food poisoning

Oy, vey. 36 hours later, I'm now recovered from a case of food poisoning. It's been years and years since that's happened to me... A certain Chinese take-out place is gonna get a call to 311 (the city's information line) on their behalf...

I very likely got hit by the most common cause of food poisoning, staphlococcus aureus. The staph bacteria typically comes from food preparers with some sort of mild skin infection who work with room-temperature food. In this case, I'm guessing that the chicken in my General Tso's sat out at room temperature for too long while being prepared. Interestingly, it's not the bacteria itself that causes the really annoying symptoms, it's a toxin produced by the bacteria as it replicates. Although you can kill the bacteria with heat (over 140 degrees), or prevent their replication with cold (under 40 degrees), you can't get rid of the toxin after it's been produced. So that chicken probably was correctly refrigerated after preparation, then deep fried to order, but it didn't matter because the damage was already done... Interesting, but I'm not inclined to do further 1st-person research on this one...