Donal Mountain/FlickrHere’s a juicy new delicacy debate to sink your teeth into; people in Japan and America are eating chicken sashimi.
Not to be mistaken for thin strips of pickled ginger, this pink poultry dish is simply raw chicken, lightly seared for a matter of just seconds before its plated up and served for your delectation.
While some foodies are happily sharing snaps of their smorgasbords of salmonella to social media, others are repulsed by the raw food.
This new delicacy looks like food roulette to me, and Live Science spoke to a food safety specialist to confirm what we all knew: This stuff is not good for your tum.
Ben Chapman, a food safety specialist and an associate professor at North Carolina State University said:
Eating chicken sashimi puts a person at a pretty high risk of getting an infection caused by Campylobacter or Salmonella, two types of bacteria that cause food poisoning.
There’s a pretty good chance that one or both of these pathogens are on or in the chicken meat itself.
Salmonella infections cause symptoms such as diarrhoea, fevers and abdominal cramps, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About 1.2 million people contract Salmonella each year, and about 450 people die from the infection, they state.
Chapman noted that eating raw chicken is different from eating raw fish, which can be found commonly in delicious sushi dishes.
The germs in raw fish that are most likely to make a person sick are parasites, but they can be killed by freezing the fish, Chapman explained.
Salmonella, on the other hand, ‘isn’t going to be affected by freezing’.
In Japan, where the dish is more popular, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare advised restaurants in June 2016 to “re-evaluate raw and half-raw chicken menus,” according to The Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper.
Restaurants are urged to cook chicken to an internal temperature of 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit), after 800 people said they were sickened after eating chicken sashimi and chicken “sushi” rolls.
Despite my love of raw fish, you’d need a helluva lotta sake to get me to chown down on chicken sashimi.
Stick a fork in me, I’m done.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.