I think I have lots of gaps to report, but I’m having lots of trouble trying to write a coherent comment about them… so I’m going to just report this trouble as a gap, for now.
Oh, and I also have lots of trouble even noticing these gaps. I have a habit of avoiding doing things that I haven’t already established as “safe”. Unfortunately, this often results in gaps continuing to be not detected or corrected.
Anyway, the first gap that comes to mind is… I don’t dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat, because I’m afraid that I lack the knowledge necessary to avoid giving myself food poisoning. Maybe if I tried, I would be able to do it with little or no problem, but I don’t dare to try.
I don’t dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat, because I’m afraid that I lack the knowledge necessary to avoid giving myself food poisoning.
Short tip: If the raw meat smells or tastes bad, don’t eat it.
Longer tip: the reason there are so many raw meat warnings are not because you will get sick from eating or handling raw meat. If you don’t have a clogged nose, there is almost no way for you to get sick from raw meat, because you will smell or taste any problems before you swallow it.
What’s NOT safe is mxing raw and cooked foods. The safety warnings are because the same bacteria that will make raw foods smell bad, will not produce the same smell warnings in the cooked food. This means that you can have highly-contaminated cooked food that gives off no warning whatsoever, and get terribly sick from it.
I have eaten raw meat—including raw chicken and raw eggs—for many years, and had fewer incidences of stomach upset with them than I have had with cooked foods. The worst reaction I ever had to a raw food was when I ate a bad egg raw, that was too cold for me to properly taste or smell. (I vomited it up a few minutes later, when some less-impaired part of my body detected the problem.)
Since then, I prefer to keep fresh eggs unrefrigerated, and find they keep for around two weeks at room temperature.
So, bear in mind that the mere presence of harmful organisms in food doesn’t mean they’ll make you sick, in and of themselves. Cooking and sterilization are evolutionarily modern inventions, and we’ve only known about the existence of germs for the last 100 years or so.
We can therefore trust that our genes will encode reflexive and intuitive responses to food that is actually harmful, provided that it was found in the ancestral environment. This means that we can easily tell with our senses when a raw and unprocessed food is unsafe to eat. It’s the prepared stuff you need to be careful with!
In other words, raw meat is plenty safe to handle and eat. Just keep it away from your cooked food, as the cooked food not only has its residual defenses destroyed (no intact cell walls, etc.) but also will not show any signs that it has been contaminated until well after you eat it.
Food poisoning, btw, is less bad the earlier your body detects the problem. If you somehow manage to eat something raw that’s bad, you may throw it up before it even reaches your stomach, or within the first few minutes of getting it there. But cooked food poisoning usually doesn’t get detected until the food is at least into the small intestine, and it’s much worse down there.
(Really, if you’re worried about cooking raw meat, you’re much better off just eating the raw meat as-is!)
I used to be a semi-frequent raw egg consumer. I figured that risks should be rather low. However, once I did get food poisoning, and it was such an excessively bad experience that I decided that I’m avoiding even small risks from raw food consumption.
However, once I did get food poisoning, and it was such an excessively bad experience that I decided that I’m avoiding even small risks from raw food consumption.
Just out of curiosity, what were the specific circumstances? Were the eggs refigerated? Mixed with other items? Or eaten warm and plain with nothing else?
I ate two raw eggs along with maybe a cup of whipping cream and two-three pieces of vegetable, for breakfast. I’m fairly confident it was the eggs. First symptoms occurred only about 5 hours later, after I’d eaten a moderate amount of other food whose composition I can’t recall. Eggs were at most 5 days old, and spent that time refrigerated. They may have spent at most one day left out of refrigerator. They were eaten cold.
Since coming out of the store, or the chicken? ;-)
As a comparison point, I usually store eggs at room temperature with a high probability of still being good 2 weeks after getting them from the farmer. (Don’t know how old they are before that point, or how they’re stored, though they usually seem pretty cold when I get them.)
I never eat them raw except at room temperature, and never without smelling them before adding them to something else (like a smoothie or other recipe).
They were eaten cold.
In my experience, you’re lucky to notice a problem with a cold egg even if you intentionally smell it, and you don’t mention having smelled it.
First symptoms only occurred only about 5 hours later,
I am a bit surprised by this. The one time I had a nasty reaction to a cold egg it only took 5 minutes. On the other hand, it wasn’t mixed with anything else at all, so maybe that’s a factor.
Since coming out of the store, or the chicken? ;-)
Store.
The one time I had a nasty reaction to a cold egg it only took 5 minutes.
Wiki says: “The delay between consumption of a contaminated food and appearance of the first symptoms of illness is called the incubation period. This ranges from hours to days depending on the agent, and on how much was consumed. If symptoms occur within 1–6 hours after eating the food, it suggests that it is caused by a bacterial toxin or a chemical rather than live bacteria.”
Generally, it is mainly chicken that one needs to be careful about, because it is sometimes contaminated with unhealthy bacteria, even when bought “fresh”. A general procedure with all meat, and especially chicken, is to wash any surface that raw chicken comes in contact with when you are done preparing it and have started to cook it, then wash any utensils you used that touched the chicken, and wash you hands. To be extra cautious, you can do that for any raw meat. Raw meat should be refrigerated soon after purchase and now allowed to stand uncooked at room temperature for more than the time it takes to prepare it.
Thanks for explaining that! But, um… I still have more questions… What is the procedure for washing the surfaces, the utensils, and my hands? How do I know when the meat is cooked enough to not qualify as raw? And for stir-frying raw meat, do I need to pause the stir-frying process to wash the stir-frying utensils, so that I don’t contaminate the cooked food with any raw juices that happen to still be on the utensils?
Salmonella bacteria is killed instantly at 165°F. Cooking small chopped or sliced pieces of meat is hard to do wrong because the surface area to volume ratio is high enough that they will be sterilized even before they start to appear cooked. Make your slices less than 1⁄2 inch thick and cook them until they start to turn golden brown. As long as the business ends of your utensils are in contact with the food as it cooks they will be sterilized along with it.
Assuming that you already know how to wash things in general, you don’t need to do it any differently. Normal washing is good enough because bacteria can’t grow without a source of nutrients and moisture, and you need to ingest a fairly substantial amount of bacteria in order to get sick.
We should add that soapy water does not kill the bacteria, but rather makes it impossible for them to adhere to anything, so they get washed down the drain.
Washing bacteria down the drain is certainly the primary purpose for using soap, by far, but surfactants like soap also kill a few bacteria by lysis (disruption of the cell membrane, causing the cells to rapidly swell with water and burst). In practice, this is so minor it’s not worth paying attention to: bacteria have a surrounding cell wall made of a sugar-protein polymer that resists surfactants (among other things), dramatically slowing down the process to the point that it’s not practical to make use of it.
(Some bacteria are more vulnerable to surfactant lysis than others. Gram-negative bacteria have a much thinner cell wall, which is itself surrounded by a second, more exposed membrane. But gram-positive bacteria have a thick wall with nothing particularly vulnerable on the outside, and even with gram-negative bacteria the scope of the effect is minor.)
In practice, the big benefit of soap is (#1) washing away oils, especially skin oils, and (#2) dissolving the biofilms produced by the bacteria to anchor themselves to each other and to biological surfaces (like skin and wooden cutting boards). Killing the bacteria directly with soap is a distant third priority.
For handwashing, hot water is in a similar boat: even the hottest water your hands can stand is merely enough to speed up surfactant action, not to kill bacteria directly. For cleaning inanimate surfaces, sufficiently hot water is quite effective at killing bacteria, but most people’s hot water only goes up to 135°F or thereabouts, which is not scaldingly hot enough to do the job instantly.
For directly killing bacteria via non-heat means, alcohol and bleach are both far more effective than soap. Alcohol very rapidly strips off the cell wall and triggers immediate lysis, while bleach acts both as a saponifier (it turns fatty acids into soap) and a strong oxidizer (directly attacking the chemical structure of the cell wall and membrane, ripping it apart like a rapid-action biological parallel to rusting iron).
Fun trivia: your hand feels slippery or “bleachy” after handling bleach (or any reasonably strong base) because the outermost layer of your skin has been converted into soap.
I formulated this hypothesis on my own, but I have not seen evidence to back this up. I think a misunderstanding of this process has lead to the profusion of anti-bacterial soaps, which may be breeding hard-to-kill bacteria.
Those who are concerned may be interested to know that Ivory Liquid Hand Soap (and, in all the stores I’ve visited lately, no other) is a brand of liquid soap which contains no antibacterial ingredients.
Furthermore, it at least used to have a slogan like “so gentle you can even use it on your face” — and it does not have the warning “keep out of eyes” that, as far as I know, all antibacterial soaps have — and I do in fact use it as a face and body wash.
This is true, but it probably helps to state explicitly that a) the even for small pieces of meat the inside might not be at 165 F even if the outside is (so make sure that it is hot for a fair bit of time) b) This is more of an issue for larger pieces of meat (luminosity’s comment below is relevant).
There’s a related issue: if the meat is raw and frozen, life will be much easier if you defrost it before cooking it. Weird things can happen if you try to directly cook large bits of frozen meat. Generally it won’t result in health problems, but it does make stuff more likely to be burned in part or simply not taste good.
However, I find it much easier to slice meat for stir-frying which is still partially frozen. (This also speeds the thawing process.) Probably if you use a cleaver or other heavy, extremely sharp type of instrument, no prior thawing would be necessary; but I don’t trust myself with those.
For cooking larger pieces of meat than saturn addresses, the way I learnt what was and wasn’t needed was simply cooking meat, waiting until the outside looked cooked, then taking a piece out and cutting it in half. You’ll be able to see if it’s still bloody inside, or if it’s chicken you’ll be able to see if it’s turned white yet. Personally I prefer meat entirely cooked, but depending on your taste pinkish in the middle should be fine.
Doing this over time has given me a good feel for how long to cook meat for my preferences, though even now I still often slice pieces open to be sure.
This is good for getting a feel for how long to cook meat, but it also dries the meat out to some degree as you cook it. This is especially relevant for cooking steak, IMHO. For things like hamburgers, a simple meat thermometer will do the trick (brown both sides and cook until the inside is 165*F). For steak, it’s more difficult if you prefer your meat cooked less than medium-well.
I’m not much of a stir-fryer, but my general method for meat cooking is to have separate utensils for “before cooking” and “during-to-after”. So if I put the meat in the pan with a fork, that fork goes to the sink. But the wooden spoon that is cooked with the meat doesn’t get washed until I’m done eating, and is usually used as my serving spoon, too. If you are really concerned for safety, you could always use one cooking spoon until the surface of the meat is obviously brown, then switch to a fresh spoon.
If dealing with a low-fat meat (like moose), burger is much easier to cook than other meat, and is still healthy. It is hard to overcook, and easy to tell what’s safe, because all the little chunks of meat go from red to dark brown. High fat burger (like cow) is still tasty and easy to cook, but not terribly healthy.
One trick that I will immediately adopt is using an infrared thermometer to check for the 165F that saturn mentioned. Thanks for the info!
This is one of the things I struggled with a bit when first learning to cook for myself as well. It may help to keep in mind that some meats are safer than others. My heuristic goes roughly: chicken < pork < beef/lamb < fish, in increasing order of safety. If I’m handling raw chicken, I’ll wash my hands and utensils thoroughly in warm soapy water before doing anything else. If I’m handling fish, I’ll usually just give my hands a quick rinse. The same ordering also applies roughly to doneness; it’s a much bigger problem to have undercooked chicken than beef, for example.
A good starting place for meats is braised dishes like stews and pot roasts, because the typically long cooking time makes it hard to accidentally undercook something while still producing tasty results (as opposed to e.g. a steak grilled until it turns into shoe leather).
Also it should be noted that ground meats are not as safe as meat that is whole. A steak doesn’t have to be cooked to the same level of doneness as a hamburger.
One bit of food safety is to use a designated cutting board ONLY for chopping raw meat. One board for fruits and vegetables (and if they’re wooden I find it’s helpful to use a separate one for onions) and one for raw meat. You’ll want to buy two that look dissimilar so you can’t confuse the two.
When you’re cooking, be sure to wash the knife between chopping up your raw meat and chopping up anything that might not be cooked to the same temperature. (Practically, this means to wash the knife or switch knives after the meat, no matter what.)
If you’re roasting meat, you can get a thermometer that goes into the meat so you can find out whether the interior has gone up to a safe temperature. Chart of temperatures
Stewing meat (simmering it for an extended period until it falls apart) is another way to be sure it’s safe.
Pork and chicken should be cooked all the way through. If you’re not sure whether it’s done, you can cut it open and have a look.
With beef and lamb, you only need to ensure that the outer surface is cooked—whether you want it cooked all the way through is just a matter of personal taste. However, if it’s minced, you should cook it all the way (it has formerly-outer-surfaces in the middle).
If you’re not sure whether it’s done, you can cut it open and have a look.
You should probably specify how one would actually visually distinguish done from not done. Or maybe not, it sounds like PeerInfinity already understands the basics of cooking. I don’t, however. :)
Uncooked meat is semitransparent with a kind of gelatin-like luster. As it cooks, it becomes more opaque and shifts color.
The exact color transitions depend on the kind of meat and whether it’s had a chance to oxidize before you start cooking it. Chicken, which as mentioned you need to worry about the most, starts out a pale yellow-pink and cooks to a tannish color. Pork starts out light pink and cooks to a kind of light pinkish-gray; if it goes completely gray you’ve overcooked it. Beef and lamb start dark red, or dark pink if they’ve been exposed to the air, and cook to a deep red-brown.
All meat develops a brown crust over time if it’s being grilled or pan-fried, but it’s the interior color that matters. Another thing to look at is the kind of juice it’s dripping; uncooked meat bleeds slightly, a thin reddish fluid, while well-cooked meat oozes gravy-like, clear or brownish liquids. It’s safe before it stops bleeding, though.
Pish posh. I have admittedly horrendous sanitary procedures, and though I handle and cook raw meat at least 4 times a week I’ve never once gotten sick.
Pork actually should have a little bit of rose inside; I only cook my chicken until this is just gone (or even faintly visible). I routinely eat steak rare as can be, and tuna essentially raw.
As long as it is sufficiently fresh I don’t think there is any particular food poisoning danger from raw meat. There is some risk from eating it completely raw, but even that is far less likely to end in food poisoning than not, and ISTM effectively impossible to do on accident without noticing.
Poultry and pork are not safe to eat raw, even store bought in Western countries, same for minced meat. They need to be properly cooked, which means white all the way through. You can cook it hot and it’ll be dry or at a lower temperature and still tender and juicy though.
Generally if it has hooves or swims and was properly handled or washed beforehand this is pretty accurate.
Given the conditions in factory farms, some might say especially store-bought in Western countries! (Or at least the US, I don’t know about elsewhere.)
Poultry and pork are not safe to eat raw, even store bought in Western countries,
Define “safe”. I’ve eaten plenty of store-bought poultry raw, never been sick from it. (Unless you count going, “ugh, that’s not as fresh as I thought it was,” and spitting it up a minute or two later.)
Define “spitting it up”—if you mean chewing on a piece of raw chicken for 60-120 seconds, and spitting it out if it doesn’t taste right, that’s just a little odd; if you mean swallowing the chicken, then vomiting it back up, that crosses my personal line into “sick from it.”
Define “spitting it up”—if you mean chewing on a piece of raw chicken for 60-120 seconds, and spitting it out if it doesn’t taste right, that’s just a little odd
That would be spitting out, not up. In any case, what I mean is that I’m eating it for a minute or two before I suddenly have the distinct feeling that something is wrong with what I’m eating, and gently cough it back up.
if you mean swallowing the chicken, then vomiting it back up, that crosses my personal line into “sick from it.”
There’s a huge difference between vomiting and spitting something up. The latter feels entirely different; for one thing. It feels almost like you never swallowed it at all, it just comes back up like “bzzt… rejected by quality control”.
To put it another way, it feels exactly like wanting to spit something out that tastes really bad… except that it just pops back out of your throat instead of merely out of your mouth. There is no unpleasantness to the expulsion; instead it feels like the unpleasantness is contained in the food itself.
I have heard parents use the phrase “spitting up” to describe what happens with babies rejecting a food, and it seems an apt description of the response here.
Believe me, if spitting up was anything like vomiting, it would’ve put me off of raw foods mighty quickly. The very distinct sensation was actually very convincing that our bodies do indeed have layered defenses against ancestrally relevant forms of food contamination, and specifically that there’s a layer of protection that kicks in before hardly any digestion has occurred, but after you’ve tasted/smelled/swallowed the food.
Believe me, it is a world of difference from cooked-food poisoning, where you’re doubled over heaving your intestines out hours after eating. Imagine a linear reduction in discomfort proportional to the time the food spends in your body, with spitting out something nasty at the other end of the spectrum. Spitting up is only slightly more distasteful than spitting something out, and if you have a decent sense of smell, you won’t even put it in your mouth to begin with.
Eggs and chicken, however, lose most of their smell when cold (which is why I avoid refrigerating eggs I intend to eat raw). Fish and beef lose less of their odor (and especially, less of their decay odors) when cold, which is probably why people think they’re safer to eat raw. (i.e., because when they’re not safe, you’ll notice this sooner and with less discomfort.)
Do you stay away from steak tartare and kitfo, since the raw beef is seasoned?
I don’t know what kitfo is. I think I may have had steak tartare, but I’m not fond of having lots of seasoning on my raw foods. Generally speaking, though, I assume that if a restaurant is serving a raw dish, they have every incentive to make sure that the food in question is fresh and unspoiled. (As a result, raw dishes are often among a restaurant’s most expensive things to eat.)
I don’t know to what extent seasoning would interfere with freshness detection in general. I rarely seasoned any raw meat with anything stronger than soy sauce or ponzu sauce, and usually only part of any given bite.
I would not be happy about my normal eating habits resulting in food poisoning 1 time in 50. I eat 3 meals per day, and would expect to get food poisoning nearly twice per month. Fortunately, my actual eating habits have a far better track record than that.
You will get food poisoning less than 1 time in 50 you do this.
I’ve eaten raw chicken hundreds of times and never experienced food poisoning from it, so by your definition, my approach to eating it is “safe”.
On the other hand, I’ve experienced food poisoning from cooked foods several times during the parts of my life where I was not eating raw meats.
Proportionally speaking, of course, I’ve eaten so much more cooked food in my life that this doesn’t mean cooked food is less safe than raw. Certainly, it still qualifies as “safe” by your definition.
On the other hand, the experience of vomiting up contaminated cooked food that made it to my intestines seems almost two orders of magnitude worse than anything I ever experienced from eating something raw… so YMMV.
Conventional wisdom is that you’re crazy to not cook chicken to the point that any salmonella is surely killed. I’m sure you know this. I guess you have faith that you won’t be infected by the bacteria as your body quickly detects and ‘spits up’ the offending chicken.
Conventional wisdom is that quite a few things discussed on this site are crazy.
to not cook chicken to the point that any salmonella is surely killed.
If you are cooking your chicken, then you should indeed make sure it is fully cooked! Partially cooking chicken is in fact a good way to get food poisioning.
This does NOT imply, however, that eating the chicken raw is maximally unsafe!
The first hidden assumption in this conventional wisdom is that the contaminated chicken will in fact reach your intestines with the bacteria intact. But this assumption is further predicated on an even bigger assumption:
Namely, that you are cooking the food in the first place.
If you are cooking it, then you are bypassing your body’s safety mechanisms, by destroying whatever chemical composition our evolved bacteria detection machinery relies upon, making it impossible to smell, taste, or otherwise detect the contamination before it’s too late.
However, if you’re not cooking it, then it’s straightforward to rely on your evolutionary heritage to detect and defend against this natural ancestral hazard.
IOW, the presence of a bacteria detection and eviction system keyed to chemical reactions in raw (but not cooked) foods explains both phenomena: why partially cooked foods and mixing raw+cooked foods are dangerous, while raw foods by themselves are quite safe in comparison.
Both will cause problems if they get to your gut—but the raw food is extremely unlikely to actually make it to your gut, or stay there long enough to be a problem.
I guess you have faith
Hey, no insults necessary. ;-)
that you won’t be infected by the bacteria as your body quickly detects and ‘spits up’ the offending chicken.
If salmonella was present as a food contaminant danger for enough of our ancestors, we would expect to have such detection and protection machinery, yes.
That I have experienced this machinery in operation with contaminated raw foods but not with contaminated cooked ones (i.e., the cooked foods that I have gotten food poisoning symptoms from), it seems strongly in support of that hypothesis.
Do you have an alternative hypothesis that fits this combination of evidence, and reasonable evolutionary priors? Or are you just regurgitating your gut reactions to the ideas you’ve been fed in the past? (puns intended ;-) )
Yes, I’m regurgitating my summary of the way that I’ve seen other people react to the idea of undercooked or uncooked chicken flesh (like it has near-magical powers to contaminate with a powerful poison anything it touches). For an amusing example, see any Gordon Ramsey cooking show (which I cannot generally recommend). Undercooked chicken is the cardinal restaurant sin. But the fear definitely fully extends to never cooked chicken (cutting boards, knives).
Kindly notice I didn’t say that you’re definitely wrong. I was aware of the distinction between “most people would say he’s crazy” and “he’s crazy”.
I’ve experienced dramatic (but not life threatening) food poisoning on 3-4 occasions only. Once was a raw egg in a smoothie. The other times were especially contaminated cooked meat (e.g. hot dog from grocery store).
I don’t buy that “it would be helpful to have evolved it, and such evolution was possible” means “we have it”. But of course it makes it more plausible that we have it.
the fear definitely fully extends to never cooked chicken (cutting boards, knives)
Because bringing them into contact with cooked foods actually is dangerous. You won’t have any way of knowing the cooked food is contaminated.
Here’s the thing: if your food’s not that fresh, cooking can make an unsafe food safe (from a bacterial point of view) at the cost of destroying some other nutrients. (e.g. creatine and vitamin C). However, that same piece of food you’d spit out due to taste or spit up via whatever the backup test mechanism is.
So it’s not that I’m claiming the raw meat itself is safe in that case. Obviously, if your body rejects it, it’s because it’s not safe. I’m just saying that, raw meat that’s not contaminated is as safe (or safer) than cooked food, and that telling the difference is easy if you use your senses in the way they’re adapted for.
Raw food is only dangerous in a kitchen if you’re combining it with other foods without first ensuring that it’s not contaminated.
The error is in thinking that all raw food is “contaminated”, simply because it hasn’t been cooked yet. Before a certain level of decay occurs, it’s not contaminated food, it’s just food.
I’ve experienced dramatic (but not life threatening) food poisoning on 3-4 occasions only. Once was a raw egg in a smoothie.
Did you smell and/or taste the egg at room temperature before it was added to the smoothie? From personal experience, it’s a bad idea not to. ;-)
I’m not saying “all raw food is safe all the time”, I’m saying, if you smell and taste individual raw foods in as close to a “natural” state as practical (i.e., near ambient temperature, not yet processed or mixed with other foods) then the odds of you coming into contact with an excessive bacterial load are quite low.
As a practical matter, I would also mention that I never eat chicken raw that is only a day or two away from its store-marked expiration date, because during that period it can be difficult to tell by smell right out of the refrigerator if it’s bad. If it is bad, I won’t notice until I’ve chewed or swallowed some, and while it’s not a traumatic event by any means, it is still unpleasant and makes me want to wash my mouth out.
By contrast, beef that has gone bad in the day or two before its marked expiration is pretty damn obvious—brown or grey coloration is also a visible indicator that it’s not particularly fresh. But the scent is more pronounced, right out of the refrigerator.
Anyway, accidentally consuming contaminated (but detectably-so) raw meat is mildly unpleasant. But accidentally consuming contaminated food that your body can’t detect is MUCH much worse.
IOW, if you eat raw animal proteins, smell or taste them separately, and preferably close to room temperature, before consumption. If it’s bad, don’t eat it.
I don’t buy that “it would be helpful to have evolved it, and such evolution was possible” means “we have it”.
Of course. But that, plus the experience of your body rejecting a food makes it considerably more plausible. It’s a very convincing experience, since I’ve never experienced the same rejection of a contaminated cooked food. Nor has anything cooked that gave me food poisoning smelled or tasted bad when I ate it.
This looks to me like strong evidence for contamination-detection machinery that’s tuned to the properties of ancestral food sources, and which is bypassed by cooking.
IOW, the benefit of cooking is that it lets you eat marginal foods. The cost is that you have to substitute careful procedures for “common sense” in order to avoid getting randomly food-poisoned. The extent to which food poisoning still occurs in the modern world is a testament to just how difficult it is for us to notice contamination in cooked foods, vs. its sheer obviousness in the raw.
Really, in the past 100 years of refrigeration and Pasteur, I would hazard a guess that more people have died or become seriously ill (per capita in the relevant regions) from food contamination than in the preceding 100 years, simply because before refrigeration we had a much higher probability of smelling any contamination. To thoroughly check a piece of cold beef, I have to put it right up to my nose and take a deliberate whiff. The same odor from a warm piece would likely be detectable just through ambient proximity—you’d know without even having to specifically check.
So, while refrigeration and cooking definitely have their place, they also bypass our built-in safeguards.
Did you smell and/or taste the egg at room temperature before it was added to the smoothie? From personal experience, it’s a bad idea not to. ;-)
It’s easy to tell when an egg has gone bad, but not easy to tell whether it’s contaminated with salmonella.
Really, in the past 100 years of refrigeration and Pasteur, I would hazard a guess that more people have died or become seriously ill (per capita in the relevant regions) from food contamination than in the preceding 100 years, simply because before refrigeration we had a much higher probability of smelling any contamination.
I’d take a bet on that. I haven’t read any statistics on this, but I have read that before refrigeration, people were often less picky about what constituted expiration in food, by necessity. People might be able to smell most dangerous food contamination, but before refrigeration and pasteurization, people were often faced with a choice between eating potentially dangerous food and not eating. I recall Bill Bryson writing (in Made In America) that a contemporary noted that at one meal, George Washington put away his food without eating it, because he thought it was off. His wife cleaned her plate.
Of course. But that, plus the experience of your body rejecting a food makes it considerably more plausible. It’s a very convincing experience, since I’ve never experienced the same rejection of a contaminated cooked food. Nor has anything cooked that gave me food poisoning smelled or tasted bad when I ate it.
I have found my senses to be particularly sensitive in this regard and they do seem to work with cooked foods. I’ve definitely ‘rejected’ cooked foods early enough that the experience wasn’t more than a mildly unpleasant inconvenience. (ie. Eating more a minute later doesn’t seem at all unnatural.) Closer inspection confirmed the instinctive judgement and I gave my reflexes a gold star. Yet I would certainly agree that this is much easier when it comes to raw foods.
Did you find it took you time to adapt to raw meats after switching away from cooked meats? It seems like something that would take some adjustment. I find, for example, that my instincts scream at me if they discover I am eating chicken that isn’t cooked through. And eating large slabs of raw fish takes a lot of willpower too.
Did you find it took you time to adapt to raw meats after switching away from cooked meats? It seems like something that would take some adjustment.
Not much. Once I was prepared for the idea, I eased into it by trying things like raw egg smoothies, sushi, beef tataki (meat that’s just seared on the outside—available at many sushi restaurants), and so on. After that, I was psychologically ready to try chicken.
There really wasn’t any adjustment to the food itself, only to the idea of eating it. What I found consistently was that raw food tasted better than cooked, in terms of flavor and texture. The main drawback I have found to eating raw food is the temperature: hot food is generally more appetizing, except for sushi and sashimi. I have very little interest in cooked fish, but I love sushi and sashimi. I can’t stand beef well done any more, I want it to be at least extremely rare if not raw. (I just don’t like it cold that much.)
These were almost immediate changes in my taste preference. Texturally speaking, raw meat is 100% superior to cooked. It feels better in the mouth, it’s juicy… damn, I’m making myself hungry now. Really, the main thing at this point I like better about cooked meat is that the fat portion is more appetizing when heated to the point of softening, and it has an above-ambient temperature. I suspect that this is once again an evolutionary thing—a fresh kill would not likely have cold-hardened fats and would be hotter than ambient temperature. It would not surprise me if early humans began heating meat for the simple reason that it tastes better if it’s at least body-temperature warm.
Is Pasteur to blame? Of course, it’s terrible that governments in Anglophone countries (and why is it only them?) are trying to stop people from selling raw milk, but even with pasteurised milk, it’s easy to smell when it goes bad—rather famously so, I thought.
I understand your claim. You think that most dangerously spoiled food is easy to detect (if not overly chilled, or cooked) by tasting/smelling a small quantity raw, and that that quantity is not enough to harm us. Or, perhaps, even if initial smell/ taste can’t detect it, actually consuming enough of it will lead to detection and relatively safe expulsion further downstream, but that cooked food defeats some of the detection mechanisms.
I do agree that exposure to harmful substances isn’t all-or-nothing bad (while of course I reject most homeopathic-believers’ views that small amounts of harmful substances are magical).
Also, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a brown or gray surface on meat. It just means the blood has been exposed to oxygen. When I store meat in a sealed glass container in the refrigerator for a few days, it looks like that and tastes+smells fine.
Also, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a brown or gray surface on meat.
I understand that. However, it’s also correlated somewhat with the age of the meat (i.e. quantity of oxygen exposure), which is why I will smell such a piece more carefully than one without such a sign of age.
I do agree that exposure to harmful substances isn’t all-or-nothing bad (while of course I reject most homeopathic-believers’ views that small amounts of harmful substances are magical).
It sounds like you might be in danger of overgeneralizing from homeopathy to the hygiene hypothesis and bacterial symbiosis. In addition to keeping one’s immune system in trim, there are other benefits to even the theoretically-nastiest bacteria. I believe E. Coli has actually been experimented with as an anti-cancer agent, for example. The line between “beneficial bacteria” and “harmful invader” is not as cleanly drawn as brains designed for primate politics would like to make it.
(i.e., we are biased to label organisms as good or bad, for us or against us, when it’s really more a matter of how much, where, and when. Dose makes the medicine as well as the poison.)
On the other hand, it seems to be actual news when beef is infected with E. coli or salmonella, so I infer that beef is usually free of such problems. (Why beef doesn’t have a unique or universal infection of its own, I have no idea. Maybe cows just have better immune systems than pigs or chickens.)
There are also traditional cuisines of raw beef (such as steak tartar) and many forms of fish (such as sashimi). This still doesn’t explain why, but it suggest to me (especially since there are so many types of sashimi) that the real question is why raw pork and chicken (is it all poultry?) are always dangerous, rather than why raw beef and fish are not.
Why beef doesn’t have a unique or universal infection of its own, I have no idea. Maybe cows just have better immune systems than pigs or chickens
This is the part I’m curious about. Or rather, why beef seems to be sufficiently immune to all infections—not just unique or universal ones—so as to be safe for raw consumption (something I hadn’t known until now).
The best guess I can venture is that it has something to do with the raising and butchering process. Notice that it’s also safe to eat a lot of seafood raw (which is often called sushi); it seems unlikely to me that all sorts of random sea-critter would also have any special cow immune system features.
Yes. Conventional wisdom is that undercooked beef is pretty safe. Weird that chicken and pig cultivation would be so much more filthy than cow and farmed-fish. (for fish, we could suppose that fish diseases and parasites aren’t so harmful to us as those found in our mammal kin)
I have been eating my cow and fish raw for the last year or so and haven’t gotten sick from it- even when the meat was old enough that half way through I noticed that it smelled kinda bad.
I’ll admit I’ve never tried any organ meats; I’ve heard that there are non-ancestral contaminants we don’t have the sensory machinery to detect and which accumulate more in animals’ organs than in their flesh.
I think I have lots of gaps to report, but I’m having lots of trouble trying to write a coherent comment about them… so I’m going to just report this trouble as a gap, for now.
Oh, and I also have lots of trouble even noticing these gaps. I have a habit of avoiding doing things that I haven’t already established as “safe”. Unfortunately, this often results in gaps continuing to be not detected or corrected.
Anyway, the first gap that comes to mind is… I don’t dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat, because I’m afraid that I lack the knowledge necessary to avoid giving myself food poisoning. Maybe if I tried, I would be able to do it with little or no problem, but I don’t dare to try.
Short tip: If the raw meat smells or tastes bad, don’t eat it.
Longer tip: the reason there are so many raw meat warnings are not because you will get sick from eating or handling raw meat. If you don’t have a clogged nose, there is almost no way for you to get sick from raw meat, because you will smell or taste any problems before you swallow it.
What’s NOT safe is mxing raw and cooked foods. The safety warnings are because the same bacteria that will make raw foods smell bad, will not produce the same smell warnings in the cooked food. This means that you can have highly-contaminated cooked food that gives off no warning whatsoever, and get terribly sick from it.
I have eaten raw meat—including raw chicken and raw eggs—for many years, and had fewer incidences of stomach upset with them than I have had with cooked foods. The worst reaction I ever had to a raw food was when I ate a bad egg raw, that was too cold for me to properly taste or smell. (I vomited it up a few minutes later, when some less-impaired part of my body detected the problem.)
Since then, I prefer to keep fresh eggs unrefrigerated, and find they keep for around two weeks at room temperature.
So, bear in mind that the mere presence of harmful organisms in food doesn’t mean they’ll make you sick, in and of themselves. Cooking and sterilization are evolutionarily modern inventions, and we’ve only known about the existence of germs for the last 100 years or so.
We can therefore trust that our genes will encode reflexive and intuitive responses to food that is actually harmful, provided that it was found in the ancestral environment. This means that we can easily tell with our senses when a raw and unprocessed food is unsafe to eat. It’s the prepared stuff you need to be careful with!
In other words, raw meat is plenty safe to handle and eat. Just keep it away from your cooked food, as the cooked food not only has its residual defenses destroyed (no intact cell walls, etc.) but also will not show any signs that it has been contaminated until well after you eat it.
Food poisoning, btw, is less bad the earlier your body detects the problem. If you somehow manage to eat something raw that’s bad, you may throw it up before it even reaches your stomach, or within the first few minutes of getting it there. But cooked food poisoning usually doesn’t get detected until the food is at least into the small intestine, and it’s much worse down there.
(Really, if you’re worried about cooking raw meat, you’re much better off just eating the raw meat as-is!)
I used to be a semi-frequent raw egg consumer. I figured that risks should be rather low. However, once I did get food poisoning, and it was such an excessively bad experience that I decided that I’m avoiding even small risks from raw food consumption.
Just out of curiosity, what were the specific circumstances? Were the eggs refigerated? Mixed with other items? Or eaten warm and plain with nothing else?
I ate two raw eggs along with maybe a cup of whipping cream and two-three pieces of vegetable, for breakfast. I’m fairly confident it was the eggs. First symptoms occurred only about 5 hours later, after I’d eaten a moderate amount of other food whose composition I can’t recall. Eggs were at most 5 days old, and spent that time refrigerated. They may have spent at most one day left out of refrigerator. They were eaten cold.
Since coming out of the store, or the chicken? ;-)
As a comparison point, I usually store eggs at room temperature with a high probability of still being good 2 weeks after getting them from the farmer. (Don’t know how old they are before that point, or how they’re stored, though they usually seem pretty cold when I get them.)
I never eat them raw except at room temperature, and never without smelling them before adding them to something else (like a smoothie or other recipe).
In my experience, you’re lucky to notice a problem with a cold egg even if you intentionally smell it, and you don’t mention having smelled it.
I am a bit surprised by this. The one time I had a nasty reaction to a cold egg it only took 5 minutes. On the other hand, it wasn’t mixed with anything else at all, so maybe that’s a factor.
Store.
Wiki says: “The delay between consumption of a contaminated food and appearance of the first symptoms of illness is called the incubation period. This ranges from hours to days depending on the agent, and on how much was consumed. If symptoms occur within 1–6 hours after eating the food, it suggests that it is caused by a bacterial toxin or a chemical rather than live bacteria.”
I can’t smell.
Generally, it is mainly chicken that one needs to be careful about, because it is sometimes contaminated with unhealthy bacteria, even when bought “fresh”. A general procedure with all meat, and especially chicken, is to wash any surface that raw chicken comes in contact with when you are done preparing it and have started to cook it, then wash any utensils you used that touched the chicken, and wash you hands. To be extra cautious, you can do that for any raw meat. Raw meat should be refrigerated soon after purchase and now allowed to stand uncooked at room temperature for more than the time it takes to prepare it.
Thanks for explaining that! But, um… I still have more questions… What is the procedure for washing the surfaces, the utensils, and my hands? How do I know when the meat is cooked enough to not qualify as raw? And for stir-frying raw meat, do I need to pause the stir-frying process to wash the stir-frying utensils, so that I don’t contaminate the cooked food with any raw juices that happen to still be on the utensils?
Salmonella bacteria is killed instantly at 165°F. Cooking small chopped or sliced pieces of meat is hard to do wrong because the surface area to volume ratio is high enough that they will be sterilized even before they start to appear cooked. Make your slices less than 1⁄2 inch thick and cook them until they start to turn golden brown. As long as the business ends of your utensils are in contact with the food as it cooks they will be sterilized along with it.
Assuming that you already know how to wash things in general, you don’t need to do it any differently. Normal washing is good enough because bacteria can’t grow without a source of nutrients and moisture, and you need to ingest a fairly substantial amount of bacteria in order to get sick.
We should add that soapy water does not kill the bacteria, but rather makes it impossible for them to adhere to anything, so they get washed down the drain.
Washing bacteria down the drain is certainly the primary purpose for using soap, by far, but surfactants like soap also kill a few bacteria by lysis (disruption of the cell membrane, causing the cells to rapidly swell with water and burst). In practice, this is so minor it’s not worth paying attention to: bacteria have a surrounding cell wall made of a sugar-protein polymer that resists surfactants (among other things), dramatically slowing down the process to the point that it’s not practical to make use of it.
(Some bacteria are more vulnerable to surfactant lysis than others. Gram-negative bacteria have a much thinner cell wall, which is itself surrounded by a second, more exposed membrane. But gram-positive bacteria have a thick wall with nothing particularly vulnerable on the outside, and even with gram-negative bacteria the scope of the effect is minor.)
In practice, the big benefit of soap is (#1) washing away oils, especially skin oils, and (#2) dissolving the biofilms produced by the bacteria to anchor themselves to each other and to biological surfaces (like skin and wooden cutting boards). Killing the bacteria directly with soap is a distant third priority.
For handwashing, hot water is in a similar boat: even the hottest water your hands can stand is merely enough to speed up surfactant action, not to kill bacteria directly. For cleaning inanimate surfaces, sufficiently hot water is quite effective at killing bacteria, but most people’s hot water only goes up to 135°F or thereabouts, which is not scaldingly hot enough to do the job instantly.
For directly killing bacteria via non-heat means, alcohol and bleach are both far more effective than soap. Alcohol very rapidly strips off the cell wall and triggers immediate lysis, while bleach acts both as a saponifier (it turns fatty acids into soap) and a strong oxidizer (directly attacking the chemical structure of the cell wall and membrane, ripping it apart like a rapid-action biological parallel to rusting iron).
Fun trivia: your hand feels slippery or “bleachy” after handling bleach (or any reasonably strong base) because the outermost layer of your skin has been converted into soap.
I formulated this hypothesis on my own, but I have not seen evidence to back this up. I think a misunderstanding of this process has lead to the profusion of anti-bacterial soaps, which may be breeding hard-to-kill bacteria.
Those who are concerned may be interested to know that Ivory Liquid Hand Soap (and, in all the stores I’ve visited lately, no other) is a brand of liquid soap which contains no antibacterial ingredients.
Furthermore, it at least used to have a slogan like “so gentle you can even use it on your face” — and it does not have the warning “keep out of eyes” that, as far as I know, all antibacterial soaps have — and I do in fact use it as a face and body wash.
This is true, but it probably helps to state explicitly that a) the even for small pieces of meat the inside might not be at 165 F even if the outside is (so make sure that it is hot for a fair bit of time) b) This is more of an issue for larger pieces of meat (luminosity’s comment below is relevant).
There’s a related issue: if the meat is raw and frozen, life will be much easier if you defrost it before cooking it. Weird things can happen if you try to directly cook large bits of frozen meat. Generally it won’t result in health problems, but it does make stuff more likely to be burned in part or simply not taste good.
However, I find it much easier to slice meat for stir-frying which is still partially frozen. (This also speeds the thawing process.) Probably if you use a cleaver or other heavy, extremely sharp type of instrument, no prior thawing would be necessary; but I don’t trust myself with those.
For cooking larger pieces of meat than saturn addresses, the way I learnt what was and wasn’t needed was simply cooking meat, waiting until the outside looked cooked, then taking a piece out and cutting it in half. You’ll be able to see if it’s still bloody inside, or if it’s chicken you’ll be able to see if it’s turned white yet. Personally I prefer meat entirely cooked, but depending on your taste pinkish in the middle should be fine.
Doing this over time has given me a good feel for how long to cook meat for my preferences, though even now I still often slice pieces open to be sure.
For beef, not chicken.
This is good for getting a feel for how long to cook meat, but it also dries the meat out to some degree as you cook it. This is especially relevant for cooking steak, IMHO. For things like hamburgers, a simple meat thermometer will do the trick (brown both sides and cook until the inside is 165*F). For steak, it’s more difficult if you prefer your meat cooked less than medium-well.
I’m not much of a stir-fryer, but my general method for meat cooking is to have separate utensils for “before cooking” and “during-to-after”. So if I put the meat in the pan with a fork, that fork goes to the sink. But the wooden spoon that is cooked with the meat doesn’t get washed until I’m done eating, and is usually used as my serving spoon, too. If you are really concerned for safety, you could always use one cooking spoon until the surface of the meat is obviously brown, then switch to a fresh spoon.
If dealing with a low-fat meat (like moose), burger is much easier to cook than other meat, and is still healthy. It is hard to overcook, and easy to tell what’s safe, because all the little chunks of meat go from red to dark brown. High fat burger (like cow) is still tasty and easy to cook, but not terribly healthy.
One trick that I will immediately adopt is using an infrared thermometer to check for the 165F that saturn mentioned. Thanks for the info!
This is one of the things I struggled with a bit when first learning to cook for myself as well. It may help to keep in mind that some meats are safer than others. My heuristic goes roughly: chicken < pork < beef/lamb < fish, in increasing order of safety. If I’m handling raw chicken, I’ll wash my hands and utensils thoroughly in warm soapy water before doing anything else. If I’m handling fish, I’ll usually just give my hands a quick rinse. The same ordering also applies roughly to doneness; it’s a much bigger problem to have undercooked chicken than beef, for example.
A good starting place for meats is braised dishes like stews and pot roasts, because the typically long cooking time makes it hard to accidentally undercook something while still producing tasty results (as opposed to e.g. a steak grilled until it turns into shoe leather).
Also it should be noted that ground meats are not as safe as meat that is whole. A steak doesn’t have to be cooked to the same level of doneness as a hamburger.
One bit of food safety is to use a designated cutting board ONLY for chopping raw meat. One board for fruits and vegetables (and if they’re wooden I find it’s helpful to use a separate one for onions) and one for raw meat. You’ll want to buy two that look dissimilar so you can’t confuse the two.
When you’re cooking, be sure to wash the knife between chopping up your raw meat and chopping up anything that might not be cooked to the same temperature. (Practically, this means to wash the knife or switch knives after the meat, no matter what.)
If you’re roasting meat, you can get a thermometer that goes into the meat so you can find out whether the interior has gone up to a safe temperature. Chart of temperatures
Stewing meat (simmering it for an extended period until it falls apart) is another way to be sure it’s safe.
Pork and chicken should be cooked all the way through. If you’re not sure whether it’s done, you can cut it open and have a look.
With beef and lamb, you only need to ensure that the outer surface is cooked—whether you want it cooked all the way through is just a matter of personal taste. However, if it’s minced, you should cook it all the way (it has formerly-outer-surfaces in the middle).
You should probably specify how one would actually visually distinguish done from not done. Or maybe not, it sounds like PeerInfinity already understands the basics of cooking. I don’t, however. :)
Uncooked meat is semitransparent with a kind of gelatin-like luster. As it cooks, it becomes more opaque and shifts color.
The exact color transitions depend on the kind of meat and whether it’s had a chance to oxidize before you start cooking it. Chicken, which as mentioned you need to worry about the most, starts out a pale yellow-pink and cooks to a tannish color. Pork starts out light pink and cooks to a kind of light pinkish-gray; if it goes completely gray you’ve overcooked it. Beef and lamb start dark red, or dark pink if they’ve been exposed to the air, and cook to a deep red-brown.
All meat develops a brown crust over time if it’s being grilled or pan-fried, but it’s the interior color that matters. Another thing to look at is the kind of juice it’s dripping; uncooked meat bleeds slightly, a thin reddish fluid, while well-cooked meat oozes gravy-like, clear or brownish liquids. It’s safe before it stops bleeding, though.
This thread just confirms the benefits of being a vegetarian.
Pish posh. I have admittedly horrendous sanitary procedures, and though I handle and cook raw meat at least 4 times a week I’ve never once gotten sick.
Pork actually should have a little bit of rose inside; I only cook my chicken until this is just gone (or even faintly visible). I routinely eat steak rare as can be, and tuna essentially raw.
It’s certainly one benefit. Unfortunately, vegetables can also be contaminated, especially when animal waste is used as manure.
True. Many people die from green onions and spinach each year (not intended to bean exhaustive enumeration).
As long as it is sufficiently fresh I don’t think there is any particular food poisoning danger from raw meat. There is some risk from eating it completely raw, but even that is far less likely to end in food poisoning than not, and ISTM effectively impossible to do on accident without noticing.
Poultry and pork are not safe to eat raw, even store bought in Western countries, same for minced meat. They need to be properly cooked, which means white all the way through. You can cook it hot and it’ll be dry or at a lower temperature and still tender and juicy though.
Generally if it has hooves or swims and was properly handled or washed beforehand this is pretty accurate.
Given the conditions in factory farms, some might say especially store-bought in Western countries! (Or at least the US, I don’t know about elsewhere.)
Define “safe”. I’ve eaten plenty of store-bought poultry raw, never been sick from it. (Unless you count going, “ugh, that’s not as fresh as I thought it was,” and spitting it up a minute or two later.)
Define “spitting it up”—if you mean chewing on a piece of raw chicken for 60-120 seconds, and spitting it out if it doesn’t taste right, that’s just a little odd; if you mean swallowing the chicken, then vomiting it back up, that crosses my personal line into “sick from it.”
That would be spitting out, not up. In any case, what I mean is that I’m eating it for a minute or two before I suddenly have the distinct feeling that something is wrong with what I’m eating, and gently cough it back up.
There’s a huge difference between vomiting and spitting something up. The latter feels entirely different; for one thing. It feels almost like you never swallowed it at all, it just comes back up like “bzzt… rejected by quality control”.
To put it another way, it feels exactly like wanting to spit something out that tastes really bad… except that it just pops back out of your throat instead of merely out of your mouth. There is no unpleasantness to the expulsion; instead it feels like the unpleasantness is contained in the food itself.
I have heard parents use the phrase “spitting up” to describe what happens with babies rejecting a food, and it seems an apt description of the response here.
Believe me, if spitting up was anything like vomiting, it would’ve put me off of raw foods mighty quickly. The very distinct sensation was actually very convincing that our bodies do indeed have layered defenses against ancestrally relevant forms of food contamination, and specifically that there’s a layer of protection that kicks in before hardly any digestion has occurred, but after you’ve tasted/smelled/swallowed the food.
Believe me, it is a world of difference from cooked-food poisoning, where you’re doubled over heaving your intestines out hours after eating. Imagine a linear reduction in discomfort proportional to the time the food spends in your body, with spitting out something nasty at the other end of the spectrum. Spitting up is only slightly more distasteful than spitting something out, and if you have a decent sense of smell, you won’t even put it in your mouth to begin with.
Eggs and chicken, however, lose most of their smell when cold (which is why I avoid refrigerating eggs I intend to eat raw). Fish and beef lose less of their odor (and especially, less of their decay odors) when cold, which is probably why people think they’re safer to eat raw. (i.e., because when they’re not safe, you’ll notice this sooner and with less discomfort.)
Informative, thanks. Do you stay away from steak tartare and kitfo, since the raw beef is seasoned?
I don’t know what kitfo is. I think I may have had steak tartare, but I’m not fond of having lots of seasoning on my raw foods. Generally speaking, though, I assume that if a restaurant is serving a raw dish, they have every incentive to make sure that the food in question is fresh and unspoiled. (As a result, raw dishes are often among a restaurant’s most expensive things to eat.)
I don’t know to what extent seasoning would interfere with freshness detection in general. I rarely seasoned any raw meat with anything stronger than soy sauce or ponzu sauce, and usually only part of any given bite.
Kitfo is Ethopian-style raw beef. .
You will get food poisoning less than 1 time in 50 you do this.
I would not be happy about my normal eating habits resulting in food poisoning 1 time in 50. I eat 3 meals per day, and would expect to get food poisoning nearly twice per month. Fortunately, my actual eating habits have a far better track record than that.
I’ve eaten raw chicken hundreds of times and never experienced food poisoning from it, so by your definition, my approach to eating it is “safe”.
On the other hand, I’ve experienced food poisoning from cooked foods several times during the parts of my life where I was not eating raw meats.
Proportionally speaking, of course, I’ve eaten so much more cooked food in my life that this doesn’t mean cooked food is less safe than raw. Certainly, it still qualifies as “safe” by your definition.
On the other hand, the experience of vomiting up contaminated cooked food that made it to my intestines seems almost two orders of magnitude worse than anything I ever experienced from eating something raw… so YMMV.
Conventional wisdom is that you’re crazy to not cook chicken to the point that any salmonella is surely killed. I’m sure you know this. I guess you have faith that you won’t be infected by the bacteria as your body quickly detects and ‘spits up’ the offending chicken.
Conventional wisdom is that quite a few things discussed on this site are crazy.
If you are cooking your chicken, then you should indeed make sure it is fully cooked! Partially cooking chicken is in fact a good way to get food poisioning.
This does NOT imply, however, that eating the chicken raw is maximally unsafe!
The first hidden assumption in this conventional wisdom is that the contaminated chicken will in fact reach your intestines with the bacteria intact. But this assumption is further predicated on an even bigger assumption:
Namely, that you are cooking the food in the first place.
If you are cooking it, then you are bypassing your body’s safety mechanisms, by destroying whatever chemical composition our evolved bacteria detection machinery relies upon, making it impossible to smell, taste, or otherwise detect the contamination before it’s too late.
However, if you’re not cooking it, then it’s straightforward to rely on your evolutionary heritage to detect and defend against this natural ancestral hazard.
IOW, the presence of a bacteria detection and eviction system keyed to chemical reactions in raw (but not cooked) foods explains both phenomena: why partially cooked foods and mixing raw+cooked foods are dangerous, while raw foods by themselves are quite safe in comparison.
Both will cause problems if they get to your gut—but the raw food is extremely unlikely to actually make it to your gut, or stay there long enough to be a problem.
Hey, no insults necessary. ;-)
If salmonella was present as a food contaminant danger for enough of our ancestors, we would expect to have such detection and protection machinery, yes.
That I have experienced this machinery in operation with contaminated raw foods but not with contaminated cooked ones (i.e., the cooked foods that I have gotten food poisoning symptoms from), it seems strongly in support of that hypothesis.
Do you have an alternative hypothesis that fits this combination of evidence, and reasonable evolutionary priors? Or are you just regurgitating your gut reactions to the ideas you’ve been fed in the past? (puns intended ;-) )
I do value your experience report.
Yes, I’m regurgitating my summary of the way that I’ve seen other people react to the idea of undercooked or uncooked chicken flesh (like it has near-magical powers to contaminate with a powerful poison anything it touches). For an amusing example, see any Gordon Ramsey cooking show (which I cannot generally recommend). Undercooked chicken is the cardinal restaurant sin. But the fear definitely fully extends to never cooked chicken (cutting boards, knives).
Kindly notice I didn’t say that you’re definitely wrong. I was aware of the distinction between “most people would say he’s crazy” and “he’s crazy”.
I’ve experienced dramatic (but not life threatening) food poisoning on 3-4 occasions only. Once was a raw egg in a smoothie. The other times were especially contaminated cooked meat (e.g. hot dog from grocery store).
I don’t buy that “it would be helpful to have evolved it, and such evolution was possible” means “we have it”. But of course it makes it more plausible that we have it.
Because bringing them into contact with cooked foods actually is dangerous. You won’t have any way of knowing the cooked food is contaminated.
Here’s the thing: if your food’s not that fresh, cooking can make an unsafe food safe (from a bacterial point of view) at the cost of destroying some other nutrients. (e.g. creatine and vitamin C). However, that same piece of food you’d spit out due to taste or spit up via whatever the backup test mechanism is.
So it’s not that I’m claiming the raw meat itself is safe in that case. Obviously, if your body rejects it, it’s because it’s not safe. I’m just saying that, raw meat that’s not contaminated is as safe (or safer) than cooked food, and that telling the difference is easy if you use your senses in the way they’re adapted for.
Raw food is only dangerous in a kitchen if you’re combining it with other foods without first ensuring that it’s not contaminated.
The error is in thinking that all raw food is “contaminated”, simply because it hasn’t been cooked yet. Before a certain level of decay occurs, it’s not contaminated food, it’s just food.
Did you smell and/or taste the egg at room temperature before it was added to the smoothie? From personal experience, it’s a bad idea not to. ;-)
I’m not saying “all raw food is safe all the time”, I’m saying, if you smell and taste individual raw foods in as close to a “natural” state as practical (i.e., near ambient temperature, not yet processed or mixed with other foods) then the odds of you coming into contact with an excessive bacterial load are quite low.
As a practical matter, I would also mention that I never eat chicken raw that is only a day or two away from its store-marked expiration date, because during that period it can be difficult to tell by smell right out of the refrigerator if it’s bad. If it is bad, I won’t notice until I’ve chewed or swallowed some, and while it’s not a traumatic event by any means, it is still unpleasant and makes me want to wash my mouth out.
By contrast, beef that has gone bad in the day or two before its marked expiration is pretty damn obvious—brown or grey coloration is also a visible indicator that it’s not particularly fresh. But the scent is more pronounced, right out of the refrigerator.
Anyway, accidentally consuming contaminated (but detectably-so) raw meat is mildly unpleasant. But accidentally consuming contaminated food that your body can’t detect is MUCH much worse.
IOW, if you eat raw animal proteins, smell or taste them separately, and preferably close to room temperature, before consumption. If it’s bad, don’t eat it.
Of course. But that, plus the experience of your body rejecting a food makes it considerably more plausible. It’s a very convincing experience, since I’ve never experienced the same rejection of a contaminated cooked food. Nor has anything cooked that gave me food poisoning smelled or tasted bad when I ate it.
This looks to me like strong evidence for contamination-detection machinery that’s tuned to the properties of ancestral food sources, and which is bypassed by cooking.
IOW, the benefit of cooking is that it lets you eat marginal foods. The cost is that you have to substitute careful procedures for “common sense” in order to avoid getting randomly food-poisoned. The extent to which food poisoning still occurs in the modern world is a testament to just how difficult it is for us to notice contamination in cooked foods, vs. its sheer obviousness in the raw.
Really, in the past 100 years of refrigeration and Pasteur, I would hazard a guess that more people have died or become seriously ill (per capita in the relevant regions) from food contamination than in the preceding 100 years, simply because before refrigeration we had a much higher probability of smelling any contamination. To thoroughly check a piece of cold beef, I have to put it right up to my nose and take a deliberate whiff. The same odor from a warm piece would likely be detectable just through ambient proximity—you’d know without even having to specifically check.
So, while refrigeration and cooking definitely have their place, they also bypass our built-in safeguards.
It’s easy to tell when an egg has gone bad, but not easy to tell whether it’s contaminated with salmonella.
I’d take a bet on that. I haven’t read any statistics on this, but I have read that before refrigeration, people were often less picky about what constituted expiration in food, by necessity. People might be able to smell most dangerous food contamination, but before refrigeration and pasteurization, people were often faced with a choice between eating potentially dangerous food and not eating. I recall Bill Bryson writing (in Made In America) that a contemporary noted that at one meal, George Washington put away his food without eating it, because he thought it was off. His wife cleaned her plate.
I have found my senses to be particularly sensitive in this regard and they do seem to work with cooked foods. I’ve definitely ‘rejected’ cooked foods early enough that the experience wasn’t more than a mildly unpleasant inconvenience. (ie. Eating more a minute later doesn’t seem at all unnatural.) Closer inspection confirmed the instinctive judgement and I gave my reflexes a gold star. Yet I would certainly agree that this is much easier when it comes to raw foods.
Did you find it took you time to adapt to raw meats after switching away from cooked meats? It seems like something that would take some adjustment. I find, for example, that my instincts scream at me if they discover I am eating chicken that isn’t cooked through. And eating large slabs of raw fish takes a lot of willpower too.
Not much. Once I was prepared for the idea, I eased into it by trying things like raw egg smoothies, sushi, beef tataki (meat that’s just seared on the outside—available at many sushi restaurants), and so on. After that, I was psychologically ready to try chicken.
There really wasn’t any adjustment to the food itself, only to the idea of eating it. What I found consistently was that raw food tasted better than cooked, in terms of flavor and texture. The main drawback I have found to eating raw food is the temperature: hot food is generally more appetizing, except for sushi and sashimi. I have very little interest in cooked fish, but I love sushi and sashimi. I can’t stand beef well done any more, I want it to be at least extremely rare if not raw. (I just don’t like it cold that much.)
These were almost immediate changes in my taste preference. Texturally speaking, raw meat is 100% superior to cooked. It feels better in the mouth, it’s juicy… damn, I’m making myself hungry now. Really, the main thing at this point I like better about cooked meat is that the fat portion is more appetizing when heated to the point of softening, and it has an above-ambient temperature. I suspect that this is once again an evolutionary thing—a fresh kill would not likely have cold-hardened fats and would be hotter than ambient temperature. It would not surprise me if early humans began heating meat for the simple reason that it tastes better if it’s at least body-temperature warm.
Is Pasteur to blame? Of course, it’s terrible that governments in Anglophone countries (and why is it only them?) are trying to stop people from selling raw milk, but even with pasteurised milk, it’s easy to smell when it goes bad—rather famously so, I thought.
I understand your claim. You think that most dangerously spoiled food is easy to detect (if not overly chilled, or cooked) by tasting/smelling a small quantity raw, and that that quantity is not enough to harm us. Or, perhaps, even if initial smell/ taste can’t detect it, actually consuming enough of it will lead to detection and relatively safe expulsion further downstream, but that cooked food defeats some of the detection mechanisms.
I do agree that exposure to harmful substances isn’t all-or-nothing bad (while of course I reject most homeopathic-believers’ views that small amounts of harmful substances are magical).
Also, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a brown or gray surface on meat. It just means the blood has been exposed to oxygen. When I store meat in a sealed glass container in the refrigerator for a few days, it looks like that and tastes+smells fine.
I understand that. However, it’s also correlated somewhat with the age of the meat (i.e. quantity of oxygen exposure), which is why I will smell such a piece more carefully than one without such a sign of age.
It sounds like you might be in danger of overgeneralizing from homeopathy to the hygiene hypothesis and bacterial symbiosis. In addition to keeping one’s immune system in trim, there are other benefits to even the theoretically-nastiest bacteria. I believe E. Coli has actually been experimented with as an anti-cancer agent, for example. The line between “beneficial bacteria” and “harmful invader” is not as cleanly drawn as brains designed for primate politics would like to make it.
(i.e., we are biased to label organisms as good or bad, for us or against us, when it’s really more a matter of how much, where, and when. Dose makes the medicine as well as the poison.)
But beef is?
What accounts for the difference?
Well, pork has trichinosis. (Notice the treatment section is silent about what to do if you are diagnosed more than 3 days after infection.)
And chicken is basically universally contaminated with salmonella or campylobacter.
On the other hand, it seems to be actual news when beef is infected with E. coli or salmonella, so I infer that beef is usually free of such problems. (Why beef doesn’t have a unique or universal infection of its own, I have no idea. Maybe cows just have better immune systems than pigs or chickens.)
There are also traditional cuisines of raw beef (such as steak tartar) and many forms of fish (such as sashimi). This still doesn’t explain why, but it suggest to me (especially since there are so many types of sashimi) that the real question is why raw pork and chicken (is it all poultry?) are always dangerous, rather than why raw beef and fish are not.
ETA: Gwern has just suggested the same idea.
This is the part I’m curious about. Or rather, why beef seems to be sufficiently immune to all infections—not just unique or universal ones—so as to be safe for raw consumption (something I hadn’t known until now).
The best guess I can venture is that it has something to do with the raising and butchering process. Notice that it’s also safe to eat a lot of seafood raw (which is often called sushi); it seems unlikely to me that all sorts of random sea-critter would also have any special cow immune system features.
Yes. Conventional wisdom is that undercooked beef is pretty safe. Weird that chicken and pig cultivation would be so much more filthy than cow and farmed-fish. (for fish, we could suppose that fish diseases and parasites aren’t so harmful to us as those found in our mammal kin)
I have been eating my cow and fish raw for the last year or so and haven’t gotten sick from it- even when the meat was old enough that half way through I noticed that it smelled kinda bad.
Raw chicken liver was over the line though.
I’ll admit I’ve never tried any organ meats; I’ve heard that there are non-ancestral contaminants we don’t have the sensory machinery to detect and which accumulate more in animals’ organs than in their flesh.
Over the line as in it made you ill, or as in you refused to eat it?
Got sick for a week or so. Symptoms matched salmonella.