The first thing that primitive humankind did with fire was use it to cook meat.
They didn't sear it briefly to preserve the juices and then eat it mostly raw.
They likely charred that meat so badly that the first few times they were eating bison flavored coal.
Animals that eat raw meat live shorter lives than animals that cook their meat. They also have really bad breath compared to the pleasant mesquite aroma that comes from eating meat that has been properly cooked.
The rare steak is a fraud perpretrated on consumers by lazy cooks who are too afraid to meet the challenge of the medium well steak, which is to say a perfectly cooked cut of meat--one that is still juicy but not uncooked. It is difficult to achieve a perfect medium well without some degree of luck. For this reason, a truly generous consumer will be forgiving of a medium well steak if it errs slightly in one direction or another, because either way a good faith effort has been made and thus there is never a need to send it back. But a rare steak? If you want to eat uncooked meat you shouldn't have to pay someone to lightly grill it for you. You can do that on the manifold of your car out in the parking lot for a few seconds if that's what you want.
Rare? They should call it COMMON, because uncooked is a more common state for meat than cooked properly and because uncooked meat is the kind that any large carnivore could eat directly on the hoof from a wildebeest that isn't even fully dead yet.
Eating uncooked meat and pretending that it's the right way to do it is like crapping in your lawn and saying that it's the natural way. It's uncivilized and that word should still mean something to people.
Mufti Dor respects his colleague, but loves sushi.
ReplyDeleteMujtahid WMR has not extended this ruling to sushi or ceviche.
ReplyDeleteMuch as I respect my Mufti's, both, I have to call foul on this Fatwa. How can uncooked cow be a problem but not uncooked seafood? Do not both involve a level of laziness? Do we not pay out the wazoo for other people to not cook but "prepare" our rare steaks and our entirely uncooked fish? I would hate to point out that sushi, at this point, is hip. Is that going too far? Or is the heart of the matter simply that raw fish is considered healthy while beef, raw or otherwise, is bad for us? Perhaps while Mufti WMR is free to dislike raw meat and like raw fish, he could not condemn his people's free choice to have the opposite preference.
ReplyDeleteFor myself, the texture (I dare not say mouth-feel, though yeah, my objection is precisely the way it feels in the mouth) of any raw flesh is simply slimy and therefore nasty.
fish don't have e.coli.
ReplyDeleteBut do fish have salmon-ella?
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, folks. I understand the notion of sushi. Not entirely happy with it, and I will admit that my taste for it has entirely developed as a taste for the accoutrements associated with it. Give me a medium well steak with some pickled ginger, wasabi and soy sauce and I will give up on sushi entirely. I'm a little hesitant on ceviche, because I don't care what you say--it's still doesn't seem cooked to me.
i'm going to revise and extend my comments to say that i think M has a point. i mean, i do think there is a qualitative difference between raw fish and raw beef, in terms of biohazard, and invoking the historical defense kind of begs for the Chris Rock Dictum: hey, a thousand years ago, a pork chop might kill ya. now, it'll save ya life!
ReplyDeletei don't know about the hipster aspect of sushi, but i'll go out on a limb and say there might actually be a gender difference. Mufti Dor remembers catching his own mother in a darkened kitchen more than once, scarfing down raw hamburger, and also once dated a beautiful midget who, when hungry, would begin to eye Mufti Dor's shoulder meat in an alarming way. and Mufti Dor's lazy, half-assed scientific awareness contains a vague recollection that women might be prone to iron deficiency, which could be effectively combatted with raw meat.
or Mufti Dor could just be talking out his ass. it happens.
anyway, a nuanced argument might involve some recognition that everyone's health, and hence nutrition, are different. and one might include the ongoing collapse of regulatory agencies like the FDA in one's observation of declining meat-related standards in western civilization. for example, the Chris Rock Dictum is itself in danger: it used to be the case that you probably wouldn't get trichinosis eating even raw pork, because the FDA was doing its' job. i fully expect the next free-market worshipper who gets elected president to "encourage privatization" by appointing a cannibal from new guinea to head up the FDA's new "alternative meats" program.
I'm sorry... I got totally caught up in an image of the beautiful cannibal midget.
ReplyDelete