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.
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.