Why the discrepancy in safe meat cooking temperatures for home consumption? How is E-Coli or other bacteria, etc. rendered safe to eat at lower temps in beef (145-ish degrees) vs poultry (165 degrees) per USDA?
Standards somewhat hold true on Earth… water boils @ 212 and freezes @ 32 degrees so why not the same for bacteria destruction in beef and poultry?
Please don’t get all pedant about atmospheric pressure and boiling point.
Different meats tend to have different types of bacteria that require different temperatures to be made safe.
Such as, and why?
I can understand the difference between raw oysters from Indonesia vs beef from Omaha both delivered to Ohio in order to comprehend a potential bacterial variance. Yes, an extreme example - but what’s this to do with chicken and beef in the US?
I think the length of time it is held at a certain temp plays a big roll in this. I cook some of my beef as low as 128 degrees but for 24 hours. Hamburger usually about 145 degrees. 140 will kill almost any of the bacteria on contact, below that it starts to take longer
With chicken, you worry about salmonella b with pork, you worry about tricanosys. I believe both can be within the tissue. E-coli is all on the surface, so all you have to do is get the outside charred and you’re good to go. Ground beef, well that outside gets ground up and is now on the inside, so they recommend well done.
There is zero reason to worry about trichinosis with domestic pork in the United States or similar countries. The USDA has not recommended cooking to well for a long time, well over a decade, you can cook it as beef to your preference.
The same does not hold for wild hog, cook that low and slow until it hits 165F at least.
Also bear meat is prone to trichinosis. I know lots of people hunt wild boar especially in areas where it is a major nuisance. And they cooks em up and eats 'em. But Becky doesn’t have anything good to say about the meat.
Different animals are eating different things, which exposes them to different pathogens.
My brother was a pork producer (sounds better than being called a pig farmer). The pig barns were extremely clean, if smelly, and the pig shit fell into a pit under the barn, which was pumped out several times a year.
Compare that to the farm when he bought it. The older father kept his pigs in an outdoor pig sty, where they spent the day wallowing in the mud, which was filled with their own excrement. If you saw that, you’d certainly want to cook that pork well done.
I bet that’s the same reason chicken doesn’t need to cooked to the high temperatures they used to when the chickens spent all day rooting around their yards filled with chicken poop.
Safe consumption temperature for hamburger (ground beef) is the same as for chicken. The risks of eating hamburgers cooked below 160°F can be made very low though. Some forms of cooking like sous vide allow food to be held at lower temperatures for enough time to pasteurize them. That is how most canned foods are prepared along with cold cut meats.
It does and it’s not really all that different from you & me. We could easily pass through through a 130 or 150 degree room (or zero degrees) but can’t linger long.
That was my exact thought when I posted that, I was thinking how it applied to most all other life forms on earth.
Can you clarify the animal(s) you’re talking about?
Heh… Didn’t pick up why you asking him that right away. Both bear and wild boar may be infected with trichinosis carrying parasites.
As I understand it, just being multicellular and mammals means our resilience & tolerance to a range of climates is even by itself pretty good but our adaptability and technology is, in a very real way, what separates us from the animals (and other known forms of life).
But ya, bacteria are often really easy to individually neutralize with heat or bleach or UV or antibiotics or drying or salting, a little imbalance knocks the whole ecosystem out of whack
With beef and pork, if the meat is cut into chops or roasts, there’s very little risk of contamination in the interior of the cut; the most serious threat is on the surface, which gets much hotter than the internal temperature. Ground meats have potential contaminants mixed throughout and have to be cooked more thoroughly.
Chickens are just filthy through and through, and have to be split open to remove all their innards. They should be nuked from orbit.
They do have a recommended temp of 145, which in my experience is just on the pink side of palatable.
But that wild hog? 165 at least. But with the way that pasteurization works, if you get it to 165, you’re good- you don’t have to hold it there.
Looks like they also recommend the same for beef, so I was right, but I do think that’s too done for my preference at least with beef. They say 160F for venison which is just insane, that’s a ruined piece of meat.
Yes, 165 and then stop, though importantly that’s in the center/coldest part of the meat. For certainly problematic poultry, doing the breast and darker parts separately might be a good idea.
My understanding is not that chickens are “filthy”, but that their meat is less dense, so bacteria find it easier to grow into the less-solid flesh. So chicken should be treated like ground beef, as being mostly surface area.