Chicken?!

tucknroll2010 · September 2018

I understand the eating cold lunch meat is unsafe and that it needs to be heated to avoid the risk of listeria. But what if you get roasted turkey from a restaurant or a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store or make a ham at home (in other words, not lunch meat) and it gets cold? Is it still considered unsafe? I guess I'm just wondering if it's something specific to lunch meats or if this is an issue with any meat product.

harpseal135 · September 2018

tucknroll2010 said:

I understand the eating cold lunch meat is unsafe and that it needs to be heated to avoid the risk of listeria. But what if you get roasted turkey from a restaurant or a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store or make a ham at home (in other words, not lunch meat) and it gets cold? Is it still considered unsafe? I guess I'm just wondering if it's something specific to lunch meats or if this is an issue with any meat product.

Stuff that is made at home, and cooked, you know how long it's been sitting in the fridge. You should be fine.

kiki75 · September 2018

It would probably be easiest for you if you were to look up information on listeria and how it grows and multiplies and everything.

Long story short: Listeria is a tricky devil. It can grow & multiply at temperatures lower than most (usually 40-140F is the “danger zone” for bacterial growth). Couple that with the difficulty in cleaning meat slicers - lots of moving parts and nooks and crannies where listeria can hide and that’s why they recommend against lunch meat. It’s like when you would do a Petri dish experiment and swipe a q-tip across but instead it’s one of those cotton rounds. So you’ve essentially swiped listeria across the whole surface of this slice and then put it in the fridge to let it grow. Same thing with sausage, hot dogs, burgers. When the meat is ground, it’s in an appliance that can be hard to completely disinfect and then all of the meat is exposed.

This is why if you’re absolutely dying for a cold turkey sandwich, you should get it or your meat from a place that slices fresh for each sandwich, like Jersey Mike’s or Blimpie instead of a place like Subway where there have been multiple potential exposures and then the bacteria has had time to grow. Or, if you go to a place that is, for example, slicing pastrami hot with a regular knife, if it sounds good, go for it!

*TW* Normally, a healthy person can fight listeria off or will just get a little sick. But it can affect vulnerable populations (children, elderly, pregnant, immunocompromised) much more. It is one illness that can cross to baby and result in death for one or both of you.

As you’re making choices, you just consider the source and production process to decide what you are good with. Some people eat cold Subway sandwiches a few times a week the whole time, no big deal. Then you’ll get someone who never touched a deli meat (even hot) and had precut cantaloupe one time and get listeria. So there’s really only so much you can do. You gotta eat.

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