I believe no one has yet mentioned the Icelandic delicacy, rotted shark. I can’t find my Icelandic cookbook, but Wikipedia describes it thus:
The recipe:
The illustrations: https://satwcomic.com/nordics-like-fish
and consequences Have a safe trip home - Scandinavia and the World
(and other Food Exotic Food - Scandinavia and the World)
I’ve heard this my whole life, but every single salmonella outbreak I know of has been from spinach or lettuce or some other poorly washed produce. Do we have any actual statistics on salmonella in chicken?
My understanding is that, like trichinosis and pork, the social mores are a holdover from a time when those diseases were far more common. I’ve seen cooks suggest serving medium rare pork these days in pushback to the common wisdom, because they know pork is far less likely to contain trichinosis than it was 50 or 100 years ago.
I haven’t seen anyone suggest rare chicken yet (except for that restaurant in Japan linked upthread), but my understanding is the situations are similar. Chicken from reputable farms/butchers just won’t have salmonella, or at least it’s far less common than salmonella from other sources, like produce. But I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise if you’ve got the numbers.
Salmonella on lettuce can get there two ways: liquid manure sprayed on the fields carrying Salmonella
putting raw chicken on a board and then putting raw lettuce on the same board. Salmonella are hard to kill, normal Soap and lukewarm water are not enough.
That’s not a good comparisioin. Trichinosis are parasites: can be seen with the naked eye, and different to fight than bacteria.
Unless you buy directly on the farm and have a look-around, Most meat People buy at the Supermarket is cheap because it’s mass -produced (I don’t have the percentages for the US, but the Price can’t be achieved with a dozen chickens in a Yard).
These industrial farming of putting 5 000 chickens on 5 Levels in one house, each in a Cage as big as legal paper, is a breeding ground and Transmission for all bacteria. This is a big Problem, because either there is a law that the People running These industrial farms give anti-biotics in advance to stop the diseases - which doctors are very upset about (for good reason) - or you forbid them, and risk the chickens being infected with disesases.
I think the later is the current US Approach, and hence the rule from the FDA that all chicken must be dunked into bleach solution at the slaughterhouse. I don’t know how many Salmonella that really kills (and how many linger on the inside of the meat?), because dunking Food in bleach is not allowed in Europe (we think that’s eww, we want to eat it).
All measures that reduce infection cost the farm owners Money and make less Profit, so the industry opposes health and animal protection measures (here as well).
In Addition, several thousands chickesn in one place produce a lot of liquid manure, and the cheapest way to get rid of it is to spray it on some fields or somewhere. If the law doesn’t forbid it, it’s a huge Problem for groundwater and a way to carry bacteria far and wide. But properly disposing of liquid manure costs the farmer Money, so again they oppose it.
The commercial chicken facilities I’ve visited actual take preventative measures against infection. Our happy chickens? None whatsoever. Damn things are probably crawling with nasties.
I thank you, constanze.
My main complaint on the few occasions I’ve had game in the US is it is not gamey enough (I’m from a rural area of the UK where properly hung game is common). Is serving game the way it is meant to be served (i.e. hung up unrefrigerated for a while prior to cooking) be legal in a restaurant anywhere in the US ?(specifically in California)
But going back to the OP one thing people should bear in mind with all these ‘I ate X and was fine’ story is that the immune system in healthy adults have is a bloody powerful mechanism (if it wasn’t we wouldn’t be here). So it’s quite possible there was dangerous microbes in X but some part of your immune system did it’s job.
This speaks to my point above about “true” food poisoning, as presumably your immune system won’t help if the microbes have already generated toxic chemicals.
What kind of preventive measures? Giving antibiotics en masse “as precaution” is exactly what doctors and scientists are upset about and want to change.
If you have several thousands chickens next to each other, with open sores from stress-picking despite clipping the beaks, and feathers falling out from stress, and shit everywhere - you have one giant breeding place for bacteria.
Happy chickens are usually much more healthy chickens because they are much less stressed. Do they have open sores? Pick themselves or each other? Feathers falling out?
Also, if you actually see signs that one of the chickens is ill, you can isolate it and treat it. In an industrial setting, nobody knows which and how many of the thousands chickens are sick, and there’s no place for isolation.
Separate biosecurity uniforms for each facility. Sterilize tools and equipment before bringing them in. Destroy infected birds and equipment if needed. But most importantly, prevent access by wild avians. No antibiotics as you describe because they want a Perdue label.
It certainly makes for good imagery.
Chickens peck. Our chickens peck. Sometimes they break the skin. Sometimes they pull feathers out. If one looks sick we kill it. But I don’t recall more than a few instances. Usually they just die.
No suiting up. No disenfectants. Nothing to prevent them from eating feed that overflying geese have shit in. No mechanism to shuttle the eggs away when they lay. Instead, they just shit on the egg until someone picks it up, eventually.
And so it’s no surprise CDC is seeing record infections from backyard chickens: https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/live-poultry-05-16/index.html/
How exactly do uniforms or equipment help if a few thousands chicken sit in an automated house and shit everywhere? 
That’s good to prevent the bird flu strains, which are usually transmitted by wild geese etc.
But I was talking about salmonella. How do you know that in these 1 000 chickens in a fully automated facility, one is sick and infecting all others?
I don’t know what a Perdue label is, how strict or tightly controlled it is.
Feed should be in covered containers, even for organic or animals-friendly chickens.
Are you saying they don’t have nests where they lay the eggs? They usually don’t shit into the nest.
Also, eggs have a shell that can be washed.
I wasn’t talking about unsupervised backyard chickens. The alternative here is organic or animal-friendly chicken. But no matter what, there are rules, and there should be a regular control.
Sad to say, it is not that the hanging of wild game is illegal, the serving of it is; hell the selling of it is.
The unimpressive taste of all retail winged game in America, barring the seasonal import of Scottish grouse, for some reason, is a result of their being raised under huge nets, i.e., farmed, with little muscle development of note.
They’re spending the money to make a fashion statement.
HACPP plans, self-inspection, inspection by USDA FSIS
You are correct.
Go outside and watch your chickens eat. The feed doesn’t stay in containers. Chickens scratch. Chickens forage. Organic chicken meat in the store has plenty of bugs.
One thing that’s funny about the USDA organic label is that the feed has to be animal-free, but of course any small animal that makes the mistake of wondering into the yard is a goner. Usually mice, mourning doves, and various insects IME.
We could require vaccination of chickens for salmonella. The UK does this. Campylobacter would be nice too but AFAIK there isn’t one available.
People in this thread seem to be talking about contaminated meat when the original question was about rotten meat. The bacteria that cause putrefaction are not (as far as I know) pathogenic in humans. And you can get salmonella from perfectly fresh meat.
Incidentally, I’ve eaten chicken sashimi. I don’t know how they keep salmonella out of the food chain in Japan (perhaps it involves a lot of antibiotics).
Yes, normally if you properly cook bad meat, it is safe to eat. Two reservations: (1) It’s not always safe to eat, and (2) anaerobic bacteria are more dangerous than stuff that grows in the presence of air.
Including Botulinum, an anerobic bacteria that produces botulinum toxin, which is not destroyed by ordinary cooking. And Perfringens is so dangerous that you wouldn’t want to even handle the raw meat, even if it might be safe after cooking.
But if you watch enough “man in the wild” television, eventually you’ll see someone eating some dead animal they just found.