Husband refuses to eat chicken left in hot car for hours, sparking food safety debate

One man risked dinner – and domestic peace – when he refused to eat sun-warmed poultry that his wife was planning to prepare, according to a viral social media post.

Writing on Reddit’s 24-million-member “Am I the A–hole” forum on July 26, the man said the spat began after his wife decided to try a new recipe for dinner.

“It’s a one-pot chicken thing with orzo,” he wrote. “She ordered the groceries online this morning and then went to collect them around 11 a.m. She got back home around midday and unloaded everything from the car.”

But around 5:30 p.m., his wife suddenly asked where the chicken went – and found that it had been sitting in the trunk of their car all afternoon.

“The chicken wasn’t a frozen chicken,” the man clarified. “The chicken was a whole, fresh, raw chicken, in a sealed bag.”

“Although it wasn’t a particularly warm day, we still had a high of [60 degrees Fahrenheit] and our car was sitting out in the sunshine all afternoon.”

The wife said that the chicken was still “cool to the touch,” which the man hesitantly agreed with – it wasn’t warm, he said, but he wouldn’t call it “overly cold.”

“It’s safe to say it was somewhere between fridge temperature and room temperature,” he wrote.

The Redditor quickly told his wife he wasn’t interested in eating the chicken.

“She tells me we’re [still] going to eat the chicken,” he recalled. “I go back to the couch and start Googling how long you can leave a chicken in the car.”

Despite going back and forth, the wife continued preparing the chicken – until the husband had an idea.

“I pitch the idea that she can have the chicken and I can just make something simple for my dinner,” he said. “She’s not thrilled because she wanted to make this meal for me.”

The man said he told her that he was “not going to eat it” and felt as if he was “being made to eat a chicken against my will.”

She then got into the car and left “in search of another chicken from the store.” 

But the man admitted that he felt “like a bit of an a–hole about it.”

“I also feel like we may have wasted a perfectly good chicken,” he said. 

But most of the comments posted on the thread — which attracted over 2,000 responses — affirmed his fears.

“You know what’s worse than throwing out a chicken? Food poisoning,” the top comment read. “I would not have eaten that chicken either.”

“I have a realllllllyyy loose attitude toward food safety, and I wouldn’t eat that chicken,” another person chimed in.

One user who attested to working in restaurants for two decades, however, had a different take.

“I would’ve eaten it,” the commenter wrote in part. “Still cool to the touch and getting cooked fully? It’s fine.”  

Another wrote, “You’re about to cook it. It’s not had time to rot, especially if it’s cool to the touch. Everyone in these comments is overreacting.”

Bryan Quoc Le, Ph.D., a food scientist with Mendocino Food Consulting in California, told Fox News Digital the risk in the Reddit situation is “very high.”

“It has been several hours-plus inside a car, which will be at a much higher temperature than the surrounding air,” he said. 

“Bacteria grow very fast every 10 degrees higher than refrigeration temperature, exponentially so every 20 minutes. They are right that it is not safe to eat.”

Le added that, hypothetically, one could try cooking the chicken, which would destroy pathogenic bacteria. But that doesn’t solve the issue, he said.

“It’s the toxins they leave behind that can be a problem, which tend to be heat-resistant,” the expert said.

“It’s not worth the risk. A single chicken is not that expensive compared to the food poisoning you could experience.”