I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
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.
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