Food safety is a myth. Salmonella is not real. Humans are incredibly complex creatures with one helluva digestive tract. Why is it that for some reason we cannot munch on some raw milk or medium rare chicken breast?? Hell, raw eggs are supposedly really dangerous, but people do use them in cocktails, or even as a quick and easy protein source.
When I was a wee tike, I was enrolled in my high school’s cooking class. They didn’t teach me much, but they did make a massive fuss about food safety and cross-contamination. Supposedly, if there’s any raw food anywhere near the cooked food that could have possibly shared the same space, cities will burn and our fields will fall fallow.
Since then, I learned about some of the more distrusting dishes from around the world. A wicked common one I’ll lead with is sushi, but that’s too tame. Everyone knows it’s raw and everyone has come to the collective understanding that sushi is probably safe. What about ceviche? If you are not familiar, allow me to fill you in. Ceviche is raw fish. It has never come into contact with any sort of hot environment (not grill nor smoke) yet it is recognized to be much safer than raw food. It’s marinated in a high acidity sauce … and that’s where my understanding has reached an impasse. How is acidity capable of rendering the meat safe to eat? Is it a form of quick pickling? Why don’t we do this with other meats, like beef or chicken? It seems too good to be true. Is this why fish is not considered a meat?
I believe that there is no actual “cooking” going on with ceviche and that it’s just as dangerous as sushi to consume. If there was a legitimate concern, the suburban wine moms would be on such an anti-sushi tirade. They have not.
Let’s move onto my oldest and most forbidden of loves, perpetual stew[1]. It’s like normal stew, but perpetual. Here’s a handy code snippet that may aid in understanding:
if(stew < 0.5*pot_volume)
{ stew++; }
The general idea is that in a high-traffic dwelling, like a public house or hotel, there may exist atop the kitchen stove a pot of stew. Stew is a hearty meal. Everyone likes stew. So why not always offer it? And I mean … always. Never allow the cauldron to cool, never allow the stew level to fall too low. Just keep throwing in scraps of meats, veggies, and potatoes, with a splash of water to thin it out. The stew must never run dry.
If you are a more food-safe person than myself, you may see the obvious issue with adding raw meat to a cooked dish. In theory, this should be fine, assuming you wait for the meat to cook through. But that’s not always possible, as the stew is a means of generating profit. If someone wants a bowl of stew, they’re getting it.
The takeaway should be that the world is too safe of a place. If you wanna make perpetual stew, do it. If you want to “cook” fish in acid, be my guest. And finally, now that I’ve convinced you food safety is not real, you can eat easy at all of UR’s dining centers.
[1]:
As a brief aside, I feel the need to explicitly mention the See also section in the Wikipedia page for perpetual stew. It feels like such a shit post or a collection of tumblr tags: List of stews, Master stock, Ship of Theseus.
Why do we need to get all philosophical about a pot of stew?
