Why people wash meat (or don't)

there is broad agreement among public health experts in the united states and europe that you generally should not wash meat before you cook it i mean this is hardly the most dangerous thing that you can do in your kitchen but washing meat probably creates more health hazards than it prevents it splashes raw meat juice around your kitchen where it can get on your raw food or on your hands and it sends droplets or aerosols of raw meat goo up into the air where they can enter your body directly scientists have done observational studies where they asked people to do what they normally do in the kitchen some people wash the meat under the faucet which is the really bad thing very splashy some people did it in a bowl people cleaned and sterilized after they were done but well here's shawna henley at the university of maryland's department of nutrition and food science the current usda study right now they're showing that even if you say you clean your sink out there's still potential for bacteria to hang out in the sink so if you're washing something else in your sink you don't know if cross-contamination's occurring because it could take as few as 10 bacteria cells to make someone sick based on their health status any germs or parasites on the surface of the meat that you could conceivably wash off are gonna die as soon as you cook it so don't bother washing it that is the advice that public health people in the u.s and europe have been promulgating in recent years as all this research has been emerging but a lot of home cooks remain skeptical this is a very culturally charged issue and in this video we're going to consider the cultural dimension why some people feel particularly strongly about washing meat in fact these guys and i undertook an original research project on people's meat washing attitudes and practices the results of which we will present here and i don't think any of us are proceeding from the assumption that meat washers are just rubes who need to be set straight people have reasons for doing what they do and it's not all about germs the initial public health messaging on this topic was i think it's fair to say not very culturally aware lucia will never be able to wash off all the bacteria that may be present you could certainly say as much about some of my prior videos on this topic much of the united states department of agriculture's public outreach on meat washing came via a digital platform called ask karen karen was a fictional character created to personify the friendly consumer advice that the usda provides and when they rolled her out in 2011 karen had not yet become what it is today a pejorative to describe a clueless and entitled white lady but it kind of fits right they have since ditched the character so elephant in the room white people are less likely to wash their meat than other kinds of people that is a finding of some research including our research and also some done by shauna henley and my dissertation at drexel university was basically telling people don't wash your chicken this research involved doing focus groups with people around philadelphia where drexel is quite a lot of people of color there and henley says the folks she spoke to were very receptive to the scientific message she presented a couple years later someone will see me be like i remember you you're the chicken girl i still wash my chicken but i'm like at least you know why and they they laugh and they know too but we also found too that a lot of people when they're washing or soaking raw poultry it wasn't for bacterial purposes it was more of getting rid of slime getting rid of fat and other things that they perceived were on the chicken that they didn't want there when they cooked it so what are all those specific concerns about well let me show you what we found out i enlisted the help of a couple professors at middle georgia state university this is my buddy chris savattawa a public health guy he's hopi native american grew up on reservation what does he do with meat i usually wash it uh and you know it's kind of uh it's habitual and this is michael gibbons sociologist white guy from the midwest he actually worked for a while in a poultry processing plant i don't wash meat if it feels uh or smells funky enough to need to wash my wife will throw it away before i ever see it she's very very conservative so what michael and chris told me is that good survey research usually starts with a qualitative phase that is interviews focus groups and such as a practical matter you usually can't do that kind of research on the scale that would yield scientifically statistically valid results you just can't interview enough people the function of the qual phase of research is to explore the question a little bit and then get ready for the quant phase that is where you craft an instrument a survey that you can then put out to a whole lot of people and get statistically significant results and basically my qualitative phase was tick-tock i have a strikingly global and diverse audience there and i got hundreds of comments from people absolutely disgusted by the idea that somebody wouldn't wash their meat again it's very anecdotal but i was struck by the number of comments i saw from people of for example caribbean and middle eastern origin who said that they wash meat to get rid of a raw smell there's even an arabic word for that zenha thanks to everybody on twitter who tried to teach me how to pronounce that i'm sure i'm still butchering it it's apparently infamously untranslatable but a lot of people described zenha as this kind of raw chickeny smell even a putrid smell and these commenters said that when they wash meat they don't mean running it under the sink they mean you put it in a bowl you rub it down with citrus or vinegar or salt or even flour i've seen people use then you submerge the chicken and let it soak for a while in this solution that i would call a brine or a marinade but this is what a lot of people in the world call washing this they say gets rid of that raw smell and taste and then you can cook it oh hey check out my new 10-inch stainless steel skillet courtesy of the sponsor of this video mizen whom i'll now briefly thank pans in this very modest price range are never remotely this heavy this thing is an absolute unit and all of that weight of metal helps the pan heat evenly and consistently it won't swing wildly from too cool to too hot the way that cheap light pans always do if you're just starting out cooking a good knife and a good 10 inch oven safe skillet are the first things i think you should get and this one really impressed me it's got the perfect five ply sandwich of metals stainless on the outside for density and durability aluminum on the inside for rapid conductivity the handle is smooth and round and it feels really good in your hand mizon is making amazingly good cookware at budget prices this pan costs less than half of what a comparable pan would sell for and you can get 20 off your first order if you hit my link in the description misen.com slash ragusia 20 off your first order do us both a favor use my link in the description get that pan thank you miesen and indeed this chicken no longer smells raw but isn't that what cooking does i mean if you're looking to convert raw flavors into cooked flavors cooking is generally a really good way to do that what does washing have to do with raw tastes well here's a theory i couldn't find any research on the historical origins of this particular washing practice but here's my hypothesis this seems to be particularly popular within cultures originating in particularly hot climates meat starts to go bad a lot faster in the heat which means that in the days prior to refrigeration people in much of the middle east or africa or the caribbean would have been especially likely to be dealing with meat that has a gross smell and mind you that smell of spoilage is not necessarily the smell of foodborne illness you can't smell salmonella which is part of the reason why it's so dangerous that off smell is from relatively harmless spoilage reactions oxidation rancidity enzymatic breakdown and the work of less dangerous classes of bacteria like pseudomonas which create gross smells and a ropey slime on the surface of meat as it sits around for a long time and develops it things like vinegar and citrus and salt can go a long way toward removing those gross smells or at least covering them up but mind you they probably don't do very much to actually kill dangerous bacteria typically the concentration isn't high enough the amount of time that that concentration is exposed to your raw poultry really isn't going to do as much good as you're hoping it would now let's stipulate that people living in the modern middle east have access to refrigerators and fresh chickens so it's not that they're all dealing with rotten food all the time but rather what i'm hypothesizing is that given the climate there there's a more recent cultural memory that people have a cross-generational cultural memory of dealing with off-smelling or tasting meat and that memory has resulted in this kind of heightened cultural sensitivity or awareness of even the slightest off smell from a chicken just a hypothesis though indeed improving palatability is apparently a big motivation among meat washers responding to the survey that i put together with the middle georgia state guys i invited you to fill this out in an earlier video and boy a lot of you did 13 000 respondents was very strong a lot of the professional work i did sometimes you'd have three or 500 respondents and that would be a that would be a good result so it says something about your your reach first of all but of course the problem with that is that it's not a random sample like you'd normally try to assemble for a scientific study we approached it more like market research you are my customers and it is therefore not surprising that you are disproportionately like me white male american and relatively young like attracts like hardly surprising however enough of you filled out this darn thing that what our sample size lacks in randomness it kind of makes up for in volume enough people who are not very much like me at all also filled this thing out that we can learn some interesting stuff people report not washing most meats and when they do it's fish and poultry interestingly enough we did ask about other meats that were washed and surprisingly consistently across geographical regions wild game venison things like kangaroo squirrel organs and other meats guinea pig that makes sense right people who are getting game are not dealing with meat that was factory processed and shrink wrapped and delivered to the supermarket hermetically sealed they're dealing with like things that they may have even butchered themselves things with like feathers and hair and blood and actual dirt and debris on them that needs to be washed off indeed many of you who responded to the survey said that's what you're trying to remove not pathogens but actual dirt debris and of course blood cultural taboo against eating blood is pretty common the torah and the quran for example both explicitly forbid eating blood however this is one case where i actually think a lot of people's concerns may be unfounded i showed this clip on my tik tok and i got tons of comments saying ew look at all that blood but it's not blood in the meat industry they call this purge it's just water juice from inside the muscle and a lot of it leaks out into the packaging with time the meat purges the pink color in it is myoglobin which is a protein that stores and transports oxygen inside your muscles it's not the same thing as hemoglobin which is what makes blood red similar things but they're just fundamentally different meat juice is not blood and if you've got a problem with eating myoglobin filled purge then you've got a problem with eating meat because this is the liquid that's inside all meat this is the juice that makes meat juicy and it's the stuff that comes out during cooking and that you might later convert into a gravy anyway down in the description there's links to all of our anonymized survey results you can see the google form responses and this powerpoint the guys put together another interesting finding was an age corollary so just based on proportionality for 25 year olds to 34 year olds older people more likely to wash meat than younger people we also interestingly found attitudes in general about food safety and hygiene got a lot more extreme when you looked at people coming from a certain type of household in large in large families uh the fact that there were desperate uh people who were you know least important and then high our hypothesis is that if you're cooking for a really large family you respond to that one of two ways you either go super ocd or you kind of go screw it i just gotta get dinner on the table somehow and nothing i've done has killed any of us yet again all our data is in the description our hope is that it can be the jumping off point for one of you out there to do some actual scholarly research with a randomized sample however when i announced this project in an earlier video i was contacted by some scientists in europe who are working on a study about meat washing and other home cooking practices and attitudes right now it is a huge eu project called safe consume where they are studying cooking practices that lead to five major foodborne hazards in europe this is monica truninger a sociologist at the university of lisbon who has been going in with teams of scientists to document how europeans cook in their own homes so it was in five countries portugal uk romania france and norway and the portuguese samples 15 families and we we observed that 10 of our families of our participants used their rings chicken so that was something and this was um classified as the red red tag from a microbiological point of view and remember this is an ongoing research project but looking at their preliminary findings they have sort of a pretty glaring conclusion overwhelmingly the chicken washers are in southern and eastern europe romania hungary portugal italy they're the ones washing their chicken in contrast almost nobody is washing chicken in germany or the uk or sweden why would there be such a strong difference along national lines we suppose it's because of some proximity to like a peasant society past a peasant society passed that's another scientist who's working on this also at the university of lisbon luis juncaid in in southern europe and eastern europe in eastern europe most people's grandparents were you know lived in largely peasant society so i think we think it's something like that so it's related to that to that proximity to that culture a culture in which most people were slaughtering their own meat or buying it from somebody in a big open-air market and dealing with a product that might have actual debris and blood and feathers and stuff on it most people in portugal are buying their meat from the grocery store these days just like i am but that cross-generational cultural memory of getting a very different kind of meat a very different kind of way is just more recent and it informs current practices it explains why a lot of people in a place like that might be more likely to wash their chicken even when scientists tell them not to certainly poverty has got to be a related phenomenon right if you're poor here in the u.s yeah your chicken is factory produced and shrink-wrapped but it might also be the manager's special cheap meat that's been sitting around for a while and it has that ropey slime caused by spoilage bacteria people understandably want to wash that off for what it's worth several experts i've talked to about this topic say that a safer option might be to take a paper towel and use that to blot or scrape off anything undesirable that's on your meat that paper towel is easy to dispose of safely and from a cook's perspective dry meat browns better so yay but you know do what is right for you and your context not everybody is living the same life the one thing we should probably all stop doing is washing meat under the faucet most of you who wash meat said that you do it under running water and that's probably the worst thing if you're going to watch do it in the bowl zenha

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 558,396

Rating: 4.8906422 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 90Nd_vh3yk8

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/aquarawaltz]

I read the powerpoint and who the hell is washing their meat in diluted bleach???

[u/CTRBridesmaid]

I only get annoyed with meat-washers when they insist you’re either “eating poop” or “don’t wash your ass” if you don’t wash your chicken.

Do whatever works for you, but don’t be obnoxious about it.

[u/soulsoar11]

When I took the survey it said : “question 1: how often do you eat meat?”

“Never.”

“Cool thanks for filling out the survey.” Lol

I get that the research question was about meat washing specifically, but I think it would’ve been cool to get the demographic data and such about respondents who don’t eat meat, may have had some interesting insights.

[u/Commontrucker]

Washing meat is fucking dumb and I’m from a culture that washes meat

[u/i-like-hentai_]

I personally wash, but that's just me. I do however never wash my meat

[u/Neovitami]

I cook heart often, and i always rinse off the blood, maybe even letting it soak for a while.

[u/2Liberal4You]

I don't wash my meat (because I don't eat it). inb4 vegan complaints

[u/coins22222]

In Chinese Cooking Demystified's Shaoxing Wine video he mentions that marinading meat in alcohol is used to remove odor in Asia. I wonder if that counts as cleaning and if it is actually worth doing.

[u/grumio_in_horto_est]

The theory about peasants is most likely true in the European context. In other global south cultures, including my parents, slaughtering poultry in a way that does not expose the meat to ruptured viscera is common, and not just among rural people. This practice significantly reduces the risk of most poultry pathogens. In a hot climate, rupturing the viscera and contaminating the meat with it is like me dropping my morning avocado into an unflushed toilet – you simply do not proceed with the meal. In the west where modern poultry processing was invented, the risk is managed differently; exposure to the viscera is unavoidable so “bleach” treatment, a cold-chain and a culture that doesn’t wash meat all contain the risk of pathogens.

More traditional kinds of slaughtering is not only in the recent memory of many cultures, but it sits beside buying poultry processed in the modern industrial way. You might slaughter a chicken at your grand-parents house, say, but buy meat at home. Note where people in these circumstances wash their meat when they process in a traditional way, it is unlikely to be in the sink next to the chopped salad that you prepared earlier! Most likely outdoors in a different area to where other people are doing the vegetables. What we see in immigrant communities and modern urban global south cultures is cultural memory of a different kind of food preparation colliding with modern kitchens and perhaps different diets with more raw food components prepared and eaten together.

I would urge him to take an anthropological look at poultry preparation, and also look at the Chinese practices of rinsing meat to remove myoglobin and get rid of funkiness – both might add to the debate.