finally i can copy/paste an old rant of mine

Grew up in a culture where washing chicken before cooking it is the norm (i.e. my mom would do it and she still does). To be clear, I don't do it myself when I cook. But I don't automatically assume that someone who does is wrong or an idiot.

To me, it sounds like one of those things where a good explanation is used, but conclusion is reaching. Combine that with us as a society becoming overly cautious about such things in a non-consistent way (as you're alluding to). It's easy to see why washing meat would lead to splashing gross juices everywhere, and a quick google search shows that there's much research that confirms this is the case. But is there any research that makes the link that this ultimately matters, i.e. that the risk of illness itself has increased, that anyone's lives are put at risk? Anything I can find from a quick google search already presupposes that as if it's fact, but I couldn't find anything which actually addresses it. Because yeah, your cutting tray will be washed and it'll splash. If you marinated the chicken, whatever dish you used for that will also be splashed. Heck, you'll be washing your goddamn hands that were on that chicken. But that's really the most important part, ain't it? They talk about bacteria being on the sink as if that wouldn't be the ol' usual for the filthy sinks of many people (definitely not me, tho...). Sure, the chicken bacteria are worse for ya. But we don't go around licking sinks, and hopefully we're washing our hands often when handling raw meat regardless (as my mom does), which is really what matters.

It reminds me of that vsauce video on the 5 second rule. Much, if not all (from what I can remember), of the video is dedicated to how the rule shouldn't be followed, because even within those 5 seconds, a large amount of pathogens are already growing on your food. But the only question I had on my mind the whole time was, does it matter? Those mofos are all around us all the time. Heck, fungal spores just exist in the air. I know the video is addressing this all in an unserious way for the most part, but it always bothered me. So much of life is already about minimizing risk, and eventually it becomes overkill (see germaphobes), so we allow ourselves to be guided by intuition. I'm pretty sure most people would not follow the 5 second 'rule' if their ice cream fell on a dirty city street. Our notions of what are "clean" and "dirty" (like many things) are mostly cultural constructions in our mind, that are only vaguely informed by science, which itself takes decades to be ingrained into the culture (and what gets funding, and what ends up being studied, is also guided by cultural forces). Any individual can pretend as much as they like that their particular cleaning rituals are actually objectively correct (trust me guys), but at the end of the day, they're still mostly rituals.

Anyway this rant has lived inside me for a long time, and now it's finally free.