How much of cooking is just a chase for tastier food? Up in Eastern Europe everyone is hardcore convinced overcooked meat is healthy because no bacteria plus warm food good for stomach. Tons of people still wince at medium rare steak.
I probably fit into this group, because in my mind it's better to be safe than sorry. While most of the food you'd get in stores is going to have good quality control and should be safe, "most" is still not "all". I recall a story from a number of years back in the news, where a person had found worms in some sushi that they got, for example.
While that's an outlier, there are also many people that enjoy hunting and eating game meat, not cooking which fully would be just asking for trouble, because you could end up with trichinellosis, essentially with parasitic worms in your muscle tissue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella
Of course, the meat that comes from farms is quite different, but regardless, you only need to get unlucky once to have plenty unpleasant experiences, from food poisoning to worse. So for the foreseeable future, "overcooked" meat it is for me, others can enjoy their raw or rare meats and fish as they please.
If I offered you irradiated steak or tartare, would you eat it?
I'm not sure what radiation would practically do and whether eating something like that would be safe for me either way.
As for the steak, if I was sure that it was quality meat, I might opt for medium well due to social pressure, otherwise leaning more on the side of well done, which some might view as a social affront. As for tartare, I wouldn't eat it either way, the same way how I don't eat raw salmon or other raw meat like that - while there are people over here that do enjoy that sort of thing, it's a matter of taste or perhaps an acquired taste.
As for raw food - can't acquire taste without trying! Raw salmon per se isn't impressive - so many people get it wrong and are not using the fatty salmon belly. I haven't tried tartare yet myself.
I wouldn't be weary of microwaves per se, but rather their effectiveness in making food safer to eat.
Even if we think just about it heating the food up enough to be safe, I've found that it doesn't heat up evenly, especially in the center of a rotating microwave. I guess that's what you get with standing waves, but it makes me a bit concerned.
I did try looking up more information, but found nothing conclusive, sadly.
But purpose of microwave heating it is not for sanitisation, it’s for taste
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinosis
That may not be totally unfounded. More developed countries have tighter livestock regulations. Not saying Eastern European farms or kitchens are "dirty", but there is just less oversight which leads to more opportunities in the swiss-cheese model of disease prevention.
There's a reason restaurants add an asterisk after meat dishes. There's risk involved in consuming rare foods. The risk is just very small in the US and Europe. Not so small in other countries.
I should say those that it's not so much a question of the cleanliness of the kitchen, but of the confidence in quality control of the meat. Parasites and tainted meat are a lot more common than in more wealthy countries.
I just think stereotyping “Eastern Europe” as some mid-20th century agrarian backwater is very counterproductive to good discussion.
It’s still a useless term.
Also lot of people (rightfully) don't trust the supermarkets - my friends were shocked I just buy raw fish in supermarket - no need to find a personal fisherman!