I always treat chicken as if it's covered with bacteria. Separate board, separate knife, hand washing with soap between handling, and cooking it all the way through. All items that touched the chicken goes immediately into the dish washer after use.
Wow. I'm really glad you stated that publicly because I do the same and always felt a little weird/extreme for how I handle chicken. I nearly always do the chicken handling last and then sanitize everything with disinfectant afterwards including large areas of the countertop. The frequency of outbreaks related to chicken has made me very careful when dealing with chicken.
I got very, very sick once from mishandling chicken. It was "just" campylobacter. But it was much worse than the average case. I ended up in the ER and afterwards the county CDC wanted to know if I left the county, etc. Long story short, it took me 3 months to get over it and a solid year to regain all of the lost weight and strength. I'm now very thorough with my food handling and preparation.
yeah, totally. chicken is nuclear material / lava in my kitchen. i do all the same and i empty the sink before handling the meat in it. i also hand wash all chicken contaminated dishes in the sink.
Anything above has the risk of dripping onto whatever is below (even if you are careful). Chicken has higher incidence of bacteria growth, spoils faster.
In addition, beef is typically cooked to a much lower temperature than chicken, between 120 and 140 F, which is not hot enough to kill something like salmonella, if the beef has been contaminated from spoiled poultry dripping from above.
Less rigorously than when I'm handling chicken. Every time I touch chicken, I immediately go to the sink and start a 20 second hand washing routine. The risk is at an entirely different level.
Why do you continue to eat this food if you have to mentally accept that it's this dangerous to eat? This would drain me considerably if I had to do this routine for eating peppers and broccoli.
It's not that onerous if you've gotten used to staging your food handling. You just prep everything else, handle the chicken, set aside in a dedicated bowl, then wash your hands and go back to handling everything else.
Once I'm cooking, I just use a dedicated pair of steel tongs for moving chicken around, then I don't have to keep washing my hands, I just clean that set of utensils once I have a moment.
I think it's still worth the effort, it's just some specific food handling practices. After all, it's not like I don't practice the same caution when I'm handling any meat, and even for any other meat I'd have to wash my hands when moving from handling meat to veggies.
Not OP, but I treat chicken with a similar level of caution. I continue preparing and eating it because I like chicken and have several chicken-based dishes that I enjoy preparing. That said, it is draining, and it has made me buy and prepare raw chicken less often since I started being really careful about the prep procedure.
I guess I just love cooking. I love making all kinds of food. And some food I prepare are significantly more complicated than handwashing and keeping separate boards and utensils.
Ironic you mention peppers because I take similar precautions when cooking with hot peppers, if any ends up on my fingers and I do something as simple as rub my eye I’m in got a bad time.
Yet I still do it, because it tastes good. I imagine OP’s reasons are similar.
It’s not dangerous to eat, it’s risky if not prepared properly.
Similarly you need to be very careful with vegetables like scallions, some leafy greens, etc. Many people assume that they don’t need to wash bagged spinach, for example.
I think it's a little unfair to chalk this up to an assumption. Most of the bagged spinach that I can purchase at the supermarket comes labeled as "Washed & Ready to Eat" [1]. Whether that's true or not - and whether you prefer to wash your spinach anyway - is of course up to you. But it's explicitly labeled as safe.
I mean, there was just a huge recently an outbreak of salmonella from onions. Every food has some risk of being contaminated or spoiled. I assume you wash your broccoli and peppers, right?
I wonder how salmonella from onions works - it's pretty standard to always peel the onions so is the salmonella on the surface and your knife carries it through the onion or is the salmonella in the onion already?
“whole, fresh onions imported from the State of Chihuahua”, “Do not use, ship, or sell recalled onions. Suppliers and distributors that re-package raw onions should use extra vigilance in cleaning any surfaces and storage areas that may have come into contact with these products. If there has been potential cross contamination or mixing of onions from other sources with these products, suppliers and distributors should discard all comingled and potentially cross-contaminated product.” — https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/outbrea...
“It's not clear exactly how many people have been infected—the 808 number is a bare minimum. "The true number of sick people in an outbreak is likely much higher than the number reported," the CDC said, since many people may have chosen to ride out the sickness at home rather than seek medical care. The CDC estimates that only about one in every 30 salmonella cases actually get reported.” — https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/10/29/salm...
I’ve worn gloves when cooking it at home. But I also treat all meat this way (except the gloves, that stays with chicken). I also don’t put washed veggies on the same thing unwashed ones have been on. Basically anything you buy at the store seems like it’s had some sort of outbreak of something at one point, so I just treat everything as contaminated at first.
In Sweden, one single case of salmonella was found in 2020 (when sampling before slaughter). All animals in the population it came from were killed and destroyed, and none of them made it to food stores.
The real problem is not in detection or distribution. It is in the production methods. Here in Norway chickens are raised in batches and the sheds are cleaned between batches, see https://www.matprat.no/artikler/matproduksjon/hvordan-lever-.... But in the US it seems that chickens are raised in continuous production facilities where chicks go in one end and grown chickens come out the other. This method pretty much guarantees that infections can spread.
Perhaps someone in possession of the details can conform, clarify, or correct.
That's fucking tragic. Imagine killing an entire population of humans because some of them were sick. Sadly most people will read that and just think "what a waste of good food". In 500 years humans will be absolutely disgusted by the way we behaved towards other animals in current times.
Cooking chicken to 170 F is a good way to to be safe and also ensure nobody enjoys your chicken. There are various temperatures depending on the cut that are safe.
If you can check your chicken to know that it is 170 then you have a thermometer to check it at other temperatures. If you have a sous vide machine you can go even lower, you just have to increase the time.
There's a big difference between cooking dark meat and white meat. Thighs and drumsticks can easily go higher and still be good, or even better. But breasts lack the fat and connective tissue that breaks down in longer cooks, so they're a lot less forgiving.
I'm happy with chicken thighs below that, but I pulled a turkey out at 165F internal temp once and it felt disturbingly underdone. Some of it was still pink. Safe, but not very enjoyable.
Heh yeah, it was weird. We were all fine, but it was weird. A good reminder that appearance is an unreliable indicator of safety, even if in this case the appearance was a false positive.
The articles you link refer to cooking in a sous vide which most people are not. So yes you could kill enough bacteria to be safe following that article if you kept it at 150 deg for 2.8 minutes but with standard cooking that is not easy to measure or maintain. That is why the guideline is 170 instant read because the pasteurization time at that temp is 0.
>if you kept it at 150 deg for 2.8 minutes but with standard cooking that is not easy to measure or maintain
It's actually surprisingly hard not to do that. Unless you're cooking at unusually low pan/oven temperatures, the internal temperature of a chicken breast taken off at 150° will probably hit 155° or higher over the next couple minutes.
Overkill. Most health agencies recommend 165°, and that's already got a big margin of safety on it. I aim for 150° these days, and even that's mostly because I like the texture there. 140° is perfectly safe if you can hold it there for a while, like if you're doing sous vide.
Yep. The FDA recommended temperatures are very conservative and reflect something like the temperature at which almost all dangerous pathogens would be killed nearly instantaneously. Holding for a minute at 155F, or even 140F for a long while (easy to do with sous vide), has the same pasteurizing effect and is perfectly safe, while not totally ruining the texture† as cooking to 170F would do.
Developing an understanding of the time/temp relationship in cooking and food safety really revolutionized the way that I think about cooking and safety. Instead of a fear-based binary cooked/raw framework, I can reason about how long I need to hold an ingredient and a particular temperature to obtain both the texture I want and the level of food safety I need. It's made me a lot more relaxed about cooking.
For me the chicken comes out chewy and spongy if I don't cook it to 170 or so. I started having a chicken breast for almost every meal recently and I had to keep increasing the cook time to find the right doneness, and at that doneness it will read 170 or even a lot more in spots. 425 for 32 minutes for one ~10oz breast for reference.
Agreed, 140F chicken is weird. I did a bunch of test runs with my sous vide and my personal magic temp for chicken is 147F for an hour. Works great for dark and light meat.
Second vote for sous vide for chicken, absolutely the juiciest chicken I’ve ever had.
One warning to a first-timer though is if you’re used to baked or grilled chicken the texture of sous vide is going to feel undercooked. One or two bites though and you get used to it because of how good it is.
The point of safety margins is the risk reward ratio is heavily weighted in one direction. 150 is flat out not worth the risk from a public health standpoint.
Sous vide is nowhere near as safe as many assume. Many spores and some pathogens can survive the process and people with compromised immune systems should seriously avoid eating such food especially if it’s been refrigerated before consumption.
>150 is flat out not worth the risk from a public health standpoint.
It's not worth the risk for public health agencies to recommend 150°, that I can agree on. Too much room for inexperienced cooks to make an error.
But chicken held at 150° for a few minutes (which is hard to avoid in most scenarios) is no less safe than the hypothetical "165° for an instant" scenario.
The problem is not just with the cook, how accurate is your equipment? +/- 4f is likely good enough at 165. +/- 4f at 150 or much worse 130 can be a serious issue.
Now it’s not big deal what you do in your own kitchen, but people recommending such practices to a wide audience have real responsibility.
I should have been a lot more specific in my comment. I'm not really convinced that this is a case for the application of that type of risk benefit analysis.
Public health guidance should be (and is?) instructions for how to produce reliably safe food.
Is shouldn't be (and isn't?) guidance for what the tradeoff should be between risk and pleasure.
The latter is entirely subjective and up to individuals. This is why you can go out to a public restaurant and get chicken sashimi if you want.[1]
duckduckgo looks pretty legit domain to search chicken :D
Chicken sashimi is almost (but not in law) prohibited (except limited area) by Japanese health center but it still served because of those restaurants are stupid. They constantly produce ill customer. To be fair, most restaurants won't serve raw chickens.
Speaking about limited area, Kyushu produces very clean chickens that considered to very low risk to eat in raw (Torisashi). They are allowed by local health center.
Relevant bits in CA Page 37, you can serve unsafe food in California as long as you notify people doing so is unsafe. Though these are minimum legal requirements, you can still get sued over the practice.
“A raw animal food such as raw egg, raw fish, raw marinated fish, raw molluscan shellfish, or steak tartare, or a partially cooked food such as lightly cooked fish, soft cooked eggs, or rare meat other than whole-muscle, intact beef steaks as specified in subdivision (c), may be served or offered for sale upon consumer request or selection in a ready-to-eat form if either of the
following conditions are satisfied:
(1) All of the following requirements are met:
(A) As specified in paragraph (1) or (2) of subdivision (e) of Section 114091, the food facility serves a population that is not a highly susceptible population.
(B) The food, if served or offered for service by consumer selection from a children’s menu, does not contain comminuted meat.
(C) The consumer is informed pursuant to Section 114093 to ensure its safety, the food should be cooked as specified in subdivision (a) or (b).
(2) The department grants a variance from subdivision (a) or (b) pursuant to Section 114417 based on a HACCP plan that satisfies all of the following conditions:
(A) It is submitted by the permitholder and approved pursuant to Sections 114417.1 and
114417.3.
(B) It documents scientific data or other information showing that a lesser time and
temperature regimen results in safe food.
(C) It verifies that equipment and procedures for food prepared and training of food
employees at the food facility meet the conditions of the variance.”
I had no idea there were that many salmonella infections in the US every year. Could irradiation be a solution? I know it is sometimes used on fruits and vegetables (wish it was used more, tbh).
Take a look at how chickens/farmed animals in general are housed before before being "processed". Turns out it's cheaper to pump the animals full of antibiotics and wash the resulting meat with chemicals afterwards than to house them in clean and sanitary conditions. The EU/UK at least recognize how terrible this is, so they don't allow US meat that is handled this way.
> ” Salmonella hospitalizes and kills more people in the U.S. than any other foodborne pathogen, with about 1.35 million illnesses, 26,500 hospitalizations and more than 400 deaths each year.”
US population is 330 million, EU is about 450 million. The difference in salmonellosis prevalence is huge.
The rate of infections are very diverse in Europe. In Scandinavia it is extremely low, they test the chickens several times during their lifetime and kills the whole flock if any of them is contaminated. Until they joined the EU all eggs were "washed" which removed other unwanted pathogens. The EU forced them to accept unwashed eggs and allowed them for the time being to continue selling washed eggs. Most other countries does not use such draconian methods to their farming and the washing of eggs removes a thin membrane which gives some protection from salmonella travelling between the eggs.
In the US, chickens are washed in a chlorine solution.
This is not allowed in UK/EU, as it's believed it's better to fix the problem at source and that no-one will bother to do that if there's end-bleaching.
also, AFAIK people rinse off meat to "get rid of the blood/slime", not to get rid of the chroline smell. Presumably they do a good enough job rinsing off the chlorine that it doesn't smell like pool water by the time it hits store shelves.
According to that linked article, it’s because ppl believe it’ll “clean” the raw chicken making it safer (which seems insane to me unless you’re using soap.. which would be a weird thing to do with meat).
As long as you continue treating everything as if it’s still lined with bacteria, why not wash?
>As long as you continue treating everything as if it’s still lined with bacteria, why not wash?
Exactly. I'm not a least-common-denominator that these public health recommendations cater to. Give me the real info please.
I am skeptical that they would rinse the chlorine off of the chicken at the factory. That seems like an extra step adding not only cost but risk of a bacterial bloom occurring between the factory and the store/home.
Chicken shouldn't be rinsed; it's a weirdly persistent myth, not actual safety advice.
I live in a non-chlorinated-poultry country, and there are still dept of health ads every Christmas warning people not to attempt to rinse turkeys; wherever the idea came from it probably wasn't chlorination.
The warning not to rinse turkeys is probably because you don't want a wet bird to go into a deep fryer, that is how explosions happen.
I would not expect a health agency, which requires processors to use a chlorine rinse that presumably the agency approves as "safe and healthy", to say that your chicken should be rinsed of any excess chlorine before cooking. They think the amount of chlorine is safe and want you to believe so as well.
And I know people rinse chicken for reasons other than what I am suggesting.
However I am still looking for a good answer to whether there is chlorine residue on chicken that can be removed by rinsing in the home. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough at first.
> The warning not to rinse turkeys is probably because you don't want a wet bird to go into a deep fryer,
That's not a thing here; I think deep-frying turkeys is purely an American phenomenon. The reason that health authorities discourage it is that it can lead to aerosolized bacterial contamination.
> I would not expect a health agency, which requires processors to use a chlorine rinse
Chlorine rinses aren't allowed in the EU. Incidentally, they're not actually _mandatory_ in the US, though they are common practice there, I gather because they're seen as a cheaper way to meet salmonella prevalence goals than controls earlier in the process.
> However I am still looking for a good answer to whether there is chlorine residue on chicken that can be removed by rinsing in the home.
I mean, if you're in a chicken-chlorination country, maybe? But small amounts of chlorine don't seem particularly a problem.
>I would not expect a health agency, which requires processors to use a chlorine rinse that presumably the agency approves as "safe and healthy", to say that your chicken should be rinsed of any excess chlorine before cooking. They think the amount of chlorine is safe and want you to believe so as well.
why not? health agencies approve pesticides as well, but they advise you to rinse off vegetables/fruit.
>why not? health agencies approve pesticides as well, but they advise you to rinse off vegetables/fruit.
As far as I know, the rationale given for washing fruits and vegetables is not because of pesticides, but because of dirt and bacteria. As far as the public is to be concerned, any pesticide residue that makes it into your home is to be considered "acceptably low."
The USDA makes no mention of pesticides:
>Before eating or preparing fresh fruits and vegetables, wash the produce under running tap water to remove any lingering dirt. This reduces any germs that may be present. If the fruits or vegetables have a firm surface, such as apples or potatoes, they can be scrubbed with a brush.
It's pretty tasty. I just did one for the first time a couple weeks ago (as a test so I'd understand the process and timing a little better before Thanksgiving). I don't know if it's necessarily that much better than a good oven roasting, but I did a 14 pound turkey in 45 minutes.
It's not as bizarre as it sounds. They're not breaded, simply dinked into hot oil and deep-fried for half an hour or so. If you're not an idiot and follow basic precautions it's a pretty reasonable way to do things, as it's much quicker than roasting for multiple hours.
Basic precautions include:
* Do it outside away from structures
* Keep a fire extinguisher handy
* Make sure there's no ice in the bird
* Measure the displacement of the bird (by filling your pot with water), and add the appropriate amount of oil
* Heat the oil up to 250, then add the bird. Don't let the temp get over 350.
I have a propane stove I use for making beer; it's often sold as a turkey fryer stove
I've never dried off the bird particularly; if you don't dunk it until the oil is around 250, it typically drops the temp down to near 212 (100C) and the water boils off pretty gently. The real issue is if you have ice, which is often present in big chunks.
With an electric turkey fryer (essentially an electric oven with the door on the top) frying a holiday turkey is easy and safe. It results in a very nicely cooked turkey without taking up any space in the kitchen (we plug it into an outlet outside the house).
Good idea. Unfortunately it would need a better name because people panic hearing the R word, perhaps Green Washed (tm) for your protection [washed in gamma rays, that is].
On a related note, there may also be a huge issue with Prion diseases in the food supply but the USDA is not testing extensively for it. We just don't know and it has a decades-long incubation period. Irradiation may not be an option.
I only mentioned prions/BSE because the USDA is tasked with testing meat for safety, but their mission in practice tends to lean towards protection of producers and not consumers. There has been some controversy over how much to test and when.
I was looking for evidence that irradiation can neutralize prions (along with viruses and bacteria), not cause them.
There is a vaccine for salmonella. I might be wrong, but I believe it is mandated in other countries, but not in the US. Notably, California requires it for chickens that lay eggs, which means most eggs on the West Coast are vaccinated against salmonella.
Fair, but chicken having salmonella is so common it's not news. Veggies having salmonella is so uncommon it is news.
There's a big difference between the FDA limit of 15% of chicken being contaminated with salmonella (with the average from this article looking to be around 5%), and the once or twice a year events where more than 0% of a veggie is contaminated and it makes the news.
You can just sick from vegetables too. In fact, as much as I think I should eat more of them it's frustrating how I have to check for rot and other similar things far more often then I do with processed foods.
I know when I make something with fruit or vegetables I'll go through, rip off all the black or dark parts, throw out any rot. Often if I see rot I'll throw out the entire batch. (one bad apple....)
And then, I have to force myself not to think about how people making salads for me (ie, at a restaurant) are far less vigilant.
As a rule, foodborne pathogens are invisible. And odourless.
Those rotten bits on your vegetables are probably perfectly safe to eat, if unpalatable. It might not even involve microbial spoilage at all, just enzymatic breakdown.
It's funny how factory farming is suddenly an issue when a human might end up in hospital. I hope those who didn't care before get to see battery cages or fledgling shredder in person at some point.
"A number of past studies have found lower greenhouse gas emissions associated with the feedlot system. One reason is that grass-fed cows gain weight more slowly, so they produce more methane (mostly in the form of belches) over their longer lifespans."
"‘Eating local’ is a recommendation you hear often – even from prominent sources, including the United Nations. While it might make sense intuitively – after all, transport does lead to emissions – it is one of the most misguided pieces of advice. Eating locally would only have a significant impact if transport was responsible for a large share of food’s final carbon footprint. For most foods, this is not the case. GHG emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from."
> Unlike quite a bit of industrial farming including growing most vegan staples.
"Many of the foods people assume to come by air are actually transported by boat – avocados and almonds are prime examples. Shipping one kilogram of avocados from Mexico to the United Kingdom would generate 0.21kg CO2eq in transport emissions. This is only around 8% of avocados’ total footprint. Even when shipped at great distances, its emissions are much less than locally-produced animal products."
"Paige Stanley, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, says many of these studies have prioritized efficiency — high-energy feed, smaller land footprint — as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The larger the animal and the shorter its life, the lower its footprint. But she adds, "We're learning that there are other dimensions: soil health, carbon and landscape health. Separating them is doing us a disservice." She and other researchers are trying to figure out how to incorporate those factors into an LCA analysis.
Stanley co-authored a recent LCA study, led by Jason Rowntree of Michigan State University, that found carbon-trapping benefits of the grass-fed approach. Another recent LCA study, of Georgia's holistically managed White Oak Pastures, found that the 3,200-acre farm stored enough carbon in its grasses to offset not only all of the methane emissions from its grass-fed cattle, but also much of the farm's total emissions. (The latter study was funded by General Mills.)"
That's from your first link (npr dot org). Seems like the jury's still out on this one.
Is this a realistic alternative to factory farmed cows though? How expensive would it be? Would there be enough land? Would it produce enough beef? Could that land be used in a better way (e.g. forests, other crops)?
I get my beef from a local (pasture-raised, 100% grass-fed) farm and it costs about 10% more than the organic beef I see at the meat counter at Whole Foods (a grocery store).
Can't comment on if those prices would change with scale. I don't know if it's more or fewer head of cattle per acre compared to the maize needed for feedlot cattle. Maize is a pretty dense crop, so my guess would be fewer head per acre.
Cattle is not treated like chickens. Beef cattle in the U.S. generally grazes on pastureland - most U.S. beef is already "free range", whereas dairy cows are mostly raised indoors. Only 10% of U.S. cattle are dairy cows.
Many cows go to fattening up centers before they are slaughtered, but the cattle don't spend their lives in them. In these centers many are fed corn -- so-called "grain finished" non-organic beef. This is the main difference between the feelgood beef and normal beef. The U.S. has ~120M acres devoted to pasture for ~80 million heads of cattle, about 1.5 acres per animal. This is land not fit for farming, so rather than saying we set aside 77% of global "farm" land for cattle, it's more accurate to say that without cattle converting grass to protein, 77% of the land devoted to food production would be abandoned. Of course you can argue it should be a wilderness -- millions of buffalo roamed on that grassland in the past.
There are an additional 10 million dairy cows living in conditions ranging from nice farm animals to horrific factory lots.
Saying that cattle is a "leading cause" of deforestation is misleading. Cattle graze on low productive land, usually more arid plains like in the Western U.S. (what was once called the Great American desert). You do not see large herds of cows wandering on farmland. You do see lots of cattle in the dry plains of Argentina.
What you mean is that a primary source of deforestation in the Amazon rain forest is the practice of slash and burn agriculture, which consists of setting fires that nourish the soil in lieu of fertilizer. This productive soil lasts about 18 months and then you need to set fire to more forest. Slash and burn was a pre-industrial farming technique widely practiced by Amazonian natives, but does not scale well in industrial application. Better to spend money on fertilizer and leave the rainforest alone.
It's true that after the 18 months (or so), the land is not productive farmland anymore but is still suitable for cattle. However you might as well say that the growing of vegetables is a leading cause of deforestation, since the would-be farmers are after the wood from the forest as well as the ~1.5 years of cash crops before the ground is only fit for cattle. Pastureland is not a good money maker, requiring so much land per animal. The rents obtained in this way are minimal.
Generally pasture land in the US at least doesn't get enough rainfall to be used as farmland without extensive irrigation, which isn't practical today given strains on aquifers. I don't think the US could maintain its beef habit entirely on what we can raise on pastures but I think we ought to be eating less meat anyways.
If you can buy locally sourced, pasture fed meat, then why can't you get locally sourced, permaculture grown vegan staples? Of those two option, I've yet to find a single credible scientific study saying that the plant based option of those two isn't superior.
You're also presenting pastureland as a viable option when there are tenfold superior ways which we could use that pastureland for almost every climate when it comes to carbon sequestration. 80%+ of deforestation world wide driven by the animal agriculture and the desire to create grazing land for cattle, and growing crops to feed said cattle[1].
Additionally, the idea of a slurry pits near my home, running off into local water supplies and ground water, and fumes affecting peoples respiration[2], do not seem like a sensible alternatives to a permaculture food forest.
I live in the UK where unlike most countries, our cattle are largely pasture fed as the norm. Half of farmland (which makes up about 70% of the UK), mostly uplands and pasture, produces just 20% of the UK’s food [3]. We could re-wild most of that if only people moved away from eating meat; including local, pasture raised alternatives.
TLDR; If you're looking to reduce the risk of contamination, consider purchasing whole chickens or, at least, skin-on, bone-in, cuts.
This is because the risk is substantially higher if you purchase skinless or deboned chicken - most contamination is on the surface of the chicken, and is easily killed during cooking.
However, during processing, the tooling used to debone or deskin the chicken may get contaminated, and necessarily pierces the flesh of the meat. This tooling isn't usually disinfected between chickens (cost prohibitive). As a result, if one of the birds has surface contamination, this contamination will remain on the outside of the instrument, grow, and subsequently infect the inside of all the other birds.
This is important, because direct heat is actually pretty good at killing bacteria. However, if the bacteria are able to penetrate to the inside of the chicken, there's a substantially greater likelihood that the temperature (and duration) on the inside of the chicken are insufficient to kill disease causing bacteria.
Note: The overall idea is to recognize that surface bacterial contamination can be killed with sufficient temperature over a sufficient duration of time, recognizing that the lowest overall temperature will be in the thickest part of the meat, and ensuring that there isn't a mechanical mechanism that will introduce contamination in that area.
I generally find propublica makes really interesting lookups with the worse method for searching, why would you not offer zip code search, or by state. Instead I have to know the city name or the P-code.
Just always feels like a missed opportunity to provide actual meaningful data.
As others have said, it does not really make sense to search by ZIP code for most consumers. Your chicken could come from anywhere. This is meant to check the processor for a specific package of chicken.
The site is specifically by p-code, company, or processor location.
But only by single location, I'm not sure if you've been near a chicken processing plant, but they are very often clustered together, shockingly near where an abundance of commercial chicken farms are, so knowing the percentage chance by an area can be very useful.
I don't think my perspective and interest seem to be aligning with most people commenting here.
I'm not concerned about if a random package of chicken is OK, I'm concerned about a cluster of processors.
It sort of makes sense though. The data is available at a plant level, but you can't necessarily tie a particular zip code to a particular processing plant, since supply chain/availability changes.
Distributors ship products far away from their sources, sometimes to other states. I think a zip code lookup tool would not be useful and may even mislead.
The tool does look up facilities and containation by address or p-code, my intent is to be able to do the same lookup by the zip of the address and report the same information as presented.
I'm not sure what you are considering, but I can't see how if I can look it up by full address, being able to lookup multiple by zip would change the representation of data, or change its usefulness?
Did you find a plant in Louisiana that's not showing up?
The search box lets you search any part of the address. You need to use proper abbreviations for example, but I don't see how you wouldn't be able to find a plant by state.
If by proper abbreviation for Louisiana you mean ", La." then yes, you get a list you can choose from, then you can select each one individually. But because they did not choose include zips in their address if you want to cluster them you can do it by city, then figure out which cities are nearest to each other.
Just seems this could have been done a lot better, with very little effort.
