Hey! What's this? Cannibal sandwiches? Cannibal sandwiches are good stuff! Where I grew up, NO celebration buffet was complete without raw ground beef, little rye rounds, and a slice of onion. ALL our family buffets had that as a matter of tradition. Always. This is good cuts of meat also, not the scraps and crap that go into cheap hamburger.
I recall being at a get together that some Lebonese folks were having. They had a pan with a mixture of some raw meats, lamb included, with spices and olive oil. It was very good. Other USA whitey-type folks were looking at me like I was nuts for eating it.
Eating certain meats raw is not the hazard. The hazard comes from improper rendering of the animal. One of the critical jobs in a slaughterhouse is the separation of the entrails from the carcass. NO contents of the intestines, and especially the colon, can be allowed to infect the carcass. That's a big deal! If the person doing that job slips and cuts the wrong thing, the line should be shut down and the area sanitized with steam. Our modern day profit-centered rendering operations are less concerned about proper procedures than the professionals of the past. Meat gets infected with colon bacteria and then people get sick.
What is in a sausage or a pile of ground beef depends on who made the stuff. GOOD sausage, and wieners and frankfurters for that matter, do not have garbage in them when they are made by a reputable company. Just because a sausage is a fine ground variety doesn't mean it has to be made from crap. Go to the store and buy the cheapest barf they sell? Yes, get rat hairs and insect parts, chicken aholes, cow heads, etc.. You get what you pay for, but cow heads can be tasty too, lets not sell them short.
With these rendering plants getting loose with procedures, there might be other ways to get good safe ground beef. Go to a good butcher and pick the solid cuts you would like to have ground. If those cuts are rinsed well and ground in a clean grinder, they should be fine as no colon bacteria is inside a solid cut of beef.
Wild brain worms zhweels! I thought I felt those crawling inside my head, now I know what they are! Trichinosis can be had from eating undercooked or raw pork, but those critters stay in the muscles. Trich has largely been eliminated from what I understand but still exists in less than 10% of the pork on the market. Always cook pork well, absolutely.
