Do You Wash Your Chicken Before Cooking It?

Julia Child Was Wrong: Don't Wash Your Raw Chicken, Folks
by MARIA GODOY
August 23, 2013 8:48 AM

Excerpt:

"There's no reason, from a scientific point of view, to think you're making it any safer," she says, "and in fact, you're making it less safe."

That's because washing increases the chances that you'll spread the foodborne pathogens that are almost certainly on your bird all over the rest of your kitchen too, food safety experts say. We're talking nasty stuff like salmonella and Campylobacter, which together are estimated to cause nearly 1.9 million cases of foodborne illness in the U.S. each year.

Some studies suggest bacteria can fly up to 3 feet away from where your meat is rinsed — though you can't necessarily see it. If that thought alone doesn't give you pause, perhaps this slimy "germ vision" animation will do the trick:

But fear not: All you have to do to kill these unwanted bacteria is to cook your meat properly (a thermometer can help) and keep your utensils and cooking surfaces clean.

Quinlan and her collaborators at New Mexico State University's Department of Media Productions have created a new public health campaign to get the word out about why washing poultry is a bad idea. Her focus-group surveys, conducted as part of a research project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, suggest as many as 90 percent of people rinse their raw birds. The practice is slightly more common among minorities, she says, but pretty much everyone does it.

And Quinlan expects some people will continue to cling to their bird-rinsing ways. Some people, she notes, just do it because they think their chicken is slimy. "If your chicken is so slimy that it needs washing, something is wrong," she says. "Other people say, 'That's just how I was taught to do it.' "