Meat-eating

[dodgymanc]

Why can every other carnivore on the planet eat raw meat and survive perfectly well, yet us humans cant hack it???

[sft42]

We can if we have to it's just that we have become used to our food being cooked......if you took a youngster and fed it raw meat from when it was being weaned i am sure it would survive perfectly well.

[wildwood]

Probably because Humans are not carnivores.

[darth vader]

humans ARE carnivores - check your bible - and have been since god sent the floods of Noah's time which washed away the vegetation.
There's your religious answer.
Actually we're really Omni-whatsits as we've been able to survive on both meat and/or vegetation for eons (a dentist will confirm this fact by the type of teeth in your head).

[dodgymanc]

i was just about to say that, Darth. If wildwood is goin to be pedantic about it, yes we are not carnivores, but omnivores. But since my question was related to meat... Anyway, so its just down to habit then? Interesting...

[WaldoMcFroog]

Let's not forget that there are good hygenic reasons for ensuring meat is cooked too though - especially because of the way that we kill and store meat in the western world.

[sddsddean]

My Mum likes Steak Tartare, which is basically raw minced steak and of course the Japanese eat loads of raw fish (or so we are led to believe).

[brawburd]

(1) Matter of common sense - the amount of rubbish fed to our animals/poultry; but then, what difference does cooking make? CJD? (2) Matter of taste - I used to eat deliciously melt-in-the-mouth fillet steak prepared by a friend. When I found out she marinated it in worcestershire sauce and whisky to disguise the fact that she then simply flashed in the pan and served "raw" to keep the tenderness - went right off it!

[wildwood]

Dodgymac and Darth vader: You both start of suggesting that we are carnivores, but concede in the same answer that we are omnivores. If you think the difference is pedantic I'm wasting my time here.

[lisaj]

The answer to your question, omnivores or not, is because we're lazy buggers who don't kill our food. If we hunted and killed it we wouldn't necessarily need to cook it because it wouldn't be saturated with bacteria from the "slaughter, process, pack, transport, sit-in-shop, freeze, defrost-in-fridge, cook" cycle that we now undertake, but rather killed and eaten there and then. It's that same kind of theme to the fact that all our children are allergic to everything because they were brought up in obsessively clean places and thus develop no immune systems.

[ulrika]

Spot on lisaj > I've eaten raw meat and fish all my life, as have the rest of my family, with no ill effects. Eastern Europeans often buy meat direct from the slaughterer and eat it raw, usually after dressing it with something simple like olive oil or vinegar. My special treat is a soft fresh pigs ear dipped in soured cream, garlic and onion. Eaten raw.

[sft42]

Good God....what must your breath smell like!!! That's a hell of a combination....but i have to agree....if we killed our own food and ate it there and then then we would build up our resistance to the nasties that are present in it and it would do no harm....after all you don't see many wild carnivores rolling about being sick...and wildwood....wow calm down.

[darth vader]

The first part was tongue-in-cheek - you have to be religious to believe that explanation. Next time i'll post a picture of one. (tongue, that is). We are definitely Omnivores, though we eat meat more predominantly than vegetation

[treaclefight]

we are indeed omnivores and we can eat raw meat, there is nothing stopping you doing it but your health, but then human also smoke and drink and drive cars and do other things that damage our health. i think that maybe though we are getting more like goats who eat everything

[treaclefight]

and i think the reason we started cooking meat was becasue something in it it made you ill more often when it was raw and so the poeple who ate raw meat more often were slightly less healthy and so slightly less likely to reproduce and the culture of cooking food grew faster and spread further than the culture of eating it raw....darwin and friends have alot to say on the subject

[KARL]

There are several well known examples of raw meat and fish being eaten - Ham and Sushi perhaps best known here. There is a Lebanese dish (can't recall the name) which consists of pureed raw lamb (very pleasant), then there is jerkey (dried beef), dried fish, etc., etc. Control against contamination by pathogens is important and this sometimes involves salting in addition to drying if not consumed very fresh.