5 ms·
It's meat, but also without the immune system so...good luck.
by prometheus76 4y ago
It's meat, but also without the immune system so...good luck.
- ncallaway 4y ago(This isn’t a sarcastic or Socratic question, just genuine curiosity) Is there some aspect of the immune system that remains active and providing protection to an animal, or parts of an animal after it’s slaughtered?
- prometheus76 4y agoNot being exposed to air, for one. That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak (where the surfaces exposed to air are cooked to kill bacteria) and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat).
- LtWorf 4y ago> That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak The USA department of agriculture begs to differ. https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Is-a-rare-steak-safe-to-eat https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Is-a-rare-steak-safe-to-eat Personally I never place much trust in random comments on the internet.
- JasserInicide 4y agoSo if the USDA recommends this, what's the reasoning behind allowing restaurants to sell rare steaks?
- sokoloff 4y agoThey recommend 145°F, which is medium-well. Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative.
- jaywalk 4y agoThere's also steak tartare, which isn't cooked at all.
- LtWorf 4y ago> Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative. Do you mean you grew coltures of bacteria from various levels of cooking and compared? Was this work peer reviewed?
- sokoloff 4y agoI do not mean that. (That would be experimental rather than experiential.) Order of magnitude, ~15% of beef consumed is quality steak cuts. US residents on average eats 67 pounds of beef (so 10 pounds of steak) per year. If eating steak cooked less than medium-well was dangerous in a practical/meaningful sense, it would be common knowledge (based on lived experience) that steak should be catastrophically over-cooked as a food safety measure.
- ncallaway 4y agoLook at almost any menu in any restaurant that serves steak and you’ll find a little asterisk, and a note about the USDA’s recommendation at the bottom of the menu. The USDA has not made it illegal or unlawful to cook steak rare. They recommend against it. A lot of people like rare steak, and will pay a restaurant to prepare a rare steak. So they do.
- replygirl 4y agoUSDA has been trying and failing for decades to make a visual aid that accurately communicates the balance of a healthy diet. and they ban foods that people in other countries have eaten for 1000 years (while allowing them for pets). they are both inaccurate and overly conservative with nutrition and health guidance
- thomastjeffery 4y agoIt's more like the USDA is begged to differ. They exist to be an ultimate authority, and that constrains them from presenting a compromised position, even if that compromise is something people find widely acceptable. The USDA simply isn't in a position to guarantee enough safety in this case to balance against their liability. Safety is compromise. Eating rare steak is risky, but most of the risk is mitigated. Getting sick from eating rare steak is, itself, rare.
- ncallaway 4y agoSure, but this is chicken, which is already notably porous, which is why it’s generally considered unsafe to eat rare chicken, even if it’s been well cooked on the outside. At least for that aspect, I’d think the protection is less relevant. I would be very curious how that’s handled with other meats, like lab grown beef. I’d be more hesitant about lab grown beef, if the cooking instructions prevented cooking it rare.
- formerly_proven 4y ago> and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett
- evilduck 4y ago> permits mett to be sold only on the day of production Sounds like Germany's laws acknowledge that non-fresh mett poses the same dangers as store bought hamburger.
- chollida1 4y agoCan you explain the significance of your statement? Surely the meat we all eat is dead along with the immune system and then cooked.
- prometheus76 4y agoI'm talking about while you are growing the meat, whether it be in a natural system that is self-regulating and with an immune system, or in a vat where any contamination will spread rampantly. That's one of the biggest problems with lab-grown meat: if you make it at a scale that is economically feasible, the chance for contamination is so high that very few batches will make it through the process, and will have to be discarded instead.
- lr4444lr 4y agoCan't we solve this at least temporarily with a sodium rich environment? It seems to be effective for safe fermentation. I have no idea whether the biochemical reactions necessary to produce the meat though would be inhibited if we did this.
- prometheus76 4y agoTry injecting yourself with saltwater and see what happens. The osmotic effects won't just affect the undesired cells. It will also affect the desired cells.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
- prometheus76 4y agoDepends on the salt content. If you try things you read in comment sections on the internet, maybe you shouldn't be on the internet.
- 4y ago
- drdaeman 4y agoIf I understood your comment correctly (I'm sorry if I didn't) - isn't it grown in essentially sterile conditions, so lack of immune system isn't an issue as I must imagine it shouldn't be able to communicate any transmissible diseases?
- mlindner 4y ago"Sterile conditions" isn't really a thing without temperatures high enough to cook the meat.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aendruk 4y agoThat’s correct. The challenge is that ensuring purity of ingredients during production is tricky at scale. A small mistake could ruin a large batch of food, lowering total yields and raising costs. Ideally the production process would include something analogous to the immune system to make it more robust. For certain contaminants simple outcompetition by probiotics might suffice.
- kube-system 4y agoThe alternative, natural meat, is even trickier to keep sterile at scale. This is why it is advised to cook meat fully. The presence of bacteria on natural animal meat is common.
- lost_tourist 4y agoIt's more than "common" it's almost 100% guaranteed.
- aendruk 4y agoThis is a misleading statement. We don’t even try to keep slaughtered meat sterile during production; the animal’s immune system makes that unnecessary.