I run a blog here, but I hope that my readers will always hold me accountable for the claims I make. There’s no mistake that “journalistic integrity” isn’t necessarily a part of a blog that deals in recipes and kooky food items. But when I sit down to opine on a subject I damn well had better be sure that I’m not misleading my readers. And it’s that thought I had running through my mind yesterday when I read through James E. McWilliams’ Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about trichinosis in free range pigs.
The contention is that trichinosis has been eliminated in industrial pork plants, but out there in the free range world of pig farming it still exists. This in turn leads one to wonder if free range pork is more dangerous, and furthermore if contentions such as my own that you don’t need to cook pork to well done to eat safely are just plain wrong. The issue is that the piece is an alarmists beating of the chest against free range pork. And the study used in the original piece was never disclosed as being paid for by the National Pork Board. A fact that an editor’s note has at least rectified as of this morning.
Not only that but the study itself was not directly stating that free range pork chops are going to be rife with trichinosis. Instead what the study shows is that wild or free range pigs are likely to have come into contact with the pathogen at some point in their life. And let’s also just go ahead and state that the National Pork Board has said that trichinosis is killed when meat is cooked to an internal temperature of 137 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the shoe leather phase most home cooks feel they need to get pork to.
