Cooking is boring. Why not just eat raw food?

Don't like to cook? Then don't. There are plenty of raw foods you can enjoy, and sushi is the least adventurous of them. Poisson cru, steak tartar, beef carpaccio, etc., etc.

But what about raw chicken, or duck, or pork? Sound gross and unsafe? Well, from the little I've read (lazy tonight) but the lots I've heard from my professor, Chef M, rare burger and lamb can be just as unsafe.

This is how I understand steers are killed. A bolt (think Anton Chigurh) is shot into the steer's head, and then it is moved via conveyor belt to be sawed in half. However, sometimes the steer turns his head, and is cut not-so-perfectly-in-half, opening up his digestive tract and spraying the walls and meat with filth. If the steer was infected with E. Coli or something nastier, it could possibly infect the meat of it and all other steers coming down the line. Inspectors apparently are rare. Even the bolt-killing process has been linked to the spread of BSE, or mad cow disease, in Britain.

The process for chicken isn't much better, but for some reason people are terrified of an undercooked game bird but rush to eat basically raw steak, or worse, an undercooked burger. In either case, if the animal is raw, you probably want to get the best meat possible to limit possibility of disease: small farm, free-range, etc. A burger is made from ground chuck from possibly thousands of steers, where the threat of disease is much higher.

I find slightly undercooked chicken delicious, and raw chicken is actually a delicacy in other countries, like Japan. But because of the preference for beef in the USA and the recent focus on salmonella, raw poultry is verboten. Ok, here's an old article from The New Yorker about chicken sashimi sold at a NYC restaurant, so it's not unheard of in the states, but still pretty rare (no pun intended).

Post-script: For raw food without the squeamish factor, curing is the way to go. Since wifey and I love to eat bagels and lox on Sundays--a tradition I've adopted from her family--and because the lox at my supermarket are foul and expensive, I've decided to try to make my own, using a recipe from class.

Typically, gravlax is made with salt, sugar and dill. However, we used some interesting alternatives, including cheap tequila and cilantro and eschewing the dill. I pilfered my Chef M's recipe and tried it at home. Below is a photo of it after the salt rub is applied. Hopefully in a few days it will turn out as good as the stuff at school. That green stuff is the cilantro, not mold.