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.)
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.)