Sometimes the steak has a thick part and a thin part. Sometimes, I don't know, maybe I'm just not the world's greatest cooker of steak. Crazy idea. So when I make it, I always try to tack toward it being a little bit too rare.

I'd really rather have one little part of it be rare and the rest of it be perfectly medium-rare than one little part of it be medium-rare and the rest of it be medium. Because who eats their steak medium? I'm sorry, I don't mean to judge you.

But what makes this rare piece of steak totally safe to eat, when it's quite dangerous to eat a rare chicken breast or a maybe even a rare hamburger?

Well, let's head to the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia and talk to its director, Dr. Francisco Diaz-Gonzalez.

When the muscle has been intact, let's say in a piece of red meat, the contamination might be at the surface. So as long as it's been perfectly cooked on the surface, then it most likely is going to be safe to consume.

And if you want to understand why that's the case, you got to think through some kind of gruesome stuff. A lot of the bugs in beef that can make you sick, like E. coli, they don't really live in the muscle itself. They live in, let's just say, the animal's digestive system.

So if you have other pathogenic bacteria, such as salmonella, that could also be carried by cattle in their intestinal tract, and eventually when the animal is slaughtered, the carcass could get contaminated, and it could still be in the surface.

But if you cook it well, then you won't have any problems.

That's why the equation with ground beef is totally different.

The outside part of the meat that might have been exposed to those gut germs in the slaughterhouse has been mixed in with all of the other parts of the meat. The outside is on the inside.

Salmonella and E. coli can be particularly heat-resistant, so that's why the expert advice is to cook ground beef to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. That's a lot.

Now what about chicken? You're supposed to cook chicken all the way through to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of whether it's ground, or in a whole piece, or in a whole bird. What gives?

Chicken, there's plenty of evidence in the scientific literature that pathogenicc bacteria can be internalized inside of the chicken pieces, so you should not compromise on eating a half-cooked piece of chicken, because that's the possibility you will find organisms such as Campylobacter or Salmonella that are still alive and still make you sick.

Alright, 165 for poultry. How about fish?

It varies from species to species, but in the case of fish, we're eating a lot of sushi right now.

And by we, Dr. Diaz means you and me, not him. He's kinda squicked out by raw fish, perhaps as an occupational hazard of being an expert in food-borne pathogens, but...

Being very honest regarding the literature, if you look at how many cases of sushi related to its consumption, there are not that many, actually. You gotta be acknowledged.

One reason for that might be that a lot of even very good fish these days has been flash-frozen.

Freezing can kill some pathogens, such as Babrio. Freezing, it helps.

Lastly, let's talk about pork.

The United States Department of Agriculture used to recommend cooking whole cuts of pork to 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

This was guidance that basically every competent cook ignored. And indeed, in 2011, the feds relaxed a little bit and said that 145 degrees is just fine, as long as you let it rest for a couple of minutes to let the internal temperature go up a little bit, which is a good thing to do anyway.

And 145 post-rest is gonna look like this — slightly pink pork. Very tasty.

The old, more conservative guidance was based in part on fear of trichinosis, a really terrible parasitic disease.

But thanks in part to improved practices from the pork industry, cases of trichinosis are way down in the United States, and most people who get it here seem to get it these days from wild game.

That said, bacteria like salmonella can still be an issue with pork, mostly on the outside of the muscle for the same reasons as beef. So pink pork chops are just fine, but pink sausage is a bad idea.

You know, I think it's totally impossible to write cooking show copy that doesn't inspire certain people to make immature jokes. I've tried. I've failed.