Mad Cook
Master Chef
I think we didn't bother back then. We ate all sorts of things that are now considered injurious to health - butter, coffee, red meat, rare meat, soft cooked and raw eggs - and because we didn't have 'fridges I expect we used to eat food that wasn't as fresh as we insist on now. I noticed at the recent food festival in the village that the game (pheasant, wild boar, venison, etc) from the local supplier wasn't as strongly flavoured as it used to be 20-30 years ago. When I served up a roast pheasant to a friend the other night he thought it was free-range chicken.Are they (grocery stores) doing something different when they grind burger these days? Why was it OK to eat a rare burger as a kid, but not now?
If it's just a "don't eat red meat, least of all rare" thing OK, those people and groups live among us, but is there something that actually makes today's hamburger less healthy that the burger of yesteryear?
I suppose, too, it could have something to do with the mad cow disease panic there was a few years back. There was a connection found between meat from cattle infected with Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and the variant form of Creuzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans.
Burgers are not the gorgeous things in the UK that they are in the USA and usually come cremated with no choice for the customer. You can buy a steak in restaurants rare, medium, well done, or, as I like mine, still moo-ing but you never get the choice when it comes to burgers. When I see burgers on "Triple D" I despair of British ones. They are basically at the lower, cheap, end of convenience food and a friend who was visiting from America and insisted on having a McDonald's meal was appalled at the difference in style and quality between yours and ours. (Yours was better!)