Quote:
Originally Posted by
UniChef 
I just have to throw something in here- before anyone gets any ideas. Once meat has spoiled, there is no way to "cook out" the bacteria. Spoiled meat generally contains staphylococcus which is in fact killed when meat is cooked above 165 degrees, however, a spore forms around the bacteria which is toxic and heat stable.
Yes, i was wondering the same thing - i knew this as well. Nevertheless there are plenty of periods in history when people ate meat that we would consider inedible and dangerous.
My inlaws were married in Italy during the war - there was little food, and they went on their honeymoon to Venice. My mother-in-law's mother gave them a (raw) chicken to take with them in case the restaurants had no food, and she could give it to them to cook. So they took it on the train, stayed a couple of days in hotels, and then took the chicken, which wasn;t refrigerated and had begun to smell, to the restaurant and they cooked it up for them. Their only fear was that they may have kept the chicken for themselves and served them cat!
Also as a kid i remember the roast on sunday, chicken or beef, was kept in the unlit oven until supper when it was eaten, and my inlaws did this till they died. So i guess that the danger is great, but probably more rare than we think.
Washing the outside of meat before cooking was done a lot in my inlaw's family - the external blood would sometimes have an off smell, and it was a shame to throw it out - that's also because they had experienced both the depression and the war and couldn't bear to waste anything.
Many people are talking about fermented meat, which is certainly different from staph infected meat. Maybe some fermenting agents are protective against dangerous bacteria?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Pastachef
I remember reading about the maggoty cheese, Mezz. Gross! I also remember reading a newspaper article a few years back that stated that if people ate raw or spoiled meat from infancy, it would never make them sick in adulthood. I won't have any, thank you:) But it did make me wonder about dogs. Animals eat spoiled meat all the time and don't get sick. A dog has a lot in common with humans as far as digestion and health needs are concerned. They even take a lot of the same medications.
We were on a trip with a friend and his dog, and he would buy the dog meat and leave it in the trunk for a couple of days because if it was fresh,. he said, it would be hard for him to digest.
One thing i did read was that if you grew up with a certain diet that was the natural diet of your area (aboriginal diets of various parts of the world, including insects, larvae, meat only, or vegetable only or whatever it was) and you moved to a place with a more modern and varied industrial-society diet like ours, you would be much more subject to all the modern ills - high blood pressure, heart attacks, cholesterol, etc. But bringing them back to their original diet brought back their health, no matter how restricted and unhealthy that diet seems to us (e.g. all meat). I guess those who couldn't tolerate that diet all died off, and those who flourished in these restricted diets survived. And at the same time, your body develops the enzymes to handle the foods it's used to receiving. (Some people can't digest milk if they stop having it for too long, but if they start having it and keep it up, they eventually re-develop the necessary enzymes. Or so i read).
