Growing up, I was taught that pork, unlike beef, should always be cooked well done, because pork is potentially loaded with more parasites than beef. In the past few years, however, I’ve noticed that, at least in better restaurants, when someone orders pork, they are asked how they would like it cooked?
Was my early lessons about the dangers of undercooked pork an old wive’s tale? Or have pig farms eliminated parasites from their critters? Or are chefs in better restaurants sadistic?
Sua
Microwave it and turn everything–pork, parasites, bacteria, viruses–into pork-flavored cardboard.
That’s my experience, anyway. 
from what i learned in culinary school, pork is probably THE safest of the more common meats to be eating raw (the worst being chicken). In fact, i’ve eaten raw ground pork at school several times, as long as a chef instructor did it first. supposedly, the reason it’s so safe to eat is because the way pigs are raised these days. the instructors used to say the last commercial outbreak of trichina was in 1983. in this article, it says there are about 50 outbreaks a year, but thats most likely from home raised pork and not the stuff you get in the supermarkets
http://www.findarticles.com/m3741/8_48/64781716/p1/article.jhtml
Hmm, culinary advice from i east dogs. Must be right!!
Sua
Pork’s safer now than it has been for a long time. The Joy of Cooking/ Betty Crocker "cook it 'till it’s dead " school was largely due to trichinosis, which can be contracted by eating contaminated pork. However, the eggs of the trichna worm are killed by high heat, so the US was dining on incinerated pork-flavored cardboard until the early nineties.
Now, people are realizing that salmonella from nasty cheap chicken and e.coli from the reprehensible mass slaughter practices used for beeves are more likely to result in an illness than a porkchop that’s pink in the middle.
I say, cook it medium rare and don’t lose the juice. Brining it also makes it extra yummy.
Years ago, hogs were fed garbage. How unsanitary can you get? That doesn’t happen any more.
Things may be getting better, but I wouldn’t eat undercooked pork, and I’m a microbiologist.
The difference between beef and pork is this: with beef, your main concern is bacteria - E. coli and such. Bacteria don’t invade muscle tissue, so if you have an intact chunk of muscle, like a steak, the interior is almost guaranteed to be safe, even if it’s so rare it’s still mooing. The outside may get contaminated, but that’s the part that gets most cooked anyway. The problem comes with ground beef, in which surface bacteria can get mixed in to the interior. That’s why you so often hear about E. coli with hamburger.
With pork, on the other hand, you’re worried about trichinosis, which is a parasite and does invade muscle tissue. Therefore, with pork, you’re not safe just searing the outside of a chop, like you would be with steak. You have to get it heated up all the way through to kill any cysts that might be there. That said, trichinosis probably is in a decline right now - I don’t remember seeing any hard numbers, but it wouldn’t surprise me. But it’ll always be out there to some degree, so eating undercooked pork will always be more risky than eating undercooked beef.
Isn’t anyone worried about *T. solium or T saginata?* T solium scares the bejeezus out of me.
Yeah, yeah, I’m sure the incidence is vanishingly small in the US, but this is yucky stuff.
See, the incidence of these nasty-ass paramecia, bacteriums and other macro/microbiological nasties is why I’ve been in favor oof reforming the slaughterhouse indusrty and changing the way meat is raised for a long time now.
It used to be that people raised their own meat, slaughtered them one at a time, and all the cuts came from the same animal, thus allowing a far lesser incidence of cross-contamination from another carcass. Now, pork, beef and chickens are slaughtered en masse, so what one animal carries in its blood or meat is far more likely to be passed to another. This is why I refuse to buy ground beef in packs, and I’ll grind my own if I have any choice in the matter.
I’ll gladly pay the premium for , say, Niman Ranch meats, or organic and free-range stuff, just to avoid possible health risks. Plus which, if I buy the good stuff, I eat less of it, and it has a better flavor. There was an excellent article in the Wash. Post magazine last year about an innovative farmer here in Virginia who rotates his herds and doesn’t feed them any animal byproducts. This is exactly what we need to support in this country, instead of McAwful’s.
Similar thing happened to me. I was making some homemade chorizo at my girlfriend’s house, while her father was making some Hungarian sausage. While correcting for the seasonings, he would just take a taste of raw pork. I almost freaked. Raw pork?! What about botulism and all that? No problems, apparently. So I followed his lead, and tasted the raw pork, to no ill effect. Not that I would take this anecdotal evidence as being proof for the safety of undercooked pork, or anything.
However, that said, I just don’t think pork (like duck) is particularly tasty cooked medium rare. Beef, sure. I mean, it’s a sacrilege to eat steak well-done. But pork? I’m not convinced. If you cook it through and cook it properly, it should not be dry. So I don’t see the point of rare pork.
I love the old Joy of Cooking except in its advice on pork, which is seriously outdated. Joy recommended cooking it to an internal temp of 180, which leaves it shoe leather. It’s especially a problem with modern pork, which is quite incredibly lean - there’s no fat or connective tissue to provide tenderness. Lots of older pork recipes simply won’t work anymore, especially if they depend on moist heat.
More modern cookbooks recommend 155-160, which leaves the pork nicely pink and juicy, but not at all raw. I find that it’s really a variation on the chicken test - at that temp, the juices are just running clear.