Sandwiches

You'd probably be guilty of inflicting food poison on anyone that ate them.

The information on this website will be helpful to your education about safe food storage:

http://foodqualitysafety.com/category/food-storage/

Thank you, doing a food course study, i know about the bad bacteria forming. just wanted to confirm it ... thanks for the web link

Not probable at all after 4 hours. In fact highly unlikely.

yeah, I'd probaly be dead by now at least several times a week for the past 50 years.

I'm pretty squeamish about it but in many places I've lived the food is left out much of the day. Lunch might be put in the oven (off, of course) while waiting to be eaten for dinner.

I'm finicky about it, and don't like it, but they aren't getting sick because of it.

I brown-bagged my lunch (sammiches) pretty much my entire career, the last few years our office got a fridge, before that my lunch sat in the bottom drawer of my desk.

Really.

I took all manner of sandwiches to school for 8 years.

It sat in a brown paper bag, along with everyone elses, on a shelf in the coatroom. Didn't matter if it was January or June, none of us ever got sick.

If sammiches are covered with a tea towel, they are especially protected.

If you have a pathogenic bacterium sitting around on your sandwich, that would multiply pretty quickly at room temperature. (On the other hand, in some cases, it can take just one virulent bacterium, and that one could have been sitting in the refrigerator all that time too, not dead, just not multiplying much if at all.) Years ago when people made their own mayonnaise more often, you might be getting some salmonella in with that mayo if the eggs in the mayo were themselves contaminated. Today we worry about pathogenic e. coli on spinach, and, I guess, lettuce. This all seems fairly rare to me. I too have never gotten sick from a sandwich at room temp for a bunch of hours.