Per reports, the 62-year-old woman, Mobley, loves eating at restaurants and she always has her pick when it comes to delicious food. After indulging in a dish of fried rice at a restaurant, she quickly fell ill and found herself getting very, very sick on her drive home and then started having problems breathing. She thought she was going to die. If she had known that she had just gotten this ‘rare syndrome’, she would have driven straight to the emergency room.
Mobley tried to brush off the symptoms and go on with her day. But she simply could not. She spent the next days in the intensive care unit and now wants other people to know the truth about “fried rice syndrome.” It is not uncommon for chefs to allow rice to sit at room temperature to prevent clumping. But when it occurs, a bacteria can form that can be harmful to anyone who eats it.
This potentially hazardous bacteria is called Bacillus cereus. And it forms when rice if left at room temperature for too long. And when the summer is as hot as it has been in the United States, the bacteria can form faster than ever before. “Often we will cook batches of rice, we will leave them out at room temperature to cool,” Rogers, a culinary expert, explained during an 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 it is common for chefs to do this, but that it cannot be allowed to occur for more than six hours. “’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, Knots, reportedly said. “To cool it quickly, we are going to get it on a flat surface so that it has more surface area to cool off,” Rogers said. We are republishing this story to raise awareness about the “fried rice syndrome.”
