If the social media rumors are true, your leftover rice may be trying to kill you. Experts on the matter, however, tell a somewhat different story. It’s true that cooked rice left at room temperature too long can become a happy home to intruders, notably Bacillus cereus, a common type of bacteria that lives in soil and, therefore, in much of the food we eat.
“B. cereus loves to grow in the warm and moist environment provided by cooked rice,” said Si Ming Man, a professor in the division of immunology and infectious diseases at the Australian National University. What has made B.
cereus more TikTok-famous than other food-borne bugs is that its spores are hardy enough to survive the cooking process, and then — when food isn’t kept cool in the refrigerator — can grow and produce toxins that even vigorous reheating won’t destroy, Man said. And yes, while the illness is sometimes referred to as “reheated rice syndrome,” since leftover rice is a common pathway, other foods (steak, pasta salad, milkshakes) have prompted B. cereus outbreaks.
(The case that recently went viral on TikTok was caused by spaghetti left at room temperature for five days in 2008 — definitely don’t do that.) So what about the countless batches of leftovers you’ve zapped (or even eaten cold) over the years, without a trip to the hospital? Martin Wiedmann, a food safety professor at Cornell University, said the reason we hear relatively little about those cases was because “the diseas.
