Is Room-Temperature Pizza Safe to Eat?

Leftover pizza can be an excellent snack or even a staple -- if it's treated correctly. Learn why refrigerated leftovers are safer than slices left at room temp, plus what toppings hold up best, in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren foc obamb here day old pizza can be a
welcome staple to college students, starving artists, and anyone who
thought it was a brilliant idea to order that extra
large double meat after coming home from the bar at
two am, only to have sleepiness catch up with them
halfway through the first slice. Cold pizza is a bona

(00:24):
fide breakfast of champions. If refrigerated, leftover pizza will stay
good for four days. But what about room temperature pizza?
Will you get sick if you eat a few slices
of the pepperoni that's sat in a greasy cardboard box
next to your bed for the last eight hours? The
official answer, don't risk it. The U s d A,
that's the United States Department of Agriculture, published some food
safety guidelines for students in which it answered this very question.

(00:48):
According to them, you should throw away any leftover food
that's been sitting out at room temperature for two hours
or more, whether or not it contains meat. The reason
is that harmful bacteria grow the fast just on foods
that are in the danger zone temperatures between forty and
a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit. That's four point four
and sixty degrees celsius. In that range, bacteria double in

(01:11):
number every twenty minutes. Does that mean that every pizza
is contaminated with pathogenic bacteria that will explode a number
if the pie is left out for more than two hours.
Absolutely not. Benjamin Chapman, a food safety specialist at North
Carolina State University, told Life Hacker that leftover pizza hasn't
made enough people sick to count as a public health risk.

(01:31):
Chapman says that's probably because pizza toppings and crust are
generally too dry to be bacteria friendly environments, and that
tomato sauce is too acidic. Not all toppings are created equal,
though Pepperoni is dry cured so it's built to last,
but eating old veggie ingredients or moist chunks of chicken
is probably pressing your luck. To get a sense of

(01:52):
the general risk level of pizza, we turned to a
public health report from Ontario, Canada. According to its review
of global food poisoning data, aces, pizza has been implicated
in a number of food born illness outbreaks worldwide, and
that includes pizza of all types plain cheese, meat, and
veggie in both restaurants and homes. For some perspective, though,

(02:12):
that report cited a few hundred individual cases of food
poisoning over more than a decade of worldwide pizza eating.
In the U. S Alone, we eat an estimated three
billion pizzas every year. So should you finish off those
last two pieces of stuff? Crust Hawaiian from last night's
of Poker game. The odds of getting sick are probably
similar to the odds of drawing a royal flush, So

(02:34):
the real question is are you feeling lucky? Today's episode
was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang.
For more on this and lots of other toothsome topics,
visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.