I thought the purpose of cooking meat was to kill bacteria and harmful things like E coli and salmonella, but don’t these things all die at the same temperature?
In: Chemistry
Different animals carry different parasites and/or are associated with different bacterial contamination.
Those different organisms may have different heat requirements to kill them and make the meat safe to eat.
You could just pick a higher tempreture that kills the hardest to kill organism, but using different tempretures helps take into account the style in which people are accustomed to eating the meat.
For example, chicken (165 degrees F for safety) needs to be cooked at a higher temp than beef(145 degrees). Of course they could just make it 165 for both and that’d be easier, but cooking a steak to 165 makes it tougher/drier where we like it juicier; chicken doesn’t suffer so much from being cooked a little more and it needs that extra heat to kill off the possible pathogens it may harbor.
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