Food safety info

[oldcynic]

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-03-cookbooks-readers-bad-advice-food.html

"This is important because cooking meat, poultry, seafood and eggs to a safe internal temperature kills off pathogens that cause foodborne illness," Levine says. "These temperatures were established based on extensive research, targeting the most likely pathogens found in each food."

"In other words, very few recipes provided relevant food-safety information, and 34 of those 123 recipes gave readers information that wasn't safe," Chapman says. "Put another way, only 89 out of 1,497 recipes gave readers reliable information that they could use to reduce their risk of foodborne illness."

[Major Nikon]

1. It helps to know a few basics about food safety

If you've ever had diarrhea, and most people do several times throughout their life, it was probably related to food safety and improper food handling. While people typically blame restaurants, the most likely culprit is their own kitchen.

Not mentioned in the article is the threat of cross contamination through improper handling and is arguably a greater threat than under cooking food. Also not mentioned in the article is the relationship between time AND temperature in respect to food safety. You can actually cook poultry to 136F and it will be just as safe as if you had cooked it to 165F. So the idea that just because a magic number for internal temperature hasn't been reached, the cooked item isn't safe.

Also not mentioned is the relativity of "safe". Commercially available eggs are quite safe. About 1 in 10,000 industrially produced eggs in the US is contaminated with salmonella. That doesn't mean you'd get sick if you ate that one egg raw , so the likelihood of that is even smaller. So you could actually eat 2 raw eggs per day for 50 years and very likely never get salmonellosis. Even if you did the vast majority of those cases are mild, which means you'd get a case of the shits for a day or two and be done. Salmonellosis is a huge problem in the US, but people aren't getting it from eating eggs with runny yolks. They are getting it from spreading pathogens from contaminated uncooked chicken around in their kitchen.