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We descend from thousands of generations of people who ate meat without the benefit of refrigeration or USDA inspections. Unless you have other health problems already, the meat is fine. (I guess "mad cow disease" is an exception, but that's a really long-term exception.)

Yes I have lived in SE Asia. I never hesitated to eat at the restaurants next door to the meat markets that had never seen refrigeration.



All diseases originally came from someone else.

The fact there are 8 billion people in the world rather than 1 million is a big part of why you have to be so much more careful with food safety.

The chance that a random liter of river water contains pathogens from someone else is much higher now than a few hundred years ago.


> who ate meat without the benefit of refrigeration or USDA inspections

There is a reason why those exist and it's not for fun.

They also knew (a bit) how to keep it good (for a while) without refrigeration.

Hence beef jerky, ham curing and other techniques. It would also get cooked on the day if not processed. In northern Europe the weather also helps.

Not to mention the tapeworms and other nice stuff laying around.

Your SE restaurants probably deep fried the stuff or left it cooking for long.


YouTube Barnacle goosling. What you’ll see are small chicks jumping off a cliff and trying to fly with something like a 40-60% survival rate. Those chicks descended from thousands of generations that jumped off cliffs without the benefit of nets. That doesn’t mean that nets wouldn’t dramatically improve their survival rate!


This strikes me as an appeal to nature. So what if our ancestors survived without knowing better? We're all alive today despite horrific lack of food safety through the ages, not thanks to it. We have every reason to use modern, hard-earned scientific knowledge to ward off easily preventable diseases.




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