This has sat in my “write about this” folder for about 2 weeks now, but you know what’s awesome about writing for vegans? You don’t have to be all that timely with your advice, at least not when it’s about how to safely handle raw chicken.
The British Food Standards Agency is now advising consumers that they should not, repeat, not, wash raw chicken before cooking it. It turns out, and this sounds remarkably straightforward when you think about it, that trying to wash the deadly bacteria off the chicken before you cook it only serves to spread the stuff around the kitchen. Food safety people are fond of saying that chicken’s perfectly safe as long as it cooks thoroughly at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, but nobody has, to my knowledge, come up with a way to cook an entire kitchen to ensure it’s clean afterwards. I have a hard enough time figuring out the dishwasher, frankly.
So, as the title of this post suggests, remember to avert your eyes when in the presence of raw chicken, lest it infect your soul. Again, not something I have to tell the readers of a vegan site, because that stuff’s kinda a turnoff to begin with.
In years past, I would have jumped on this story as yet another example of why people are completely utterly insane to even contemplate eating animals, but I’ve since come to the opinion that this is just another thing that technology will solve one way or another. We’re still early in the discovery phase where we as a society are still figuring out cause and effect with food preparation, but as illnesses and deaths get linked closer to certain practices, somebody’s going to figure out a way to bypass the risk.
In fact, I believe that the future of food safety, at least when it comes to poultry preparation, has been staring most of us in the face for more than 20 years now:
Image may be NSFW.
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I don’t know how or why the chicken will be made into glowing green cylinders but that’s what we call the price of progress for a society. For the individual, there’s always the option of taking yourself out of the insanity and eating the most healthy and compassionate foods you can, which will only increase your lungpower as you laugh at the hoops the rest of the world has to jump through to maintain a way of life that, upon inspection, might not be so awesome when it involves suiting up in full protective gear just to make a sandwich.
