Washing your Meat

[Chad the Chicken Man]

I work for a meat company here in wisconsin, and the only meat that should me washed is meat with bones in it. like bone in pork chops, t-bones, bone in ribeye.... and that is because when the meat is being cut on the bandsaw you get alot of bone dust on the meat. most meat plants will scrap off as much as possible but hardly get it all off. and custom slaughter plants just cut the meat and package it up with out scrapping any off. so I hope this answers your questions... But it would not hurt to wash all your chicken parts off just to be sure...

 

[dancingbear]

I only rinse store-bought poultry, and pieces like pork chops to remove small bone bits left by the saw.

I cook all meat well-done anyway, except DH's steaks, which he likes rare. Cooking will kill bacteria, fungus spores and whatever else may be living on it. As long as it's not started to spoil, it's fine once it's cooked. Eating little bits of dust or whatever, in cooked food, isn't going to hurt you. Toxic chemicals in the kitchen certainly could. So could stressing over every little thing that may or may not be in your food.

I raise a lot of my own poultry, now raise all of my own pork, and we hunt deer. Soon, we'll be raising beef. We process our own, as well, so that takes care of that problem. If you aren't comfortable with what somebody else might do when they process your food, then do it yourself. That's the solution, it's that simple. If you can raise it, you can process it. You might not want to, but you could.

I'm 52, so I've been cooking, and eating, a long time. I figure if it hasn't killed me by now, it's probably not going to. Never harmed my DH or any of our collective children, either.

I know the media makes it sound like there are jillions of things just waiting to pounce and kill us all, especially the commercials for the toxic chemicals. In reality, though there are jillions of bacteria, fungi, etc., most are harmless, or even beneficial. The proof that most people are worrying over nothing, is that a lot of people don't take all those precautions, and don't get sick or die. If things were as bad as TV makes them seem, people would be dropping like flies, every day, from eating food.

Having said all that, the fewer commercially prepared foods you eat, the better off you'll be.