Will Pink Pork Kill You?

every food is safely "done" at around 140, even chicken.

w/r/t poultry, recommendations for 160 in the breast and for 180 (even 200) in dark meat are entirely for mouth feel. ...but you'll have a hell of a time telling the wife and mother-in-law that. i take chicken of at 155 in the breast. legs/wings i go by feel.

That's 145° now. But I still won't eat chicken at that temperature because every single piece of chicken in this country has salmonella all over it and in it.

As far as trichinosis goes if it's in the meat you are probably gonna get a few spores in your system because it begins to break down at about 180° but can withstand 200° on special occassions. Luckily it has been removed from the commercial pork.

Still got that piece of chicken in the fridge for you. Maybe we can Warren to Sous Vide it for you to 120° just toi give you an extra chance.

That's funny. I was at a festival the other day where the Pork Patrol was on their tour promoting the "other white meat". I sampled some of the cooked pork and thought it was very dry.

He told me they cooked it to 160 degrees. I asked him what a safe temperature was and he told me 128 degrees, but he was dealing with the public and had to tell them to cook it at least 160 degrees for health reasons.

to me, 128 seems a little low, but 160 seems way too high.

140 for trichinosis. well established (actually, 138, but 140 has a safety factor). commercial pork is essentially trich free anyway. any "health" recommendations for 160 in pork are due to the fact that most folks don't use a thermometer, or use it incorrectly, or that it might be out of calibration. 160 is not when trichdies. 160 is the temp at which you can be damn sure it's long dead, big difference. it dies instantly at that temp, by the way. it doesn't need a certain amount of time.

bacteria is what needs exposure at certain temps for specific (and variable) lengths of time to die. you can kill bacteria at lower temps with longer exposure, or higher temps for much shorter exposure. trich is not bacteria, it dies instantly at short term exposure at a specific temp. human error is what is responsible for quoting "safe" pork temps well above that. very few people use food thermometers, and most ovens are WAY off.

most salmonella poisoning in this country comes from produce, despite your truth about how much there is on chicken. people often eat produce raw. if you were as concerned about salmonella as you seem to be, you should be cooking ALL vegetables, and avoiding peanut butter. you are not, i would bet. which proves you also do not follow the letter of the law, but that you also feel comfortable assessing risk on your own despite warnings.

salmonella on chicken is not even as bad as lysteria, or many other intestinal bacteria in beef and pork. chicken is no more dangerous than beef or pork when handled properly. being "extra safe" by overcooking food says more about unwarranted fear and a misunderstanding of what's involved than it says about understanding where bacteria come from, how they reproduce, and what will or won't kill them. what bacteria are you saying are actually IN meat (as opposed to on it)?

best, safest practice is to take everything to 160, you are absolutely correct. hear that? you are ABSOLUTELY correct. Joe Public ought to feel very safe eating his pork/chicken/beef at 160. he's way overcooking the stuff, as far as safety goes, but he will never get sued.

'they' say 160 so that the 16 year-old summer employee can get a safe-serv cert, and won't expose grand-ma Jones to salmonella, and incur a giant liability .

there is virtually NO intestinal bacteria in pork/beef/chicken. on it, yes. in it, no (unless they meat had been poorly and obviously cut into or, say, de-boned)

you can cook a chicken breast next to a steak, serve both at 125 internal. both are safe. the chicken will not be firm, and it'll have crappy mouth feel, yes. but it's safe.

that chicken you leave out on the counter will possibly be swimming in bacteria on the surface. again, you are correct. the interior wouldn't be. i know you don't believe it. what can i say. but the very act of handling it, and cutting into it would expose the interior to the bacteria.

stike wrote:

every food is safely "done" at around 140, even chicken.

Hate to split hairs here but that's not 100% true. Cooking food to a certain temp makes it safe if, and only if, that temp is sufficient to kill any specific bacteria that are present.

S. Aureus and some strains of E. coli can produce a heat stable toxin that will not be rendered harmless at 140*F.

Clostridium perfringens can produce very heat stable spores.

The infamous prion (protein) that causes BSE (Mad Cow Disease) will survive all but direct exposure to steam or being incinerated itself. So unless you cook your BSE contaminated burger to a consistency of lump charcaol you're not safe from BSE

So to summarize the key is accquiring safe meat. It is true that most of the pathogens present int eh food chain can be rendered inactive with proper temps it is not an absolute.

that's basically my point... but you were clearer than I was.

your post agrees, though, that the BACTERIA is toast at 140.

i was never talking about their toxins, though. it's not possible to render a piece of meat safe by cooking it to only kill the bacteria if it has been outside the window (the incredibly vague and overly safe window) of four hours between 40-140. you can't 'purify' meat of the toxin by cooking it. that is agreed, and i think whenever anyone asks about their meat being safe, we here generally trip over ourselves to explain the difference between bacterial safety, and safety from their toxins. (such as in the infamous "my fire was out, will i be ok if i just restart the fire?" posts)

and i don't think even Bobby-Q is worried about BSE in his chicken. heh heh

LOL :laugh: You beat me to the reply Stike. Very good points. Thats why I love my Kitchen Aid mixer with meat grinder attachment. Always "fresh ground" for me!


----my late reply----

Cooking meat that has the infective agent for BSE will not make it safe. The infective agent is not a bacterium or a virus. It's is single small protein that has the ability to affect other proteins and copy itself. By definition it's not even "alive" so you can't "kill" it.

It would need to be physically destroyed by chemical or heat methods. If it's in the tissue then you can't do that without destroying the tissue itself, i.e. a very black and crispy burger. I suppose you could use some industrial pressure cooker too as direct contact with steam will destroy proteins, but I'm not sure what you'd have left. No amount os A1, BBQ sauce or anything else would likely make it worth eating.

You are correct that BSE manifests itself primarily in the central nervous system, but it's not clear if ti can become blood borne or reside in other tissues.

Remember that the primary way it's been transmitted before was from animals eating the tissue of other infected animals so in those cases it survived whatever processing was done as well as a trip through the consumer animal's digestive system and bloodstream to reach the brain.

Again... the majority of food borne pathogens we encounter can be avoided with safe handling such as washing vegetables/fruits and cooking food to safe temps. Your "garden variety" Salmonella and E. Coli don't take heat too well, but just like there are many strains of drug resistant bacteria/viruses there are also a few "heat resistant" ones too. Thankfully they don't show up often in the food chain.

if there is a mark on trich free pork, ive been reading about freezing for so many days at certian temps or just buying trich free, is there any marking for it.

some sources out there refer to "certified" trich free, just never seen that on a package, wonder if its on the box. havent gotten it from bear meat yet, maybe the eastern bear is better than those fish eaten western bears

maybe you need this? i can't believe this is a real thing. i kept waiting for the punchline.

http://www.changethatsrightnow.com/problem_detail.asp?SDID=3406:1904