20 ms·
Just to be clear, it's far less safe to eat ground beef rare than a steak. With a steak, potentially harmful bacteria are all on the outside, which you sear. So
by nilkn 9y ago
Just to be clear, it's far less safe to eat ground beef rare than a steak. With a steak, potentially harmful bacteria are all on the outside, which you sear. So the interior can be practically raw and the steak will be safe to consume. If you grind it up, the outside is now mixed into the inside.
One cool trick to get around this is to cook the beef sous vide. Beef can be pasteurized at as low as 130 F as long as it's held at that temperature for long enough. That's basically medium rare.
- ouid 9y agoless safe, but not far less safe. since 1998, there have been less than 400 deaths from foodborne illness in the united states. 12 of those were from ground beef. Your risk is utterly negligible.
- OJFord 9y agoYou might still be right, but safety for many isn't about merely not dying.
- ouid 9y agoAlright, there are ~5000 cases of foodborne illness since 1998 in this report, ~600 resulting in hospitalizations. ~1 in a million over 20 years
- awinder 9y ago“CDC estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States”
- ouid 9y agoI was only talking about ground beef, but perhaps I am using this tool incorrectly? https://wwwn.cdc.gov/foodborneoutbreaks/ https://wwwn.cdc.gov/foodborneoutbreaks/
- awinder 9y agoThe tool seems to be dealing with reported outbreaks only. The total illnesses in the outbreak tool over that time period is at 370K, but the cdc reports 48M foodborne illness cases per year, so totally different scale
- ouid 9y agoOk, clearly I am drawing the wrong inference from this tool, but I think the point still remains valid. insofar as it matters whether your beef was ground, the statistics you should care about are outbreak statistics. The reason that ground beef is less safe than steak is that pathogens from thousands of cows are evenly distributed among the entire slurry. This would absolutely be captured in outbreak statistics. After the relevant processing, the argument for cooking burgers to 160 is no different from the argument to cook your lettuce to 160.
- cypherpunks01 9y agoTrue, however death is not the primary worry of anyone who thinks they have have eaten undercooked meat. People are generally more worried about just getting sick.
- ouid 9y agoif you're worried about just getting sick, the odds are more like 2/100000 per 20 years from ground beef, although I trust these numbers less, despite being from the CDC.
- awinder 9y agoThese numbers do not come from the CDC: “https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html” https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html”
- DanBC 9y agoDon't put urls in quotes!! https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- awinder 9y agoAnother key here is that commercially packaged ground beef does not come from one cow. It comes from around 400 cows.