Meat juice is not blood, and the difference matters

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22 Replies to “Meat juice is not blood, and the difference matters”

  1. I am legitimately surprised that there are enough people who haven't tasted their blood to not know what it tastes like. Blood, to me, has basically always tasted like a penny smells. I honestly love the metallic taste of it. It's the only reason I'll put with eating raw spinach.

  2. I think the real insanity of this argument is the underlying assumption that cooking a steak more thoroughly would remove the blood from it.

    Like. Where do y’all well some people think that “blood” was going?

  3. Thank you Adam, I'm tired of people being grossed out by "blood".

    I'll literally be citing this video either until I die or the broader misconception about meat being "bloody" is squashed, whichever comes first.

  4. Interesting that blood is not available in US. Here in Finland frozen beef blood is easily available in main food store chains.

  5. Imagine eating dead aimals but at the same time having problems with blood …

  6. As of the reason why some abrahamic religions ban eating blood, there is my hypothesis:
    In old testament there's A LOT about liquids going out of bodies and "being unclean". For example – if you touch an ill person leaking some liquids(like blood or mocus from nose), you are required do bath and wash your clothes and you are considered unclean till the evening. Another example is with touching menstruating women – it also makes you unclean and the guidelines are the same.
    Looking at it from dawkins meme theory – avoiding body liquids may improve survivability of the culture since it makes the people less vulnerable to plagues. Those cultures that don't avoid blood(and other body liquids) will die out, unless they have another way of surviving plagues. There's a hypothesis that jews were blamed for causing black death, because of lower mortality, what is generally connected with using separate wells, but maybe being away from body liquids played a part as well.

  7. Yeah I'm not sure I'd like partially coagulated scabs in my meat. It being watery should make it clear it's not blood, It's less dense and separates even from the fat.
    Not sure why anyone with a working brain would think it's blood.

  8. Carbon monoxide is sometimes used to enhance the appearance of packaged meat because it binds to myoglobin to create carboxymyoglobin which is red and more stable than the oxymyoglobin that forms when oxygen binds to myoglobin. If oxymyoglobin forms it ends up as metmyoglbin which is brown and makes that packaged steak look less fresh. I also suspect that carboxymyoglobin is the reason there is a red ring under the bark of barbecued meats when the wood or charcoal fire bathes the slowly cooking meat in CO.

    As a second bit of trivia regarding the metallic taste of blood. The idea of metals having a taste or smell is a bit of an illusion. Blood that has not been in contact with skin or other body chemicals has very minimal odor. However, the iron in hemoglobin (or myoglobin) can catalyze breakdown of compounds found on skin or in our mouth to generate aromatic chemicals such as 1-octen-3-one that we identify as having a metallic odor or taste, similar to what you smell on your hand after handling coins or touching a wrought iron handrail.

  9. One time I thought it was blood but it never bothered me. Like, yeah… It's flesh from an animal, why would I have any expectation of it being completely free of blood. Humans are silly to worry about blood in meat though.

  10. My husband was just telling me about this…I was about to forget and get scared until this video came out…. I might still forget, but thank you. XD

  11. Wait is, chicken breast meat 'white' only for the reason that the birds don't fly or exercise their chest muscles?

  12. All this talk of hemoglobin and myoglobin I was totally expecting Chubbyemu to make a quick cameo telling us mitochondria is still the powerhouse of the cell

  13. There is a known reason in Abrahamic religions for why blood should not be eaten. It is believed in these religions that the soul of humans is from the breath of God. Animals, by contrast, do have souls, but their souls are made from the same place their bodies are—the earth. When a human dies, the soul is supposed to return to the place it came from—from God. Likewise, the souls of animals must return to where they came from—from the earth. This is why James, the stepbrother of Jesus, tells Christians in the Acts of the Apostles to abstain from eating things that have been strangled to death, as opposed to slaughter by cutting the throat. James was known among the Jews in his day as "Camel-Kneed" because he did so many prostrations. He was very, very reverent and observant in the Jewish way, and this comes across in his proscription. If an animal was strangled, it's soul could not return to the earth, and this was considered cruel. All of Jewish rituals surrounding slaughter were designed to be as quick and painless to the animal as possible. One very quick slit across the neck, then the blood was allowed to pour on the ground. Christianity and Islam inherited parts of these rules in the proscription against eating things strangled and things "mingled with blood." It is an avoidance of consuming the earthly soul of the animal.

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