why is it ok to eat steak undercooked (rare) and other meats are not safe?
In: Other
It depends on the meat.
Pork tapeworm is far more common than beef tapeworm and has more serious side effects. You want to make sure you cook those dead so they don’t turn your brain into swiss cheese (if you like horror, look at pictures of pork tapeworm in the brain).
Chicken carries salmonella bacteria that gives you food poisoning. Cook until dead so you do not spend a week in a bathroom.
Ground beef has to go through the grinder, so it increases the number of parts that could have E. coli on it (more food posioning!). When you cook a steak, you cook all the outside surfaces so all the places were E. Coli could be are cooked, but an extremely rare burger could still have E. Coli in it’s folds.
Internal cook temperature is designed to kill the pathogen most likely to live in the meat. Chicken is cooked to a minimum of 165 for 15 seconds because salmonella dies at 163.
155 (MW) is E Coli – that’s why ground beef is technically not supposed to be under MW. E. coli though is far less prevalent in actual cuts of meat than ground beef – so steak rare is no problem but burger rare is often a no or a let me check with my manager.
Trichinosis was a problem in pork so in the 80s and before people were at risk for pork under well done and you’ll still see that hold over today in people be unwilling to eat pork with any pink. In reality changes in USDA code in the 80’s all but eliminated the actual trichinosis conditions from pigs so it’s not a health concern and can be order however you like now.
Lots of meat is SAFE to eat rare, it’s just gross. Pork can have trichinosis in it so you need to cook it, but that is pretty rare in the modern age, you basically could get away with eating rare pork chops all you want but no one really likes rare porkchops much. Same with chicken, salmonella is an issue but could be dealt with if needed, but outside some very specific cultural dishes almost no one is trying to eat rare in the middle chicken. People eat most sea food raw all the time at least. It’s really only ground up meats you should never eat raw, and even then people eat rare hamburgers pretty much always.
bacteria lives on the surface of meat, and ground meat means that bacteria can end up ground up inside the burger you’re about to eat. You have to cook the meat all the way through to be sure you killed the bacteria!
a steak would only have bacteria on the surface, and as long as the surface is cooked to a reasonable temperature you’ll kill off the bacteria.
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