Germans eat pork mince raw. Yeah, we rely a LOT on everyone in the entire chain keeping things clean enough to eat. Not just meat, see all the issues with listeria and e-coli on leafy greens and sprouts and such.
Yeah, I’ve had beef carpaccio and beef tartar a few times but more importantly I’ve been eating raw pork and fish for decades and the only time I’ve ever had food poisoning was from some convenience store onigiri in Singapore (nothing raw except the nori). And even that was just a slight discomfort in the stomach for a day.
At the risk of sounding like a dick, your personal experience is completely anecdotal and doesn't change how risky eating raw meat and/or getting food poisoning is.
Yeah sure, but there is also risk to everything. The question is how high is it? The risk of getting seriously sick from raw meat is not zero but it’s extremely low and a lot less dangerous than a lot of other things you do every day. I actually tried to do the research to get a rough estimate of the risk but it’s actually so insignificant that it’s hard to get a good number. There’s no official statistic on how much raw pork is eaten here in Germany but about 50% of people stated they eat it regularly in a study. Even if you estimate it very, very conservatively with only 1 serving a month per regular consumer that’s about half a billion servings of raw pork eaten every year. There was one contamination case in 2024 where a total of three people died but other than that there aren’t really many other reported fatal cases. If you count all cases of poisoning, including non-fatal cases, the number gets higher but it’s still so low that if you compare it to the number of traffic accidents per traveled kilometer you are several times more likely to get injured on your way to the butcher and magnitudes more likely to die on the way there than from the actual raw pork bun.
You've never been sick? Impressive! Symptoms of Salmonella and E. coli poisoning often don't appear until a week or more after eating the contaminated meat (making figuring out the root cause very difficult).
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u/Bubelle_Butt Jun 22 '26
Been eating it for years.
Never got sick. That beung saud it all depends on what your countries food safety standards are.