So, is it possible to make a slab of meat good to eat without making it cooked? What if the meat is alive? Is living raw meat safer than dead raw meat? Let’s say the living meat was just attached to a artificial nutrition circulatory system, but still had a fully functional immune system.
Meat is perfectly fine to eat uncooked. Sushi/shashimi, steak tartare, and so it goes.
Cooking meat helps make old meat edible, and has a range of attributes that can add flavour. But the vast majority of meat eaten in the world is eaten raw. Most of it not by humans, but we are weird.
Unless it’s processed in non-sterile conditions. E.g. any commercially produced ground meat.
Anyway, irradiation should make such meat safe to eat without cooking it.
Said another way, meat (living or dead) is safe to eat raw when it isn’t infected now and wasn’t infected in the past, leaving toxic residues behind.
So a fresh kill is safe to eat raw. *If *you keep the dirt, hair, skin outsides, poop, pee, and the contents of the stomach, gall bladder, etc. off the meat as you butcher the animal. In other words, you need to kill it without infecting the wound and you need process it cleanly too. Discard any part you can’t keep clean and you’ll be fine.
A clean fresh kill cleanly processed that’s promptly refrigerated is safe to eat raw about as long as you see with ordinary commercial meat. Like a week or 10 days in a fridge, becoming more unappetizing by the day and risky towards the end. It’ll keep safely sealed in a freezer for years, albeit losing flavor and texture all the while.
As **scr4 **says, the problem with commercial meat is they’re not as careful as they ought to be about cleanliness. They’re planning on you cooking it which covers for (most of) their inevitable slip-ups. You violating their assumptions by eating it raw increases the risk … some. And increases it far more for ground meat than for straight cuts.
Drying meat, sometimes with seasoning, is the way to make jerky. Cut thin strips and keep air moving over it until it dries out. No cooking required.
And treating with acid is another means of preparing meat without traditional cooking with heat. This is perhaps more often done with seafood, but could apply to other types of more terrestrial meat like beef. Cut meat/fish/seafood into small cubes and smother in lime &/or lemon juice with tomato, peppers, and onion. Yummy ceviche.
So why dont they sell this treated raw meat in ready to eat packets at the supermarket? I ate some normal raw beef once as a small child and it was delicious.
One could argue that it isn’t the meat’s fault how it is treated and contaminated. Contaminating cooked meat is at least as dangerous, and sometimes more so. Indeed you can contaminate almost any food and make it dangerous.
Because many people have an irrational fear of irradiated food (example).
Also, cost.
Yes, but the main reason the FDA tells us to cook beef is because of risk of contamination.
Of course chicken and pork have other risks associated with them (salmonella and trichinosis). I think irradiation would take care of those as well.
They do. It is in the meat section.
Read the last paragraph of LSLGuy’s post and the preceding post by** scr4**.
I’ve never seen any radiated meat before, nor any ready to eat raw meat. Maybe the laws on raw meat are different in Australia. I would love to try some of this radioactive meat, though, is there there anywhere to buy it in Australia?
What about radiated fruits and vegetables? Are they any good? What do they taste like? I’ve heard that radiated for tastes different from normal food, will my carrots suddenly taste like chocolate?
How long will radioactive food last? Can I bite into a radiated apple then leave it out for hours and hours and when I come back except for some browning it is exactly the same?
Irradiated food is not radioactive.
My local Wegmans sells irradiated ground beef patties, both sliders and regular hamburger size. For some reason the only ones that they sell irradiated are ones flavored with added ingredients, like bacon cheddar, or jalapeño. Maybe the added ingredients increase the contamination risk?
By the way, I didn’t mean to imply that all irradiated foods are safe to eat raw. Irradiation can kill all pathogens, but it’s possible that some/many irradiated foods don’t receive sufficient dose to kill all pathogens.
Yes of course that’s why I included fruits and vegetables in my post, because are usually always safe to eat raw.
Ultra (very ultra)sounding beef is a thing in research, btw. So is running electricity through it.
Not really, Robert, depends on where you are. One of the standard cautions for traveling abroad (to some areas) is to not drink the local water or eat uncooked veggies like salad. They can all contain bacteria that the locals have built up a resistance to. But they will wreak havoc on your gut.
On my first trip to Thailand I got a good dose of intestinal distress that lasted for weeks. I was very careful not to eat or drink anything I shouldn’t so I was puzzled as to how I got it.
Then it dawned on me, I had been drinking iced tea from street vendors. The tea itself is prepared right before your eyes from boiling water and served in a new plastic bag, so it was OK. But the ice! They just scooped it out of buckets, it seemed good, nice cube shapes, but I bet it wasn’t bottled water to begin with.
Dennis
But most of that is irrelevant since I specifically mentioned buying things from the supermarket, from Australia, and even said “usually”, not always.
Food irradiation can cause slight changes to flavor, but not nearly in the carrots-taste-like-chocolate extreme. Any flavor change is due to the same chemical reactions that occur during cooking, just to a much lesser degree.
This is an excellent example of a phenomenon I have been through many times now. We grow up learning all kinds of things, and some of what we think we learned, really isn’t true. Often, no one intentionally lied to us, we just made incorrect deductions, or what we were told was over-simplified so as to save time.
The idea that we cook meat to make it safe to eat, is one of those kinds of things. Many children deduce, entirely logically, but also incorrectly, that the reason we cook meat to make it safe, is that all raw meat is poisonous.
But after we are older, and have more in depth, detailed information about the world, we usually realize that it’s more complicated than that.
Not sure what to call it, but it could do with a specific name. The phenomenon of building your life from harmless over-simplifications, and the occasional discovery of them later.