Will Eating Raw Pork Actually Kill You?

When I was growing up, the family matriarchs taught us that eating raw pork would kill you. Apparently, however, the rules have changed—I haven’t seen full-blown pork tartare yet, but it certainly seems that cooking the stuff to within an inch of its well-done life is no longer mandatory. Was the whole thing just an old wives’ tale? —Wilbur

Let’s not be too hard on the old wives, Wilbur. Sure, those ’70s grandmas who called a hazmat team if any hint of pink profaned their pork chops are the same ones who garnished their casseroles with french-fried asbestos and considered lead paint chips to be an acceptable substitute for Mrs. Dash, but it was a different time. Anyway, they got one thing right: At the time, undercooked pork really could be dangerous.

The danger was probably overstated even then, but trichinosis certainly can survive in pork long enough to infect someone who eats it. This is a long-standing problem—some people even think it’s responsible for religious prohibitions on eating pork, though it probably isn’t—and its longevity gives the fear of raw pork multigenerational cachet.

A further blow for dry, tasteless pork was struck by the “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” cooking guidelines of the 1980s, which recommended bringing pork to a hockey puck–inducing internal temperature of 180°. This was reduced to a still-pretty-brutal 160° in the early 2000s, and didn’t reach the modern (and culinarily salubrious) figure of 145° until 2011.

I think it’s pretty obvious that we as a society have not been getting more daring and risk-tolerant over the years, so what made us chill out? It turns out that trichinosis is like polio: It used to be terrible, it was conquered decades ago, and now we get to enjoy the fruits of a world without it until such time as RFK Jr. figures out a way to bring it back.

You laugh, but old Creaky McSaddleface is one of the few people who really could bring trichinosis back into the human food supply. You see, when I say the disease has been conquered, I really mean only that it’s been eradicated from the farmed pork supply. There are still about 20 cases in the U.S. every year, and you know how they happen? It’s when—I shit you not—people eat the undercooked meat of wild bears. Does that call any members of the U.S. Cabinet to your mind? Good luck, America.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.