redshiftsinger: existential-dread-in-the-am: randomslasher:unbekanntespferd: pbrim:succ-my-pandas-
redshiftsinger: existential-dread-in-the-am: randomslasher:unbekanntespferd: pbrim: succ-my-pandas-dick: pr1nceshawn: People Who Enjoy “Medium Rare Chicken” My dad was a veterinarian in the meat animal industry so here is an explanation of why medium rare is a thing with steaks, but not chicken: In beef, what you worry about is e. coli. In healthy live cattle (and they must be healthy to be butchered for consumption) e. coli is only in the digestive tract but it can escape and contaminate the outside of the beef during slaughter and butchering. The bacteria does not migrate to the interior of the meat as there is no circulation to take it there. So you can eat beef where the inside is less cooked as long as the outside is well seared to kill any bacteria that may be on it. Hamburger should always be thoroughly cooked because it is all “outside”. With chicken, the concern is salmonella, which is found through out the body of the chicken. Chickens can tolerate it, it doesn’t make them noticeably sick, but humans can not, so the entire meat must be cooked enough to kill any bacteria present in the meat. As a note, it used to be believed that salmonella was not passed on to the eggs and in fact in the 1950′s, when my dad was in Vet school, studies showed it was not present in the eggs even if it was present in the hen. That’s why there used to be a lot of recipes that used raw eggs, it was safe then. However due to some change in the bacteria, or changes in egg-farming practices, it is now found in eggs as well. The amounts are small, and if you are eating eggs within a couple days of being laid it’s probably not a problem, but store eggs are old enough for bacteria to have reproduced to dangerous levels and the liquid interior allows it to spread all through the egg. As a side note, with pigs the concern is trichinosis, a parasite that used to be common in pigs and spread to humans through under-cooked pork. However, it has been essentially eliminated in commercially produced pork these days. It should be safe now to eat “medium rare” pork, but trichinosis was so horrible and the fear of it so ingrained that it is rare to see pork that is not well done. ^ Good addition! I also wanted to mention that apart from the salmonella risk (which is a freakin’ big “apart from”), you also have the risk of Campylobacter infections. Not only can these lead to really really horrible gastro-intestinal problems, a small number of infections also cause an auto-immune response that leads to the body destroying its own myelin (the stuff around your nerves that makes them good at carrying electrical signals). Basically, your nerves stop working and even if you survive, you’ll be hooked up to an iron lung for… a long time. I don’t know how long it takes to regrow myelin, I’m not a neurologist. Don’t eat raw poultry, guys RB for awesome info, ty! I knew the info but not the reasons and as a “I need reasons to remember things” person this is really helpful! Every time I see an undercooked piece of chicken I can feel my soul desperately trying to claw it’s way out of my body Regrowing myelin takes months to years depending on the type, location, and extent of the damage. Source: personal experience with nerve damage involving wearing away of the myelin in particular, though I also had some axon damage as well. The damage occurred in my shoulder area to nerves that run down the arm. It was about three years before I felt like I’d mostly regrown my nerves after the surgery to correct the cause of the damage. This was LOCALIZED damage due to a structural issue, not systemic as a disease would cause. -- source link