordinary I wouldn't serve it. Some people like Kimchi. sauerkraut and the such. I've known some people that have eaten foods I've known where bad.

This is ridiculous. While some disease causing microbes need very few infectious organisms to cause severe disease (hello, Campylobacter) others aren't directly the bacteria themselves, but bacterial toxins, which are secreted into food to break it up and help stop other species from colonizing. Ditto with fungus - they secrete toxins like crazy (hello, penicillin) to stop other bacteria and fungus from colonizing. Shellfish often poison when spoiled not from bacteria, but by causing severe histamine release, which stimulates nausea and vomiting and all sorts of good things. This lady just sounds like a terrible cook who had no idea when to order pizza, but there is absolutely no excuse for half-hearted microbiology. It's far cheaper to throw something out than sicken or kill someone.

Also, she seems completely unfamiliar with how things rot - in nature, rotting produces heat. Hence - botulism. If you want to see a small amount of food poisoning in action, go to a lake with a botulism outbreak in dabbling ducks.