My stepfather routinely ate raw hamburger sandwiches. It was gross. My wife loves steak tartare, raw egg and all. She’s gotten sick twice that I remember. I won’t touch the stuff. I will eat carpaccio, though.
I’d eat one, just to try it out…but only if it were irradiated.
I worked in a restaurant in the 60s and we made those. Take a half pound of hamburger, mix in a couple eggs, form into a patty, and put it on the bread. Most people ate them with lots of raw onion. My husband ate them there.
I thought they looked disgusting, and I bet the restaurant doesn’t make them anymore.
I’ve never eaten* raw *meat, but I’ve had lots of beef (including hamburger) that was pretty damned rare. I love the stuff! 
That is what I do - with whole muscle mass you only need to wash it to get any surface contamination off, the bacteria won’t make it inside the muscle. I also tend to dissect off/out silverskin, tendon, gristle and blood vessels. The texture suffers from being ground, chopping is the way to go. I use the chinese double cleaver method of chopping you see on stuff like Yan Can Cook or some of the way older 80s early 90s chinese cooking shows.
Tartar was/is very popular in Europe.
My first introduction was in a small snack shop in Amsterdam. Looked like a nice hamburger patty and I ordered one. The guy put it - uncooked - on the bun and handed it to me. I thought he was insane and said, “Aren’t you going to cook it first?”
He looked at me as if I were insane and said, “This is a sandwich shop, not a grill, and that is how you eat them.”
I politely declined and he, pissed off, took it off the bun and put it back into the cooler.
Later, when I would see this in Berlin and friends would eat it, I would tell them, “You might as well bring a cow in here and let me take a bite out of him.”
Much worse for whoever was passing underneath the tree stand. :eek:
And any sensible deer would have stayed FAR away from that stand.
I’ve eaten 'em. Never cared for most of them all that much. But as others have alluded, the best ones were not ground hamburger, but high quality shredded cuts of beef. Capers and lemon and seasoned salt sealed the deal.
That’s even more dangerous than raw beef.
That’s what makes it so tasty. 
The Danger makes it Delicious!
Seriously, though , there is a lot more raw and undercooked eggs in my diet than beef. (Especially now with eggnog season upon us.) I’m willing to take the chance. But you can buy pasteurized eggs if you’re worried or in a group that really shouldn’t be even taking the minimal risk.
Cookie dough, cake batter, other things that don’t come to mind right now, they all have raw eggs in them. I have fried eggs just about once a week, and I like the yolks runny; so I cook them just until the whites are set. Or I let the whites be a little runny. Scrambled eggs? They’re still not ‘done’ when I take them off the heat. (The residual heat in the pan keeps cooking them, though.) I never look to see if the eggs are pasteurised. Haven’t gotten sick yet.
I always lace my eggnog heavily with brandy or whiskey. The alcohol should kill any bacteria lurking in the beverage.
Only if the alcohol content of your beverage is enough to enable your drink to catch fire…
You are correct, I meant 29. I live near 28 and must have it on my brain.
In my 20’s I used to order kibbeh nayyeh, raw ground lamb mixed with cracked wheat, all the time from Middle Eastern restaurants. I enjoyed grossing out my lunch companions by offering to share- nobody ever took me up on it. I loved the stuff. Haven’t had it in a while though.
I’ll have to try that sometime. Eggnog flambé … mmmmmmmmm! 