i love steak and love it blood rare and this is fine to eat. does anyone know why pork,?

Question

chicken and lamb have to be cooked for longer and shouldn't be eaten under cooked, but beef on the other hand can be eaten raw.

Answer 1

The reason for this is pretty simple. Chicken is very susceptible to carrying disease. And pork, due to the pigs lifestyle, usually carries a lot of tiny parasites. Once you cook these meats fully, most all risks are reduced to zero. Cattle have a better imune system than do pigs and chickens, and therefore once treated in the slaughterhouse, are less likely to carry disease.

Answer 2

Beef and lamb are both often eaten rare. Pork, Poultry and Fish need to be cooked through due to the greater likely hood of parasites and bacteria in the food that lodge in the human gut.

The Tape worm is perhaps the best known from Pork and in the case of Poultry the usual bacteria is Salmonella. Both these can be fatal, Salmonella very rapidly if it is not treated quickly, where as tape worms can grow to be many metres long and make you ill by absorbing the goodness from your digested food before your body can use it.
A typical sign of someone with 'worms' is being constantly hungry.

Beef does also carry some risk, but there have been times when Parasites in Pork and Salmonella in Chickens have been considered to be endemic (in the vast majority of animals) so as a precaution best advice is always to cook thoroughly.
You should also not reheat Chicken, it should be eaten cold or recooked, in gravy, making sure it is hot right through.

Answer 3

Interesting question, I know the reason you have to cook chicken so thouroughly is because of Salmonella.

I found this on Wikipedia:

"Disease-causing Salmonella species have recently been re-classified into a single species, Salmonella enterica, which has numerous serovars. Salmonella Typhi causes typhoid fever. Other salmonellae are frequent causes of foodborne illness, especially from poultry and raw eggs and more generally from food that has been cooked or frozen, and not eaten straight away. While these infections would normally only require a treatment of antibiotics, the overuse of antibiotics in both the poultry and beef industries have created a strain of salmonella which is potentially resistant to antibiotics. It can also be caught by handling reptiles, such as iguanas or terrapins, which commonly host Salmonella species."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_illness

But that doesn't really explain why you have to treat "red" and "White" meat differently, I don't know. It'd be interesting to find out though.

Answer 4

Here is the reason why you can eat steak rare. Steak is muscle tissue and the interior of muscle tissue is sterile (no bacteria) so you just need to cook the outside of the steak for it to be safe to eat.

I heard in a food safety lecture that chicken are full of bacteria if it was not for the fact that it is a traditional food and people know how to cook it properly it would not be allowed to be sold on food safety grounds

pigs are more prone to parasites than cows are part of the life cycle of these parasites involves the bacteria travelling via the blood stream to a muscle in the animal and causing a cyst (sp?) if this is not cooked properly it can still be alive in under cooked meat.

Answer 5

The only meat that can't be eaten semi cooked would be chicken. Pork now a days isn't as bad as it used to be you can cook pork until it reaches 137 F internally. Most cookbooks ask you to cook pork till 170 - 185 F but that produces an overcooked and not desirable product but cooking until150 - 165 F still produces a juicy tender meat. I hope this helps you.

Answer 6

its all decaying flesh, no matter how you look at it, but poulty and pork harbor more types of bacteria that can only be killed off by cooking to a certain temperature. Listeria and salmonella for example are present in all poultry products, and need to be cooked at high enough temps to destroy it. Steak contains some bacteria, but not as harmful as the other meats. Hamburger is known for bacterial food poisoning from being under cooked. Pork and poultry also contain more parasites than beef, and they are destroyed only through cooking

Answer 7

This may freak you out but there was a common disease (at one time it was common) that came from pork. I remember my grandma cooking pork chops so long they were drier than wood because she "didn't want you kids to get worms". Apparently this was a serious concern at one time. While the infection of Trichinosis does rarely occur now it isn't something that should overly worry people. The trick is to just raise the internal meat temperature to the recommended level and be done with it. Not cook it at 1000 degrees for hours like my grandma.

Answer 8

I think the other meats get more germs faster and have to be cooked longer to kill them all. I like rare steak, too. I have just had some pork which was a little under-done and it is not so nice.

Answer 9

basically I like all my meats cooked well, no red bloody meat to be seen, I don't think these days other meat have to be cook well except for white meat, Pork and Lamb can be under cook, if you watch the cookery programmes many have any kind of red meat cook rare or medium rare, it was said undercooked pork was bad for you as you cook get ill, but with new regulations on pig breeding, I don't think the risk is around anymore.

Answer 10

it all harks back to the times when pigs were fed on ANYTHING - Kitchen scraps, the outside of cabbage leaves, other meats etc, and it all had to be boiled up to make a mash, although not always adhered to by certain unscrupulous farmers - and this caused sick animals that were still slaughtered for meat, causing bacteria and other diseases to be rife in pigs, the only way to counteract them was thourough cooking. Pig food/feeding this is strictly regulated these days and there are EEC rulings that have to be kept else you are out of business with inspectors around to make sure you're doing things right.