Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Pasteurization is one of the great lifesavers of the modern age, akin to the initial use of fire to cook food. We in the west can afford to be obsessed with "fresh" because, thanks to modern scientific agriculture, we don't have to deal with so many pathogens. But the bugs are still out there. Cook your food properly. I would be extremely cautious about any new sterilization tech. I want it tested not just on clean food from clean farms, but on the horrible stuff not normally seen in our food chains.

I like my steak overcooked, cooked to the point of wrecking it, because where I grew up eating under-cooked meat was a serious health hazard. We used to wash our vegetables in water with a bit of bleach. Whenever I see someone eating a bloody steak, or vegetables rinsed only in tapwater, I shudder a little.

Does it kill pork tapeworms?

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-ed...

"Some people get it by ingesting microscopic tapeworm eggs found in raw or undercooked pork, or unwashed fruits and vegetables from overseas. But Palma has never travelled outside the U.S."

I'm a westerner now living in Vietnam. I travel around the country quite a bit by motorbike. Through all of the most rural places. I'm currently in the far north having driven up from the south.

People in this country leave all of the bits of meat out in the sun with flies and what not all over it. I've seen cows, chickens and pigs slaughtered on the side of dusty dirty roads. They eat the whole animal... entrails and all.

Most cooking of meat just means it has been boiled in the bowl you're eating it out of. The concept of sanitization here is incomprehensible, it just does not exist. Literally, millions of people live like this... not even because they have to, there is actually a lot of money here... but because they just don't know any better.

Needless to say, I've become vegetarian with eggs. You just can't trust the meat at all. My diet on the road is the same almost every day... fried rice, tofu with tomato, fried eggs, boiled veggies. When I first moved here 3 years ago I would be sick a lot, but now my belly is used to it. Worst is a bit of belly ache.

Boiled in the bowl you eat it from is pretty good sanitation IMO. Great if you can't count on anything to be clean, sterilize at the last step.

There's almost nothing that's unsafe well cooked unless it was rotten to begin with

Prions

Prion diseases are a first-world problem where factory farms turn their cattle into cannibals.

Botulism. Pasteurization kills the bacteria, but it takes a ton of heat to kill the dangerous spores (250 F for three minutes).

The bacteria is aneorbic so it's not a huge danger outside of canned food

Isn't the gut moderately anaerobic?

It's the toxin the bacteria produces that's dangerous. AFAIK botulism bacteria don't grow inside humans

It can grow inside babies, which is why you can't feed babies honey.

You don't feed babies honey because they can choke on it.

That might be true, but the reason for this recommendation is because botulism spores can exist in honey and the systems (mostly gut bacteria, from what I understand) of infants are not developed enough to deal with it, unlike older children and adults.

AFAIK, spores have not been observed in US-sourced honey, but that is no guarantee.

I forgot about this, you're totally right

> There's almost nothing that's unsafe well cooked unless it was rotten to begin with

Boiled rice - op's staple carbohydrate - can be dangerous if reheated. https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/can...

> Uncooked rice can contain spores of Bacillus cereus, a bacterium that can cause food poisoning. The spores can survive when rice is cooked.

> If rice is left standing at room temperature, the spores can grow into bacteria. These bacteria will multiply and may produce toxins (poisons) that cause vomiting or diarrhoea.

> The longer cooked rice is left at room temperature, the more likely it is that the bacteria or toxins could make the rice unsafe to eat.

We descend from thousands of generations of people who ate meat without the benefit of refrigeration or USDA inspections. Unless you have other health problems already, the meat is fine. (I guess "mad cow disease" is an exception, but that's a really long-term exception.)

Yes I have lived in SE Asia. I never hesitated to eat at the restaurants next door to the meat markets that had never seen refrigeration.

> who ate meat without the benefit of refrigeration or USDA inspections

There is a reason why those exist and it's not for fun.

They also knew (a bit) how to keep it good (for a while) without refrigeration.

Hence beef jerky, ham curing and other techniques. It would also get cooked on the day if not processed. In northern Europe the weather also helps.

Not to mention the tapeworms and other nice stuff laying around.

Your SE restaurants probably deep fried the stuff or left it cooking for long.

All diseases originally came from someone else.

The fact there are 8 billion people in the world rather than 1 million is a big part of why you have to be so much more careful with food safety.

The chance that a random liter of river water contains pathogens from someone else is much higher now than a few hundred years ago.

This strikes me as an appeal to nature. So what if our ancestors survived without knowing better? We're all alive today despite horrific lack of food safety through the ages, not thanks to it. We have every reason to use modern, hard-earned scientific knowledge to ward off easily preventable diseases.

YouTube Barnacle goosling. What you’ll see are small chicks jumping off a cliff and trying to fly with something like a 40-60% survival rate. Those chicks descended from thousands of generations that jumped off cliffs without the benefit of nets. That doesn’t mean that nets wouldn’t dramatically improve their survival rate!

Salad, home-made sauces, home-made lemonade, popsicles, etc. are the stuff that will really get you sick in rural places. (Assuming you aren’t eating raw river fish or something.) You can get all kinds of fun diseases from drinking untreated water or eating any food containing untreated water.

Boiled meat should be fine though. Becoming a hot-soup-a-tarian wouldn’t be the worst idea if getting sick is your big fear.

> where I grew up eating under-cooked meat was a serious health hazard.

This is a not-so-obvious fact I only learned about in my 20s : that everyday food can be dangerous. I grew up in a very rural area and never thought our food couldn't be safe (except the milk, we had to boil it once back back from the farmer next door). I liked to eat bits of raw meat while my mother cooked and always thought we rinsed the vegetables only because they taste and look better without the dirt and small bugs.

Maybe I was lucky to live in a "safe food zone" (Europe, France). Is there any data on the prevalence of food pathogens? Also, is there any correlation between gut problems and being raised in rural vs. urban areas?

I've never heard of home paseurizing farm milk, is that common?

Yes. And easy. Though I would imagine not as common a practice as it was in the past.

In India, we always boil milk irrespective of source. That's way hotter than pasteurization.

Modern farming practices really help. The cows/pigs are kept far away, and downhill, of the fields growing vegetables. Irrigation water isn't contaminated. Humans are in minimal contact with the crop. Like it or not, epic agribusiness dramatically reduces the risk of cross-contamination between crops/livestocks/peoples.

In France, toxoplasmosis is very commonly acquired from food.

In 1965, 83% of pregnant women in France were found to have it. This dropped to 37% by 2010.

Infection normally causes subtle behavior changes. There may be more risk-taking behavior, leading to more car crashes and more promiscuity. Schizophrenia becomes more common.

So maybe you are affected, but you haven't noticed. Maybe you would have made different life choices without an infection. Maybe you would have avoided some injuries.

> I liked to eat bits of raw meat while my mother cooked and always thought we rinsed the vegetables only because they taste and look better without the dirt and small bugs.

With healthy livestock the chances of getting anything from eating raw meat are very low. With healthy livestock is a pretty big caveat though. Most people throughout history have had parasites, never mind animals. Industrial agriculture has the benefit of antibiotics and other medicines so most livestock is healthy. My biology lecturer in college said he wouldn’t eat fish, poultry or pig raw, everything else was basically ok. Fish because wild fish are crawling with parasites, poultry because salmonella is everywhere and pigs because of ringworm.

Vegetables are safe if they haven’t had unfermented on them recently but taking the time to let manure rot doesn’t always happen in places where that’s the only fertiliser you’ve got. If you can buy nitrogenous fertiliser by the bag you’re overwhelmingly going to be fine but generally safe food is not natural, it’s the product of work.

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