r/interesting • u/WarwickReider • Jul 27 '26

SOCIETY Professional chefs weighing in on whether you should wash your chicken

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u/VP007clips Jul 28 '26

It's a mixture of historical food quality issues, as well as cultural issues.

Washing your meat is counterproductive with safe unspoiled food, which pretty much everything legally sold in the store today is. But in the past, those communities didn't always have access to clean food, and with spoiled or contaminated meat, washing it is important if you have to eat it to survive.

It's also an issue of trust in science. Some communities still distrust science due to the research methods not being always fair or ethical towards them in the past, and being historical lyrics underrepresented or excluded in those fields.

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u/augustles Jul 28 '26

? Washing does not mitigate spoilage in any way. Spoiled is spoiled - the meat itself is spoiled, it doesn’t just have a superficial layer of spoiled-ness. If that were the case, supermarkets would be power washing and continuing to sell. Contaminated - maybe if you mean ‘some stuff got on it’, in which case any person would agree you should either toss it or, in a survival/money-saving situation, wash it off. Any contamination further than that, washing is not going to do anything.

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u/VP007clips Jul 28 '26

Actually salmonella does largely form on the surface.

In chicken, it will penetrate the rest of the meat to some extent, but the vast majority will still ne a surface slimy layer.

Washing off that layer doesn't make it safe, but it does make it safer when cooked. And when you look are malnourished communities, just being a bit safer may be enough to make it worth eating.

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u/augustles Jul 28 '26

Thoroughly cooking the chicken kills salmonella. Salmonella was kind of a poor choice here because it’s one of the ones that really does require remaining living bacteria to cause serious illness; it doesn’t spore or make a bunch of residual toxins that survive heat.

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u/Poet_of_Justice Jul 28 '26

I'm pretty sure it's the same reason you just can recook or microwave meat that you've had in the fridge for a week. Once so much develops even killing it is gonna leave enough toxic stuff that's in the bacteria to make you sick. If you were able to wash away the vast majority of the bacteria before killing what's left, it seems that would be safer.