I’m a white guy and I like my meat (beef, lamb, pork, fish) rare or raw. When my brother returned to the US after living in Germany for a few years he made me a German dish of raw pork and onion (mett), it was delicious. I also love watermelon but hate grape soda. Isn’t life interestingly?
Yeah, and there is some dinosaur piss in the coffee I’m drinking, but it’s clearly ridiculous to say that’s what I’m drinking.
So that’s why we’re called crackers!
So, why is it? Inquiring minds want to know!
You can still have rare steaks with little to no risk; almost all of the beef recalls are for factory-packed ground beef where one contaminated piece will spoil hundreds or thousands of pounds of otherwise fine ground beef.
Your steaks, briskets, etc… generally speaking any solid cut of meat doesn’t have bacteria on the INSIDE of the steak, and I suspect if they did, you’d know it as soon as you opened the package. And usually a rinse, drying and searing the outside (or braising/slow-cooking) will take care of any external bacteria (heating above 165 will kill them, as will longer cooking at lower temps).
It’s probably a good idea to get your burgers cooked to well-done though when they’re not made from meat you’re confident about. It’s what I do anyway.
But I don’t sweat a medium-rare steak. It’s probably pretty low on the list of risky things I commonly do.
People who don’t like steak order it well done or medium well whenever they occasionally order it just to see whether they still don’t like it. Inevitably it turns out that yep, they still don’t like steak.
People who actually like steak have at some point been given a piece of meat they thought was under cooked, but they didn’t realize it until it was too late and they had already taken a bite or two. Those are the people who realized that steak is FUCKING GOOD! They ask how to order a steak to get it as good as the one they’re eating right now, and if they’re lucky there’s someone around who knows what they’re talking about that can tell them “medium rare”. In this person’s mind, they’ll usually tell themselves “I like this steak a lot but I don’t like seeing all the blood, so I’ll just order medium instead.” And the next steak they got was shitty again, like all the others before that one gloriously delicious steak. They’ll wonder why nobody can make steak like that one time that was so goddamned good, not realizing that they’re ordering it wrong.
Nobody likes a well done steak. Some people have convinced themselves they prefer it that way, but that person has never considered steak to be one of their favorite foods.
If it’s true, which I wonder about but let’s assume it is, it’s not a question of RACE, but of culture. People enjoy foods they are familiar with, so if African-Americans, say, are used to medium and well done beef, they will tend to prefer that, just as Chinese people enjoy cuisine I would find weird and Norwegians enjoy lutefisk and Russians like borscht.
There was a long period of time where long- time posters would come here (of all places) to ask presumably sincere questions about the preferences and actions of black people. Like thisone.
Might I suggest class as a major, perhaps preeminent, factor?
As Umlaut says, chicken, pork and ground beef are much cheaper sources of protein than (non ground) beef. Cheap cuts of meat that are safe/tasty to eat rare/medium rare are uncommon. As others have suggested, the cuts of meat that are worth having rare/ medium rare are expensive.
Hence, people who 1) are currently 2) come from 3) mainly know people who are in the lower economic strata will tend to eat meat well done and have less experience with rare/medium rare meat. Since they have little experience eating good cuts of meat, the idea of eating a medium rare steak is as repulsive to them as eating medium rare pork.
My impression as a non-American is that quite a few aspects associated with the black American subculture have to do with their overrepresentation in the lower income quintile.
Any white people who grew up lower class here? Any black people who grew up middle or upper class? Tell us how steak tended to be cooked.
Anecdotally, I can say that my white father’s side is upper middle class and bloody meat wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. When having steaks, it was common to request how you’d like to have them cooked. On my white mother’s side, which is lower class, meats are cooked well done. Seriously, when she cooks a steak, you’d think she was strictly adhering to Genesis 9: 3-4:
3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.
Throw my steak on the grill till it quits mooing. That’s done enough for me.
I’m white and even if I preferred my steak well done, I would be reluctant to order it prepared that way since well done meat is generally considered to be prole food.
Other prole foods you may wish to avoid include hot dogs, crawfish, fried foods, fast food, sodas, sweet tea, beer from domestic megabreweries, blended whiskey, bologna sandwiches, etc.
Aren’t most of these foods associated with the Southeast and Midwest of the US, irrespective of race?
Also, you can have my Jameson Whiskey when you pry it from my moist, drunken hands.
It’s too bad nobody thought to post that link 50 posts ago.
My mom is seriously repulsed when anyone at her table cuts into pink meat. It doesn’t have to be right in front of her, and it doesn’t have to be blood rare, either.
Well for starters in the USA if you’re at a steak restaurant where you can order your steak rare, you’ve already passed a economic barrier in that it tends to be pricey, that eliminates a lot of racial and ethnic minorities right off the bat who can’t afford to eat there often. It would not shock me to learn high end steak restaurants tend toward white clientele.
I didn’t see it before, but my point was not to try to answer that question. The point was that this has been going, from the other side, since pretty much day one.
Le Château du Boeuf
We only serve pink meats
Well, from a monetary perspective we were not well-off after my parents divorced. [Meaning, we didn’t have much ready money, but certainly weren’t lower class…(books, habits, hobbies, and attitudes make up “class” as much as money).]
We ate a lot of ground beef. If served as a burger, it was generally medium-rare to rare (my mom and I love rare burgers).
My mother served steak and roasts mostly rare, with a small portion on each end that was well-done formy stepfather, who preferred well-done meat.
BTW, for the Safety Police out there, I’ve never had “food poisoning” in my life (and I still eat rare burgers if I know where the meat came from), so, no, rare burgers don’t immediately cause teh dead.
ETA, now I have mom eating her lamb rare, and not with feckin’ mint jelly. VICTORY!
I’m by no means a food historian, but didn’t the practice of eating meat well done start because of food safety? To this day, if I have little to no trust in the source of my meat, I prefer that it be served well done for health purposes. But for taste purposes, most meat is more flavorful and juicier if it isn’t overly well done. I grew up on stringy beef roasts and pork chops cooked to a state resembling hockey pucks. I thought I didn’t like meat until I was served medium rare prime rib once at a banquet. It was a minor revelation. Had a similar experience with pork.
How did a misspelled Mercola link go this long without being corrected and/or roll-eyed?
Who are you people and what have you done with the… other people?!