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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

Steak tartare and sushi exist.

If you have a large muscle and you keep it clean, the inside is especially clean. As soon as you cut it, the inside will be likely to get infected pretty quickly. That's why you don't make steak tartar from super market ground beef.

Similarly, you can eat raw fish (if you don't worry about parasites), but you pretty much want to eat them right out of the water. As soon as you cut it and leave it alone for a while, it can start to go off. This is, in fact, the origin of sushi. Originally, people in the interior of the country couldn't eat fish because you couldn't transport it without going off. Instead, they would pickle it. This pickling eventually made its way to the rice. Most Edo period sushi used pickled fish.

Been eating all sorts of low quality raw meat my whole life with no problems. (usually buy organic etc)

I find all the science about it contrary to the actual personal experience.

As for the point that cooking helps digestion in another comment, again it makes absolutely no sense to me. After eating 200g of sliced raw beef my stomach feels amazing, way better for digestion.

The more I cook meat, the more bloated I feel etc

(I've also ate raw chicken every now and then for 15 years with no problems)

I would love to know why you regularly eat raw meat

Not OP, but it does taste better.

Well cooking increases the available energy for one and that is separate from digestion in the regularity sense. The raw bits which would release more calories if cooked could be akin to fiber.

You also clearly have a microbiome accustomed to it for one and presumably the sources were sufficiently clean that doctors haven't found parasites or similar that cooking would address. I guess low quality means cut as opposed to "roadkill wildlife".

>That's why you don't make steak tartar from super market ground beef

The risk are way overstated, no you are unlikely to get sick from eating super market ground beef raw.

> Similarly, you can eat raw fish (if you don't worry about parasites), but you pretty much want to eat them right out of the water. As soon as you cut it and leave it alone for a while, it can start to go off.

Raw fish used in sushi/sashimi is often butchered properly to prevent the fish's muscles from producing lactic acid (see ikijime), and then aged for flavour: https://medium.com/torodex/the-sushi-you-eat-isnt-fresh-f347...

Crucially, it is not aged at room temperature ;-). The original discussion was talking about the idea that technology has been used by humans to process and preserve fresh meat, making it more of a staple than it would have been thousands of years ago. Arguing that technology will allow you to age fresh fish, is kind of circular :-) Before the ready availability of ice, unsalted and unvinegared sea fish was very much a rarity if you were more than a days travel away from the sea in Japan.

Originally sushi started as picked fish. Then they got the idea to make blocks of pickled fish and picked rice (you can still buy this kind of sushi today in Japan). It really has only been in the last 150 years or so that sushi included raw, unprocessed fish, and only quite recently that it would have been available far away from the sea side.

Edit: I should qualify this as being in Honshu. I believe the Ainu people were eating raw fish for a long time - in the winter months, of course.

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