Rob's Rants

The New York Times published an article on 6/11/09 that once again named poultry as the largest source of food poisoning in the US. Also listed as causes of illness: vegetables. In fact, the article had this to say:

Researchers counted leafy vegetables, fungi, root vegetables, sprouts and vegetables from vines or stalks as separate categories. Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, noted that if all of the produce categories were combined, outbreaks associated with vegetables would have far exceeded those in poultry.

Of all the food categories mentioned in the article, one was absent: hamburger. In fact, it wasn’t even mentioned.

So, as I said in my original hamburger post, most people won’t get sick from a rare burger.

As I wrote in my rare hamburger post, I think that people’s fear of getting sick from undercooked ground beef is overblown. The other day I was in the supermarket and I saw something that got me almost as worked up as the message board post. Standing in the chicken section, a woman was about to pick up a whole bird, totally wrapped in plastic. Then she paused, walked past me, around the corner to the vegetable section, and came back with a plastic vegetable bag. She turned it inside out, pulled it over her hand, and only then did she pick up the chicken wrapping the already plastic wrapped bird in another layer of plastic.

Are you fucking kidding me? It’s not toxic waste! It’s a chicken. I’m not saying that you should lick it, but what kind of mind-bending brainwashing does it take to make someone so utterly terrified of their food that they treat it like it’s a biohazard. Actually, probably more carefully than a biohazard because I’m betting she doesn’t glove up or wrap her hand in plastic when she wipes her ass.

I was stunned. Appalled. Dumbfounded.

So I decided to do a little research into the actual chances of contracting salmonella from a typical supermarket chicken. I’m betting that they’re higher than getting sick from a rare hamburger, but certainly not deserving of this kind of treatment.

So here it goes …. how safe is our chicken?

Turns out, it’s probably not very safe at all. Probably the main test of consumer chicken has been done by Consumer Reports magazine, which found in 2007 that 87% of supermarket chickens were contaminated with either campylobacter or salmonella or both.¹ While disturbing, the presence of some amount of bacteria doesn’t necessarily translate directly to sickness potential. In order to cause illness, there must be a certain concentration of bacteria and you must consume a minimum number before illness is guaranteed. In susceptible individuals that seems to be at least 400 to 500 bacteria² but more in most people. In fact, the amount of contamination required to cause noticeable illness varies widely depending on the organism (eg. campylobacter or salmonella), the age of the individual, any underlying medical conditions, and even what they eat along with the contaminated food.³

Unlike my hamburger conclusions then, it’s hard to say how safe things are. We know that chickens are likely contaminated. And we know that some varying amount of that contamination could make you sick. But unlike hamburgers, I don’t hear anyone asking for or advocating serving rare chicken. So until I dig up a little more information, my guess is that there won’t be enough bacteria on the outside of a wrapped chicken to make you sick, but if the person doing the picking had issues then maybe the caution is justified in her case.

But you certainly won’t see me double bagging my poultry any time soon.

² Foodborne Pathogenic Microorganisms and Natural Toxins Handbook, US FDA Center for Food Safet & Applied Nutrition, http://www.foodsafety.gov/~mow/chap4.html. Retrieved 6/2/2009

³ http://www.mass.gov/Eeohhs2/docs/dph/environmental/foodsafety/ref_manual/chap_3.pdf