Comment on Procedural Knowledge Gaps

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:25:03 GMT

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!)

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