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.”
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.