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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

how....can you eat lamb that is still pink?

i come from india where the stuff is boiled and roasted for hours and hours and hours and hours.

As far as I know, for any type of meat it will go from soft to hard and then back to soft as you go from short to long cooking times. So lamb cooked to pink is quite delicious. But if you want it cooked all the way through, you have to go for a very long time to get back to a nice texture.

And of course eating meat that is pink is a luxury of having very high level of hygiene from the farm all the way to the table. This is difficult and expensive, so even in the highest income countries it has only become common in the last few decades.

Here in Scandinavia our traditional dishes involving lamb are also based on boiling or steaming the meat for many hours. If you had offered my late grandfather a piece of lamb that was pink inside, he would have refused to eat it.

That's also because the primary function of sheep in Scandinavia was to provide wool, so they would be deep in mutton territory by the time they were slaughtered and require low & slow cooking to make the meat edible.

> And of course eating meat that is pink is a luxury of having very high level of hygiene from the farm all the way to the table. This is difficult and expensive, so even in the highest income countries it has only become common in the last few decades.

Is this true? People have been eating rare or medium-rare meat since forever. Maybe it was more a cultural thing in Scandinavia to boil or steam. I certainly know people who order New Zealand grass bed beef steak well done (while the waiter cringes).

On the other hand if you offered me pink chicken I would be revolted.

> People have been eating rare or medium-rare meat since forever.

It's not safe, one thing are the bacteries that you can catch from raw/undercooked meat that was not stored correctly, another thing is the parasites, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella_spiralis

People also used to get tapeworms and other parasites from eating bad meat very frequently.

Just because people ate it back then doesn’t mean it’s okay to eat it now. Being free of parasites now is expected but was not back then.

funny you said "hygeine"

https://kashmirlife.net/radiating-carcinogenic-issue-13-vol-...

the sheep we consume are reared in a freaking nuclear test site so yeah

Depends on the part of the sheep and the age. Generally chops and a few other parts are great pink. But mutton chops are still quite tough sometimes like this. Leg and shoulder usually need slow cooking.

You just have to trust you won't get any infection from that, so the whole 'manufacturing' chain has to be properly set up and supervised. Once you have that, you can eat raw meat. It's quite common in many places, here (in Europe) we eat steak tartare which is raw beef.

germany has a big tradition of eating raw minced pork (mettbrötchen - bread roll with raw minced pork, diced onions salt and pepper). and its perfectly safe because the food safety laws are so strict. its so safe that even gas station variations of this are very popular

I don't have a problem with most undercooked or even raw meats as long as I trust the supply chain (I can imagine how this would be problematic in India). The latest trend of medium-rare pork is a bit too daring for me, though.

That's because there is a difference between trichinosis from undercooked pork and E. coli from the unhygenic handling of cut meat in general. E. coli mostly infects just the surface of cut meat so as long as it's cooked well on the outside, the insides can still be quivering and ready for action. Trichinella, on the other hand, can be found throughout pork and thorough cooking is the only way to render it harmless.

Of course, trichinosis has been nearly eliminated in recent times, hence the recent trend of pork being cooked to medium-rare.

Same way as beef.

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