Reminds me of an article I came across once about artisanal French cheese. The gist was that the French would much rather risk potential illness from raw-milk cheese than give up the pleasure of eating it.
Growing up in an immigrant family and having lived in Spain a spell, I've come to realize Americans are much too paranoid when it comes to food safety.
> I've come to realize Americans are much too paranoid when it comes to food safety
On the contrary, Americans come from a culture where food purveyors will happily kill you for a quick buck. American food safety is highly regulated because the American business model makes that necessary.
American education is that everything needs to be sterilized, irradiated, and wrapped in plastic. However it does not seem to matter how the food was created with growth hormones, antibiotics, preservatives, and other questionable ingredients.
Some of this might be due to the influence of big ag on our education, media and regulatory systems. These measures definitely benefit the big factories and impose excessive burdens on the small local farms.
People like saying this kind of stuff to imply that, like, steak tartar is safe.
The fact of the matter is that yes, all things being equal, things like actually cooking food or not leaving things out at ambient temperature make it safer to eat.
The problem with food science is that you can have terrible food hygiene and still survive for a long time! This sort of stuff doesn’t instantly kill you
Factbox: Fake olive oil scandal that caused Spain's worst food poisoning epidemic in 1981
> * About 100,000 individuals were exposed and clinical disease occurred in 20,000 people, 10,000 of whom were hospitalized, according to Science Direct website. More than 300 victims died and many more were left with chronic disease, Science Direct said.
> * According to the survivors' organisation Seguimos Viviendo more than 5,000 people have died over the years and there are 20,000 surviving victims with poor quality of life and incurable afflictions.
That's not true. First of all, as cheese ages all the bacteria (and fungi and yeasts) inside it die out because they run out of food to eat. You see, they're trapped in a solid lump of protein so they have nowhere to go. So they die of hunger. That does make the cheese safe to eat so cases of food poisoning from hard cheeses that tend to age for more than three months, are virtually unheard of.
Second, whether good bacteria will outnumber the "bad" depends on how many of each ... goodness value? there were at the start. If your raw milk is contaminated with sufficiently high numbers of coliform bacteria (E coli and friends) there is no amount of bacterial goodness that can make that milk good for cheesemaking. Most likely you're looking at "early blowing" (literally the cheese blowing up like a rugby ball, with a great big fissure in its center, because of gasses released by bacteria early in its maturation).
Third, some "good" and "bad" bacteria can coexist quite happily with each other simply because they do not consume the same resources and so do not compete for them.
Wouldn't that also apply to pasteurized cheese? Cultures are usually introduced which I would expect to outproduce bad bacteria just like with raw-milk cheese.
Yes it does also apply to pasteurized cheese. But pasteurized cheese is safe at any age (young ones safe because of pasteurization step, older ones because of good bacteria). And slightly less flavourful.
My informed opinion as a cheese maniac is that raw or pasteurized milk doesn't make any perceptible difference in cheese quality. What makes the difference is a) the animals' diet (which imparts flavors that don't go away with pasteurization), b) the manufacturing process (anything made in a factory will be bland, even if it's made with raw milk) and c) the aging.
The most important factor by far is aging. There's a reason why the French have a special name for the special job of aging cheese, "affineur". A good affinage can transform the most mediocre cheese into a culinary tour de force.
Americans seem a bit weird about food safety, but also American food seems incredibly unsafe.
I remember an American colleague of mine absolutely freaking out that I was slicing up chicken without wearing gloves, and he was convinced that I'd be dead by morning from some hideous chicken-borne disease because of it. Apparently chicken in the US really is that dangerous, or something, but I guess someone from the US can comment?
I've never seen anyone wear gloves to cut chicken that wasn't working in a commercial kitchen where they required it.
I've been cooking in America for decades and have never once had an issue with cooking chicken and not wearing gloves. My mother, other the other hand, got an eye infection the day after getting a bit of raw liquid in her eye while she was cutting chicken a few months ago. A few antibiotics and eye drops, and it cleared up.
The only absurd precaution I've seen someone take in the US is that my grandmother would overcook pork to the point we would joke that it would shatter if you dropped it- however, she grew up in times when trichinosis was a very valid concern. Nowadays, it is safe to cook less than well done (some prefer medium or mid-well) though I don't know anyone willing to try it.
Industrial-processed chicken really is that dangerous. It's the de-feathering. They place the bird in vat of boiling water. It loosens the stool so the bird isn't really de-feathered in boiling water, it's de-feathered in boiling chicken shit water. Believe it or not this process works so long as you take precautions in how you handle the meat to prevent that bacteria from growing.
Having said that, I don't know of anyone who uses gloves when handling chicken. Just wash your hands and you'll be fine. Then again, this person may have known someone who died from a staph infection. As long as you're not handling raw chicken while having an open cut on your hands or fingers (gross!) then you should be fine. Still, wash up when you're done!
Let’s say you have a big pot of boiling water and you put a raw chicken in there. What temperature is the water now? What if at the end of this process, your goal is to have a raw chicken?
I’m American born & raised, and know of no Americans who are concerned about gloves while cooking (though you do need to wash anything touching raw meat before moving on). On the other hand, Koreans I’ve seen seem to almost fetishize the use of plastics for all manner of cooking which I’ve never understood.
As far as I’ve seen, all the American sterilization obsession is pushed onto the industry, not in the kitchen itself — e.g. you cannot find anything “dangerous” in most grocery stores / restaurants in the first place. The closest is steak and sashimi
> I remember an American colleague of mine absolutely freaking out that I was slicing up chicken without wearing gloves, and he was convinced that I'd be dead by morning from some hideous chicken-borne disease because of it.
Most Americans aren't like that person.
> Apparently chicken in the US really is that dangerous
Not to my knowledge. On the other (ungloved) hand, I don't know of any culinary tradition involving eating raw chicken.
I understand that American chicken is not processed under sanitary conditions which is why it needs to be chlorine dipped to kill the salmonella bacteria.
This was one of the big controversies about Brexit, that they would be receiving chlorinated chicken from America when previously they were able to enjoy non-chlorinated chicken.
That said, even with salmonella bacteria, just wash your hands after preparing it and you'll be fine.
That's because federal regulations in the US require that eggs be washed and refrigerated prior to selling at grocery stores. On the one hand, this decreases the risk that the egg will get contaminated if someone cooks an unwashed egg, but it also means that it no longer has the protective coating on the shell that unwashed eggs have.
That said, I don't think there have been egg related deaths since a raw egg eating competition years ago.
I've been making historic cocktails with uncooked US eggs (either whites or yolks) for the winter season, and have yet to get sick. But sample size me and usually with a decent amount of ethanol.
You can also save the yolks and make zabaione without being wasteful. Heavenly decadent on fresh fruit and easy to whip up after dinner. Also a great wow if you've got leftover champagne, as the carbonation isn't particularly important. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabaione
I usually split an egg and store the unused portion (whites or yolks) in the fridge 24 hours and use them the next day.
I looked this up before since I was curious if this actually did anything, and apparently the US _does_ have a lower incidence of food poisoning compared to many countries, so perhaps some of these preventative measures taken in the US do help.
I guess it also helps there is a cultural aversion to eating raw food compared to the Europe and Asia.
Unironically, with their health care system couldn't it also be underreporting and not seeing a doctor if you have a mild case of food poisoning where someone in Europe would just go see a doctor?
I remember hearing that the protective coating on unwashed eggs is also where salmonella is most likely to come from as a justification for requiring that the eggs are washed. I don't know how correct that is but it seems to be somewhat commonly believed in the US.
Other common raw meats include sushi, poke, sashimi, steak tartar, yukhoe (double whammy, raw beef + raw egg)
the #1 source of food poisoning is the norovirus via bad veggies by a literal order of magnitude over anything else. Guess I'd better stop eating salad and putting uncooked veggies in my sandwich
Sorry, I just really like the wording and wanted to make sure that people don't read that and think that there's some magic going on (like the "real" magic that goes on with eggs that make raw eggs safer to eat in some countries)
To your point about uncooked vegetables... the fact that that is what is left standing is a testament to us cooking meat and practicing proper food safety! I'm sure that stat would change quite quickly if people were having chicken sashimi more often.
Disclaimer: I eat sashimi quite often (steak tartar... sometimes. There are definitely restaurants I trust less to do that safely). Just also think it's important to conceptualize the size of the dice roll for various foods.
American born and raised here: I always ensure I wash my hands thoroughly after handling raw chicken but I've never worn gloves or ever seen anyone doing it to cut chicken at home.
I have seen it in restaurants but that's more to keep the food from being contaminated by hands, not the other way around.
Its not related to alcohol. Fermentation is mainly about producing acidity that stops harmful bacteria growing (also in the absence of oxygen, plus salted).
Wait until the author finds out how prosciutto is made. You take the (raw) hind leg of a pig, cover it in salt, and hang it in a cool dry place for 9 months to two years. Then you take it down, scrape off all the mold, slice it thinly, and enjoy its deliciousness. That's right, prosciutto is raw pork that was left unrefrigerated for months or years until covered in mold.
Right, so: you take the kind of raw meat that is so thick that any contaminants you might get during carving is surface contamination, then cover it in a substance that kills any bacteria or molds that it comes into contact with, making sure to use enough salt to prevent subsequent contamination for as long as it takes for the surface to dry and form an impenetrable layer, and then we let it age for however long we like because it is now physically impossible for surface contaminants to make it into the meat anymore.
Which is completely different from leaving wet meat to just hang out at room temperature for many hours.
That "we" in "we survived" is doing an awful lot of work. "We" also survived many rounds of bubonic plague and suchlike. Those who didn't, though, presumably don't get to count themselves among that "we".
For the purposes of these kinds of conversations, I think I might prefer some sober estimates of costs and benefits over platitudes.
That was not an appeal to emotion. That was pointing out that observing that some portion of humanity survives is blatantly talking past the stated purpose of these kinds of measures, which is to reduce the size of the portion that doesn't.
If your floor on what is acceptable is, as the "we survived" standard implies, the base continuance of the species, then you're effectively allowing that even a situation like what happened in the movie Threads is acceptable and it would not be ethical to try and prevent such a situation from happening.
On the other hand, if that isn't actually what you believe, then you should construct rhetoric that is consistent with your actual position.
That's absolutely what you intended, or you wouldn't have reached to such a visceral example.
You could have picked influenza to make the same point, but that wouldn't have been as theatrical.
So if you want to play the high-standards-of-discourse card, it goes both ways.
And now you're reaching for your own straw man by stating my "we survived" implies your "base continuance of the species", which is obviously an easier framing of my argument to argue against.
We also died a lot. If it smells bad, it might be bad, or it might actually be fine because we took creating food to a new level once we discovered fermentation could actually make things tasty.
The same goes for hams, really. Some curing yields things that your nose would go "throw this away!" to, and it couldn't be more wrong. Some Iberico and Parma can smell quite terrible, even if once trimmed it's not just safe but incredibly delicious.
The why is presumably "there are a million trees with these things, how can we eat them". The how has a number of equally "we will never know" theories, all of which make some kind of sense =P
Just like good old country ham here in the US. I get one every year, been eating it since I was a kid. Dry, crusty, some mold on the outside. Clean it off an slice it, or soak it for a couple of days then bake it. Either way it's staple here on the farm.
'Peking' is a romanized name for Beijing. So is 'Beijing.' Had the author said "a romanized name for 'Beijing,'" then you would have a had a point. Sure, you could use '北京,' but that is unnecessarily confusing.
That's my point, they're both "romanizations" One is one type, the other another. There have been other romanizations as well and in addition there are things like bopomo. And, yes, it would make sense to me to say Peking is a romanized transliteration of the Chinese character for the locale [in the mandarin dialect.]
The author raises the point about 'Peking' because many people don't know that it's a romanization of Beijing. You are suggesting that the author is incorrect to omit the commonly known romanization? Develop the argument.
They just want it to say "an alternative romanization of Beijing" or something like that instead. As written it sort of implies that "Peking" is the result of romanization while "Beijing" is not.
While I don't think this was intended - there is a movement to use place-names as preferred by their inhabitants, rather than their "colonial" names. Regardless of the historical context or the merits of linguistic descriptivism. So for example you have Mumbai or Turkiye. So the _implication_ for someone that didn't have the context regarding romanization, is that Peking is the "colonial" name, now requiring updating to less-racist standards.
Eh, I rather go by whatever a language one is speaking calls something:
For example, are you going to write in to Chinese radio and news outlets and insist they use English names for cities in Anglo north America and Spanish for cities in Latin America? They use phonetically semi-close analogues for major geographical place names[1].
What about Latin American speakers and their translations of US and Canadian cities into Spanish, is that now frowned? And who cares about what a despot says a country should be called (be they Turkey or Burma)?
Do I have to say Koln instead of Cologne, Roma/Rome, Espagna/Spain, Torino/Turin? Or Myanmar instead of Burma? But, whait.. what do I do when the locals have a dialectal non-official variant?
Eh. There's definitely a move in English (or at least the United States) in many quarters to move closer to native-language spellings, pronunciations, whatever. In parallel there's a move of countries to request or demand changes in how they're talked about: (see for example Kyiv, or Turkiye). Obviously the specific politics around the governmental moves get all tied up in these moves, too.
I think it's fine, really. It's a bit odd that some countries get basically native names or romanizations thereof and some get borrowings from other languages, or Anglicized variants, so a drift toward more uniform treatment "feels" more logical in a sense. It's not as if "Japan" is any more "English" than "Nihon" would be.
In a similar vein, see the question of name ordering for countries whose native ordering differs from the typical Western order. Chinese names are almost always presented in native order in English (e.g., Xi Jinping). Korean names have shifted more recently in that direction (e.g., typical coverage of "Chan-wook Park" in the 2000s vs. "Bong Joon-ho" in the 2010s... or more directly, "Park Chan-wook" now). Japanese names are almost always presented flipped to Western order, though the government has made some noise about pushing for press to use native order. This extends beyond Asia, of course, for example Hungarian names, which are also generally flipped for use in English.
If people are going to be prescriptive throughout, fine, but they just want it in certain places. As for me, I prefer that people use whatever they are used to.
The French also use Lastname, Firstname, but I don't observe that except in France. If people want to say Jinping Xi, or Xi, Jinping, (or Macron Emmanuel, or Emmanuel Macron) I don't care. And people should be free to use whatever grammars or syntaxes they wish outside of official usage. Just like people can't tell me to say 'Going to' or 'gunna' nor are we to tell foreign speakers.
If other countries are asking us to modify our speech to pronounce things in their way, then we should ask the same of them: No hard retroflex Rs in anything that has an R in English, etc. Do pronounce the puff after plosive Ts and Ps, etc, etc...
Anyhow, it's wholly stupid. Most languages do not contain each other's sounds and will be missing some, so necessarily you need to say things in your own native way.
Just imagine telling native Chinese or Russian speakers to pronounce North American placenames the in the prevailing local pronunciation. I'll continue to say Kiev the way I learned it from King Missile.
> They use phonetically semi-close analogues for major geographical place names[1].
No, just like everyone else, they use whatever their names are without worrying even the slightest bit about whether those names are phonetically close to the native pronunciation.
Heh, no, I did not, but it's down the list alphabetically. I mean, the above stray far enough from pronunciation where locals would have a hard time understanding without some context (like, I'm going to be pronouncing a state name, try and guess which one) that it's not necessary to show the pronunciations that have no basis in local pronunciation.
But, yeah, I totally agree. Use whatever the language you're using at the moment uses. Like I'm going to figure out what the "real" pronunciation is for Ex-USSR locales...
(On the topic of San Francisco, I'm always... bemused... by the city's insistence on referring to itself as 三藩市 in its own Chinese documents. https://sf.gov/zh-hant/about-this-website )
There are plenty of people that will gleefully try to correct you if you write Burma rather than Myanmar these days. I don't think it is a _good_ trend. But it really is a trend.
> While I don't think this was intended - there is a movement to use place-names as preferred by their inhabitants, rather than their "colonial" names
Kind of off-topic, is it just me or is this really inconsistently applied?
Like we have Kyiv (pronounced "keev") instead of Kiev because that's the Ukrainian way... but the country itself is still pronounced (in English-speaking media anyway) as "you crane" instead of "Ooh-krah-ee-nah " which is much more how the natives would say it.
I can think of probably a dozen examples where the quote-unquote "colonial" name is still in widespread, respected use even though the "native" form would be fairly trivial to use or start using.
Let's not go down the prescriptivist route. Let people use the words and pronounce the words as they prefer.
Like what do you do when you have a Spaniard and someone from the Catalonia region and you're talking to both? Or as you mention, a couple of Ukrainians --but remember, some speak Russian as a primary language and others only as a remote second language.
It's silly. Which of the various official languages and dialects should an English name counterpart take hints from, the dominant dialect or language, what about the ostracized local language?
the term 'peking duck', much like the more common spelling 'beijing', are based on romanizations of the name of the city of beijing, china, which is a city, and not a romanized name for itself
bringing up the fact that 'beijing' is a different kind of romanization is only useful if the audience needs to be educated on different kinds of romanizations, which is the point of contention between the author of the duck article, Preston Landers, and 'mc32', which is four ascii characters, and not a person
Such terrible misinformation from speculation in the other replies. Peking is not that much closer to the Cantonese pronunciation (see the voice sample in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC). Nor is it Wade–Giles, which would romanize it as Pei-ching. Just look up the word's well-sourced etymology in Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Peking#Etymology): the name comes from Mandarin after Mandarin dropped final -k, -p, -t (which are preserved in Cantonese) but before Mandarin palatalized ki > ji. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_postal_romanization. The initial consonant being p- is also expected, since it is closer to the unaspirated p in most European languages than to b-; the Pinyin p- then corresponds to aspirated p.
It's also very easy to hear the similarities between Peking and Mandarin... clearly they are related in every aspect except for k > j
Whereas for Cantonese, there's difference in vowel quality and the final -k of 北.
It wouldn't be misinformation if Mandarin indeed used to be pronounced similar to Cantonese... but that's just not true since earlier Mandarin never had -a- for the vowel of 北; it was an innovation in several southern Chinese languages. At best we can say that they used to be pronounced like their Middle Chinese ancestors.
FWIW: my understanding is that there's a dialect issue at work too. The folks providing the pronunciation to a transliterator that became "Peking" said the name of the city somewhat differently than the people living in Beijing today do.
Yeah, Peking is much closer to the Cantonese pronunciation of the city, however, I think the guys who came up with the romanization did live in the north capital city. On the other hand Wade-Giles is more prevalent in Singapore, HK and Taiwan, for example --though in some instances they are starting to follow the pinyin transliteration.
etymonline says "Peking" comes from Hong Kong without much argument devoted to the question. Wiktionary claims, much more convincingly, that it comes from the Mandarin pronunciation of 450 years ago, before palatalization took place.
> Abraham Ortelius used C. Paquin for his 1572 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas; Italian Jesuit Martino Martini used Peking in his 1654 Latin De Bello Tartarico Historia and 1655 Novus Atlas Sinensis, which were quickly translated into English
Not really, under the old Wade-Giles romanization system the city was transliterated as 'Peking'. Under the newer (~65 year old) pinyin system it's transliterated as 'Beijing'. The pronunciation in Mandarin never changed, just the way that sounds which don't have any exact equivalent in our alphabet are represented.
Chang used to be a very common Chinese surname, but Zhang is now. It's the same name.
> under the old Wade-Giles romanization system the city was transliterated as 'Peking'
Not even close. Under the old Wade-Giles system the name of the city is transliterated as 'pei-ching'. That is because, as you note, the pronunciation in Mandarin didn't change. You seem to be imagining a sound that might be interpreted as a K or, alternatively, might be interpreted as a J, but there is no such sound.
No, that's not correct. The 'k' in Peking is there because Peking is not a transcription from Mandarin. The change was in what language to use for the name of the city, not in what romanization system to use.
Yep, this is the reason. The same reason they use 'q', 'c' and 'x' etc., they don't correspond to English, or Italian pronunciation of those letters. They are "pronunciation keys" and Wade-Giles was the same. Just represented differently.
NB this works both ways on a lot of things. For instance, the Chinese word for "guitar" is 吉他; pronounced "jí tā" in Mandarin, but "gat1 taa1" in Cantonese. Similary for "Canada" (加拿大): jiā ná dà in Mandarin, and gaa1 naa4 daai6 in Cantonese.
It's a weird side-effect of two facts: 1) the British interacted a lot more directly with Canton than the rest of China 2) Mandarin and Cantonese are "officially" different dialects of the same language, so once you define the characters in one, you've mostly defined them in the other.
(Some exceptions seem to include "bus" and "taxi", which in HK are obviously based on the English words, but Mandarin has their own, self-describing names for.)
And then you also have Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew. Spending some time in Malaysia and Singapore, you can hear all of these (plus Malay) mixed into a single English-language sentence. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the colonial language migrated back with the Brits.
First of all, the salt kills all the harmful bacteria. I don't know how true this is, but it's said that mammal meat is denser than poultry meat, bacteria can't grow inside of it (or at least have a lot more difficulty growing inside. Duck prosciutto is a thing too though, so maybe it's just chicken?
The salt inhibits growth. It's no different than curing and salting other meats, it's perfectly safe. See also, dry aging, it doesn't necessarily sit in a fridge yet it's still safe as long as you cut off the pellicles.
The thing that does the damage are the toxins the bacteria produce, not usually the bacteria themselves. If you leave the food in the danger zone, the bacteria colonies multiply wildly, producing whatever metabolic products the entire time. Even if you then cook the food and kill the bacteria colony, it won't necessarily denature or destroy the toxin. The seems like the key part of the recipe to me is actually the antibacterial properties of the marinade!
This is actually backwards for botulinum. Boiling denatures the toxin, but doesn't kill the critter; you need to use a higher temperature, e.g. that produced by pressure cooking / canning. So I'd be curious what bacteria are being referred to.
> Doesn't an internal temperature of 160° F kill everything except some weird toxins?
It's worth noting that food safety is not limited to living micro-organisms but includes everything from physical objects (choking on a chicken bone) to the bi-products of micro-organisms (such as alcohol or the toxin that causes botulism). Although bacteria produces the botulism toxin, the toxin itself can't be rid of afterwards through temperature.
In the case of botulism toxin, it's actually the opposite. The spores are extremely resistant to temperature, but the toxin can be destroyed by boiling at normal temp/pressure until all parts have been fully exposed to those temps. Other toxins are still an issue though, and many are heat resistant, so not a good idea to eat potentially contaminated foods.
Ah thanks! It's been a few years since I took a food handling safety course and I remembered Clostridium botulinum being called out as something that "heat won't kill" but you're right, it's the spores, not the toxin itself.
But yeah, as you also pointed out, bi-products that can cause illness are separate issues from "killing living organisms that cause illness", and heat is not always the magic solution. Heavy metal poisoning is another example of something that heat will not take care of.
Aminita "death cap" mushrooms are one substance that I know of that remains toxic after exposure to high heat over time.
"Amatoxins cannot be destroyed by any conventional cooking method, including boiling or baking. Freezing or drying the mushrooms also fails to remove any amount of amatoxin..."
The science bit says it's safe because the seasoning inhibits microbial growth during the drying period, but the recipe at the top applies the seasoning after the drying period. Something doesn't add up.
No one in this thread (nor in the article) has made the obvious observation that this means there are a massive variety of genuinely safe foods that could be made via currently banned practices. You can only get an exception at great cost for foods with existing cultural practice. Some real innovations, like the initial invention of the Peking duck, are basically prohibited.
PS: it doesn't turn me off in the least and I find many food safety rules to be ludicrous, protectionism, and counter productive.
For example: I find that the requirement to wear gloves while preparing food that I see people touching things they would be less likely to touch with their bare hands, touching, and then continuing to prepare the foods. For me, without gloves I can tell when my hands are dirty and wash them but when gloves I feel nothing and am therefore less likely to wash. Have no proof that this is true for everyone but I'm fairly confident that if I had hidden cameras looking for violations I'd find more for people using gloves than not.
The food safety in general from my Chinese in-laws gives me panic attacks. Mostly related to meat. But they also don't do dumb things like we do such as eating raw cilantro from Mexico.
What is perplexing about it? Most/all bacteria on the skin is sterilized by the boiling water. So the only growth on the bird during drying would come from additional bacteria introduced from the environment, which would be low levels, and then the bird is baked which would kill any of that off. There is very little risk of, e.g. botulinum toxins building up either as a result of this process. Seems safe if you understand food safety.
Why would there be bacteria (of material concern) on the inside? Where would it come from?
Beef is dry aged for 60 days at 40F and 75+% RH, and no one has concerns about a raw center of a dry aged steak. A half-day at 70F seems equivalent if not less severe
I would think the intestinal bacteria would remain (by biological design) in the intestinal parts of the animal, at least for 12 hours. No data on this though. You may be right
I'm not as familiar with factory duck processing as I am with chicken... but I'd generally assume the worst for anything that ends up at the supermarket.
I had some chicken sashimi in Japan. It was mildly seared on the outside, I guess to kill any bad germs but quite raw in most of it and quite tasty too.
I had it in a large restaurant in Kyoto called "Bird"
Yes, it is. A romanization is spelling a word in the Latin alphabet when the people who use that language as their first language use a different writing system.
Hung at room temperature overnight? Nah, it's typically hung in a refrigerated and ventilated cooler (before it's cooked)... Never seen a recipe that says it should be hung at room temperature.
Whole article is based on a strawman.
Edit:
Even the "evidence" of healthcode violations used in the article is of hanging the COOKED duck in the window, not the raw duck. Restaurants (yes, even Chinese ones) use a cooler to hang the raw duck because the ambient temperature is way too hot.
When I first tried making it in...1994, I believe, the instructions I had from cookbooks didn't say anything about refrigeration. Looking briefly on the internet right now, I see a mixture. What I know for sure is that I hung it from a fixture on my ceiling. I wish I could remember exactly what I thought of this at the time.
Growing up in an immigrant family and having lived in Spain a spell, I've come to realize Americans are much too paranoid when it comes to food safety.