The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service reissued its annual Memorial Day grilling guidance this week — two-hour outdoor cooking limit, one hour above 90°F, the four-step "clean, separate, cook, chill" routine. [1] The reminder is calibrated for a holiday that does not exist in half the country this year. The Weather Prediction Center confirms Sunday a cold-and-wet rain corridor running from Southeast Texas through Upstate New York; the Mid-Atlantic is in the 50s and 60s; NWS Caribou expects rain into Memorial Day itself. [2][3] In Cape May and Boston this afternoon, the temperature-driven spoilage clock is not the operational risk. The grill is under a cover.

The split is the news. AccuWeather's Memorial Day forecast has the West dry and warm enough that FSIS's two-hour rule is the live constraint — Phoenix at 95°F, Denver and the Front Range in the 80s, Northern and Central California pleasant for the holiday. [2] In those backyards the guidance applies as written: hot food at 140°F until served, cold at 40°F or below, no raw-meat platter doubling as cooked-meat platter, an instant-read thermometer to 160°F for ground beef and 165°F for poultry. [1] The half of the country grilling is the half the rule is for. The half eating chili indoors does not need the timer.

The annual service article writes itself as one rule for the whole country. The Sunday forecast says it is two — one for the West where FSIS guidance is operational, one for the East where the day's actual health risk is hypothermia for the family that drove to the shore for the long weekend and walked into 58°F and steady rain. The plain-English version: read the food-safety page only if you can see the sun.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago