Hmmm.… I just noticed that these questions are all about dietary restrictions, as though a normal diet is unrestricted. But in my case, my dietary distinction is that I eat things that “normal” people don’t, not so much a restriction from the normal diet. But oh well, here goes:
I don’t avoid anything for reasons other than taste, cost, health, or convenience. Cooked meat I avoid for both “health” and “taste”; I can eat it, but mostly prefer raw or seared just enough to warm and soften the fat. Highly-processed foods I also consider less-than-tasty most of the time.
Answered above
Answered above
No plans, but if I did, I would.
Not really.
I don’t really avoid any class of foods.
I think they’re either missing out on tasty things (raw meat) or eating crap (over-processed foods).
Restrictions not relevant.
I sometimes like cooked or processed food, but I nearly always regret the sluggishness the day after.
Eating raw meat put me more in touch with my inner animal. ;-) There’s nothing quite like grabbing a piece of it with your bare hands and tearing off chunks with your teeth. Also, based on taste my guess is that early humans wound up cooking when they tried to warm up their cold leftovers, or to improve the taste of rotting meat. (Most meat I see in the supermarket gets too rotten to eat raw a few days before its official expiration date.)
Do you have any pointers to how to prepare/select raw meat so that it is safe to eat? I like my steak and other red meats rare and I’m a fan of sushi but when preparing my own food I tend to err on the side of caution for fear of food poisoning.
Do you have any pointers to how to prepare/select raw meat so that it is safe to eat?
Yes: smell and taste it. If it smells good, eat it. If it doesn’t smell good, or if you find yourself wanting to spit it back out (either before or after you swallow), it’s bad.
My wife and I have both found that ours bodies are quite sensitive to the scent and taste of raw food; it’s easy to tell if something is bad or not. I seem to remember reading somewhere that bacterial counts can be 26 times higher in cooked food than raw, before it’s detectable by taste or smell; evidently evolution hasn’t had enough time to tune our senses for detecting the quality of cooked proteins!
One other interesting phenomenon I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere: for lack of anything else to call it, I call it the throat sense. After you swallow something that passes the smell and taste test, but which isn’t quite good enough, you’ll find an urge to hack it back up from your throat, even though you’ve already swallowed it.
It’s not like throwing up, exactly; it’s as if the food just doesn’t go all the way down, and you can just spit it right back out again. I think that babies and circus regurgitators make use of the same machinery. But I wasn’t aware that I had such a thing, personally, until the first time I swallowed a bad egg that I didn’t smell first. (Nowadays, I smell every egg after opening, and I don’t refrigerate them. Refrigeration makes them harder to smell, and kept out of the sun, they keep for 2-3 weeks.)
As far as I know, I’ve never gotten sick from eating a raw protein gone bad, because they don’t stay down long enough to reach my stomach. (I did get sick the first time I ate a bad avocado, but I didn’t realize yet that it wasn’t supposed to taste like that!)
So, as long as you aren’t disguising the taste and smell of your food, I wouldn’t worry too much about safety. When it comes to raw, if it tastes good, it is good. You can at least trust evolution to get this bit correct. ;-)
I seem to remember reading somewhere that bacterial counts can be 26 times higher in cooked food than raw, before it’s detectable by taste or smell; evidently evolution hasn’t had enough time to tune our senses for detecting the quality of cooked proteins!
Sounds suspicious to me. OK, so maybe if you cook your meat in spices, you can’t smell the bugs as easily. But cooking kills bugs, most spices kill bugs, salt stops bugs growing and you don’t keep cooked meat for long enough for the surviving, or new bacteria to multiply to dangerous levels. If you had a credible reference for the claim I wouldn’t be as suspicious.
you don’t keep cooked meat for long enough for the surviving, or new bacteria to multiply to dangerous levels
Then why, when I was growing up, did they have all those “you’ll be sorry” commercials about not leaving your cooked food out on the counter for more than a couple hours?
OK, so maybe if you cook your meat in spices, you can’t smell the bugs as easily.
It’s got nothing to do with spices. Compare the smell of room temperature raw meat and cooked meat, left out for a couple hours: the cooked meat emits very little scent, period, while the raw meat still smells good. Just the fact that there’s more scent means you can detect a finer-grained change in the scent… and the same thing goes for the flavor.
So as long as the bacteria in question are changing the scent, you’re going to be able to detect it more easily in the raw.
It’s pretty reasonable to assume that somewhere in our evolutionary ancestry, it was advantageous to be able to tell whether some borderline raw meat was safe for eating or not. Whereas, the opportunity for selection on detecting the safety of borderline cooked flesh has been somewhat more limited in scope, as well as being a more difficult task just due to the destruction of some of the meat’s scent-producing capacity.
If you had a credible reference for the claim I wouldn’t be as suspicious.
I’m not clear on what you mean by “suspicious”. I’m certainly not trying to persuade anyone to follow my dietary choices, here. I was just answering somebody else’s question.
Hmmm.… I just noticed that these questions are all about dietary restrictions, as though a normal diet is unrestricted. But in my case, my dietary distinction is that I eat things that “normal” people don’t, not so much a restriction from the normal diet. But oh well, here goes:
I don’t avoid anything for reasons other than taste, cost, health, or convenience. Cooked meat I avoid for both “health” and “taste”; I can eat it, but mostly prefer raw or seared just enough to warm and soften the fat. Highly-processed foods I also consider less-than-tasty most of the time.
Answered above
Answered above
No plans, but if I did, I would.
Not really.
I don’t really avoid any class of foods.
I think they’re either missing out on tasty things (raw meat) or eating crap (over-processed foods).
Restrictions not relevant.
I sometimes like cooked or processed food, but I nearly always regret the sluggishness the day after.
Eating raw meat put me more in touch with my inner animal. ;-) There’s nothing quite like grabbing a piece of it with your bare hands and tearing off chunks with your teeth. Also, based on taste my guess is that early humans wound up cooking when they tried to warm up their cold leftovers, or to improve the taste of rotting meat. (Most meat I see in the supermarket gets too rotten to eat raw a few days before its official expiration date.)
Do you have any pointers to how to prepare/select raw meat so that it is safe to eat? I like my steak and other red meats rare and I’m a fan of sushi but when preparing my own food I tend to err on the side of caution for fear of food poisoning.
Yes: smell and taste it. If it smells good, eat it. If it doesn’t smell good, or if you find yourself wanting to spit it back out (either before or after you swallow), it’s bad.
My wife and I have both found that ours bodies are quite sensitive to the scent and taste of raw food; it’s easy to tell if something is bad or not. I seem to remember reading somewhere that bacterial counts can be 26 times higher in cooked food than raw, before it’s detectable by taste or smell; evidently evolution hasn’t had enough time to tune our senses for detecting the quality of cooked proteins!
One other interesting phenomenon I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere: for lack of anything else to call it, I call it the throat sense. After you swallow something that passes the smell and taste test, but which isn’t quite good enough, you’ll find an urge to hack it back up from your throat, even though you’ve already swallowed it.
It’s not like throwing up, exactly; it’s as if the food just doesn’t go all the way down, and you can just spit it right back out again. I think that babies and circus regurgitators make use of the same machinery. But I wasn’t aware that I had such a thing, personally, until the first time I swallowed a bad egg that I didn’t smell first. (Nowadays, I smell every egg after opening, and I don’t refrigerate them. Refrigeration makes them harder to smell, and kept out of the sun, they keep for 2-3 weeks.)
As far as I know, I’ve never gotten sick from eating a raw protein gone bad, because they don’t stay down long enough to reach my stomach. (I did get sick the first time I ate a bad avocado, but I didn’t realize yet that it wasn’t supposed to taste like that!)
So, as long as you aren’t disguising the taste and smell of your food, I wouldn’t worry too much about safety. When it comes to raw, if it tastes good, it is good. You can at least trust evolution to get this bit correct. ;-)
You can’t smell liver flukes.
Sounds suspicious to me. OK, so maybe if you cook your meat in spices, you can’t smell the bugs as easily. But cooking kills bugs, most spices kill bugs, salt stops bugs growing and you don’t keep cooked meat for long enough for the surviving, or new bacteria to multiply to dangerous levels. If you had a credible reference for the claim I wouldn’t be as suspicious.
Then why, when I was growing up, did they have all those “you’ll be sorry” commercials about not leaving your cooked food out on the counter for more than a couple hours?
It’s got nothing to do with spices. Compare the smell of room temperature raw meat and cooked meat, left out for a couple hours: the cooked meat emits very little scent, period, while the raw meat still smells good. Just the fact that there’s more scent means you can detect a finer-grained change in the scent… and the same thing goes for the flavor.
So as long as the bacteria in question are changing the scent, you’re going to be able to detect it more easily in the raw.
It’s pretty reasonable to assume that somewhere in our evolutionary ancestry, it was advantageous to be able to tell whether some borderline raw meat was safe for eating or not. Whereas, the opportunity for selection on detecting the safety of borderline cooked flesh has been somewhat more limited in scope, as well as being a more difficult task just due to the destruction of some of the meat’s scent-producing capacity.
I’m not clear on what you mean by “suspicious”. I’m certainly not trying to persuade anyone to follow my dietary choices, here. I was just answering somebody else’s question.