If you are planning on eating Chinese food this weekend, there really is something you should know about it before you start…
Like many other people, Germaine Mobley, 62, enjoys going out to eat. She is a resident of Texas, so it’s pretty much par for the course. Considering that there are so many cultures in this massive state at the border with Mexico, she honestly felt that she could not go wrong when it came time for her to pick dinner. However, she quickly found out after eating fried rice that she had made a terrible mistake.
After she indulged in a dish of fried rice at a restaurant outside of Dallas, Mobley fell ill very quickly, getting “very, very sick” and soon had some “problems breathing.” It was so bad that she thought that she was going to die. Apparently, unbeknownst to her, she had gotten fried rice syndrome. This is very serious, and she should have driven straight to the emergency room.
Mobley tried to brush off the symptoms and just go about her day, but she simply could not. She spent the next couple of days in the intensive care unit and wants other people to know just how dangerous “fried rice syndrome” truly is.
This is because it is a common practice for chefs to allow rice to sit at room temperature so that they do not clump. However, when that occurs, a bacteria can form that would be harmful to anyone who eats it.
This is a potentially hazardous substance called Bacillus cereus, and it comes upon rice when it is left at room temperature for too long. The summer is now fast approaching, and once it gets hot this bacterium will be able to form faster than ever.
“Often we will cook batches of rice, we will leave them out at room temperature to cool,” Celeste Rogers, a culinary expert, explained during his interview with Inside Edition. “It is that period of time that we need to watch. We have a max of six hours to cool that rice.”
Rogers admits that while it is common for chefs to do this, it cannot be allowed to occur for more than six hours.
Mobley has now hired an attorney named Kathryn Knotts to help her fight the restaurant that she believed nearly killed her.
“’Fried rice syndrome’ sounds like a joke, but it’s very serious. I remember going, ‘I’ve never even heard of this.’ She wasn’t sure what could even really be done, she just wanted this to not continue to happen to other people,” Mobley’s attorney, Kathryn Knotts told Dallas News.
Of course, if you have ever went through a bout of food poisoning, then you probably realize full well just what Ms. Mobley went through.
Meanwhile, the Asian King Buffet, where Mobley said she got the food poisoning, denies that their food was the problem.
Did you know fried rice syndrome was a serious problem?