I try not to, but habits die hard. And I don't like to see the blood/pink juices run out of it so I like to rinse the inside of it clean.

Sometimes I rinse it too, because it looks so goopy. But then I realize I have to sanitize the whole sink and my hands and the surrounding areas. But I seem to endlessly wipe down the sink and counters anyway. Why can't they invent a Roomba for kitchen sinks and countertops!

Seems like common sense, I haven't washed chicken since I was a teenager cooking at home. But chicken is cleaner, not bloody looking, now.

There is also a university study that you should not flush your toilet because it will contaminate your whole house.

A study that you should not in public places. One sneeze from a sick person will contaminate the entire area.

dcarch

It took them 2 years to make a silly cartoon? They have been talking about this forever.

A healthy chicken will not make you sick. But the big factories where most grocery chicken comes from are raising them in horrid conditions. It is just a flip of a coin if you'll get a diseased one, or parts. With the hormones and water/salt 'enhancements' they get an extra few pennies in weight. The packages are full of liquid. Another penny. If i needed to buy that, i would prep in the sink. We always prep any meat in a clean sink with the 'meat' cutting board next to it. Contained. It does not splatter everywhere. Most need to do a bit of prep with spice rubs, some batter for fried. Trussing for a rotis. I suppose i see the point.

A past discussion i mention some friends that got sick from a neighbors farm. They immediately went to work finding the sick one. Out of the 6 or so dozen they keep. It can happen but the chances are less.

This is hilarious. Julia. I kept waiting for her to run her hands through her hair, lol. She is all over the place with chicken hands. Times have changed. Looks like healthy chickens and diseases were not so prevalent. I still want to scrub down that kitchen. : ) Big party foul. : )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRZxaUuFA1Y

It's funny that people even eat chicken since everything it touches is "contaminated" and needs to washed thoroughly! They act like it crawling with bacteria...

All these studies fail to show that contamination is statistical. Yes, washing chicken may spread germs, but how many per square inch? There are already germs everywhere to begin with. We are perfectly OK to deal with germs in our environment.

They need to pass a law to prohibit kissing. Because each time you kiss someone, it has been shown that you exchange up to a billion germs.

dcarch

My mother has been using a wooden cutting board my father made her 45 years ago to cut chicken on. I warned her of the dangers and she said "if I haven't died or gotten sick in 45 years, I'll take my chances.

Haven't washed chicken or any other meat for decades - thanks to Jacques Pepin's influence (again ). I was taught as child that all birds carry salmonella. & there was a study awhile ago that found kitchen sinks to be super dirty - some had more pathogens than people's bathrooms

Also recall a Consumer Reports study from many years back that found wooden cutting boards harbored far fewer pathogens than plastic ones.

Here's what this discussion brought to my mind...

Warning - adult language:

Oooooo-er, Missus!

LOL somehow I missed Auntie Fee, that cracked me up and grossed me out at the same time.

Re washing chicken, for me it depends on what it looks and feels like. I don't think I could enjoy eating a dish that I knew was made from unwashed, slimy, goopy chicken. They've been warning about washing chicken for years, so when I do I'm very cognizant of any overspray and sanitize surrounding areas afterwards regardless. Same goes for cleaning dishes and utensils that come into contact with raw chicken.

Yes, there are germs all around us and the vast majority don't make us sick. But many (most?) of us who have ever suffered from salmonella take precautions to avoid a repeat. Unlike eggs where the incidence of salmonella is something negligible like 1 in 20,000 - not enough to keep me from eating a raw egg if I felt like it - the incidence in chicken is far greater, to the tune of 11-16% is what Consumer Reports found in years of testing. And becoming infected with salmonella is no freak occurrence. This from the CDC:

"Annually, non-typhoidal Salmonella causes approximately 1.2 million illnesses, 23,000 hospitalizations, 450 deaths, and an estimated-$365 million in direct medical costs in the United States."

How concerned we want to be about different risks in life is our own choice of course, but if "they" decide the risk of cross contamination from splashing chicken is high enough to warrant a public service announcement then I'm all for it.

I butcher my own so washing and patting dry before freezing is necessary to clean out any extra blood. I don't wash it again before cooking though.

I just read a few minutes ago, "---Aber analysed toothbrushes in bath rooms used by nine people or more, to find that about 60% were packed full of other people's poo. This means that anytime someone else uses your toilet, they could actually be bombarding your brush with their unspeakable emissions."

I am upset that so many health professionals will do anything to be sensational and to get research grants. There are so many irresponsible "researches" to scare the general population.

If you let your dog lick your face, you will have 10,000,000 more dog poo on your face.

FOAS --------- "Annually, non-typhoidal Salmonella causes approximately 1.2 million illnesses, 23,000 hospitalizations, 450 deaths, and an estimated-$365 million in direct medical costs in the United States."

I feel that the above statistic needs to be understood. If there are only two people in the world, one does sky diving and one does not. The sky diver kills himself. Does this mean that there is a 50% chance of sky diving deaths for everyone in this population of two?

There are 350 million people in the USA, by definition, there will be stupid careless people who are totally careless in food preparations. 23,000 hospitalizations and 450 deaths is not surprising, but it does not apply to people who are not careless. You don't need to go to extremes just because there are stupid people who do dumb things.

dcarch

I esp. liked Auntie Fee's testimonial for dried parsley = J

I'm in the same camp as foas - if our health officials & regulatory agencies are advising something, I choose to take them seriously.

Nobody is going to make anyone change their personal habits, BTW.

dcarch7 - what about "stupid careless people" who are preparing food for others? What responsibility do they have if they make those other people sick? & what is meant by extremes?

http://barfblog.com/

The best of food safety rules don't prevent chefs from dripping sweat into food.
I ate lunch recently at the bistro area in Whole Foods and wanted the main cook to wear a beard net.
Sometimes too much analyzation is bad for digestion!

Like littlemonkeys3, I grow and process my own chickens. I have 17 of them due to hit the freezer in about a week and a half, and I do wash them before packaging.

I slaughter, pluck and clean them outside on a stainless steel table, then pack the carcasses in ice for two days, then package with the Food Saver. Every surface gets bleached after it is used, as do all utensils. However, our situation is much different than most others, who rely on the commercial food supply industry to provide their chickens, and you never know how the birds were raised, who handled them or how.

Annie

Having visited a couple of the newer chicken processing plants in recent years, I will continue to wash all poultry before I start prepping or cooking it.

I am fanatical when it comes to food safety and cleanliness in the kitchen. So if, in fact, I'm spraying chicken germs during the cleaning process, I can assure you they're washed away once I'm done. This is nothing more than common sense and they way I've handled chicken for the 50+ years I've been cooking.

The only poultry I ever washed was whole birds, but I stopped doing that a long time ago. I'm confident that cooking chicken thoroughly kills all the bacteria. I have a separate wooden board for cutting/pounding raw meat and wash that separately with soap and hot water. I don't use bleach in the kitchen. It's worked for me for 40 plus years.

Washing a chicken may not kill any germs, indeed it likely spreads them. But I find it un appetizing to have chicken with pieces of artery hanging out and globs of fat on the edges of the boneless breast meat....etc. I find that most commercially prepped chickens have bits of the lungs in place and I even found the heart tucked up in the chest in a chicken from an organic free range farm.
I mostly always wash chicken, but for when I cook bagged frozen pieces....then I just dump that $h^t into the MF sink and pour on....well you know!! LOL!
Somehow frozen icky stuff is better than fresh! I don't wash chicken to kill germs but to rid it of blood, bits of bone and other icky stuff.