Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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