Welcome to Risky or Not, a short podcast about everyday risk from germs. I'm Professor Ben Chapman from North Carolina State University, and I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Don Chapman from Rutgers University. In this podcast, we do our best not to waffle, dither, dissemble, or equivocate, and to give you straight up answers about whether something is risky or not. Don, today's topic comes to us from listener of the show, Carlos. Carlos sent us a link to Reddit, to the r-cooking, but I'm not sure that the actual link is still here. I'll see if I can make it work in a better way. But the canonical question is making stock with chewed or licked chicken bones. So I'd just like to talk about this. But Carlos says, I do this all the time without a second thought under the theory that anything nasty is going away after hours above boiling temperatures. But what say you? Are you able? Oh, you got the link to work? Oh, there we go. You have to cut and paste that it's poorly formatted in Google Docs and it won't work unless it's correctly formatted. Well, I got it. Thank you for dropping it in. This is from an r slash cooking Reddit post entitled Making Stock with Chewed Chicken Bones. Roasted a whole chicken and I'm saving the bones for stock. Classic. It sounds like something out of the office. I've been eating the meat straight off the thighs wings and tossing them in the freezer to save them. But it just occurred to me that might not be hygienic. They're not really chewed, just eaten off of normal style. My thinking is. It's very sloppy. Yeah, just eaten. Eaten off of normal style. Oh, well, that clears it up. Yeah. No, it's not abnormal chicken bone eating. It's just normal chicken bone eating. Normal style. You know, like how you do it. Like how everybody does it. Normal style. Yeah. My thinking is that every stock I make, I let simmer for at least 12 hours. So any nasties are completely cooked off for myself. I'm not really worried. I'm comfortable with it. No doubt. But would the stock be okay to serve to guests? Curious y'all's thoughts. Thanks. Edit. Just for the folks who are worried. I've never served this to guests. I'm pretty much always cooking for myself and I've only made stock a handful of times. Edit two. Didn realize this would be so controversial Seems there are two camps on this one Those who deeply hate this idea and those who really don mind I am personally not squeamish about this stuff but for the sake of those who are I avoid using my homemade stock for them So Don, homemade stock made from chewed chicken bones, normal style, risky or not. Yeah. And this was posted on our cooking at the time of this recording only 14 days ago. So fresh post. and the poster, the OP, as they say, is Nance in my pants, which is a great name. So, so congrats to Nance. And I think this is a perfect, oh, go ahead. Do you want to hear some of the comments or you, you talk first and then we'll talk about comments. Sure. Sure. So I, this is, this is the reason why we do this show. And, and I think the first comment from Lacey Lizard was if I was the guest, I would not like to think the host had used scraps from their plate in the food, making for yourself is fine feeding to others. No. Well, I mean, you know, Lacey Lizard, you should get, you should get a podcast and then you can say your opinion and maybe more people will hear it. But I, I mean, this is the reason why we do this podcast because it's definitely gross. And I think if you were to do this and not tell your guests, that's not polite, right? But, But doing this is not risky at all, right? Like, I mean, what could, what, I mean, it's, the stock is going to be boiled, right? Now, maybe, let's try to figure out a way to get to risky. Let's say you have some sort of bacterial pathogen in your mouth and it forms spores, because that's all we're talking about here. It has to be able to form spores. But those spores, I mean, they could maybe germinate after you cool this stock down. But again, there's going to be spores in everything anyway. So there's not, this is, this is, this might be gross and you certainly can have opinions, but, but, but don't say it's not safe because it's, it's absolutely safe. It's, it's perfectly safe. And I, you know, I, I wonder like if you invited somebody over to your house and say, Hey, we made this with chicken stock from bones that we, we ate the meat off of normal style. What would people say to that? And I think people would say, that's gross, right? Yeah, I guess. Like, yes, I think people might think that. I mean, if you go to someone's house to eat, do you ever think, like, how did they make this food? I mean, you know what I mean? Yeah, all the time. All the time because I'm a food safety guy. I think about it all the time. But I don't. Yeah. Would you think like oh man I wonder if they chewed the bones for the stock they made Like it would never even come into my mind right Like yeah So I have to say like people like we talk about cross-contamination all the time. We talk about dogs, our dogs specifically, licking off plates. I realized as we had guests at our house the other day and I put the plates down for the dogs that we're a little weird. And I think that it kind of, I think some of our guests were, you know, what do I say? Well, don't worry. The plates that we gave you and washed in the dishwasher, those were ones that we made sure the dogs didn't lick, right? Sure. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, for sure. We have special plates. We have special plates. Yeah. Now, these plates that you just ate off of, the dogs just licked, they're going to get segregated into a different category. in the kitchen but yeah but yeah yeah no i yeah yes so actually i think that's a really good analogy right yeah so someone would look at that and say well maybe that's gross but it's not it's not risky and this is the same same thing right like the whole making stock cooking process is going to take care of anything any trace of anything that may have been put from saliva to the to the bones but ultimately like aren't you and maybe this is something that i just don't i don't fully understand are people weirded out that they're eating chicken stock that was made from bones where it was like a live chicken and then it was raw and then it was cooked right like and it was like eviscerated and there are actual pathogens like i'm i'm i think that that's way if i was to like deconstruct it i think that's way grosser than someone who ate it and then, then also recooked it and, and made chicken stock out of it. But I don't know, maybe that's, maybe that's just me. Like maybe. Right. Just, just the idea of eating, eating an animal that was once alive, that was slaughtered and then made into food. And then, and then the bones were, were used for something else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of this is kind of situational and, and I think, you know, we, I mean, if you're a vegetarian, you know, you, you might object to being served chicken stock that was made from chickens. Right. So yeah, there's, there's lots of things that people are weirded out about or uncomfortable with that really don't have anything to do with risk. Yeah. And, and I, so, and maybe this is, maybe this is just like my philosophy in life. It's like, that's something that I can't, if I was going to someone's house, I can't control any of that and I can't work. I try not to worry about what what did people do Like how did they make these how did they make their food decisions I just suspending my you know my my thoughts I do I do things the way that I do things from a risk standpoint in my own home and other people do things the way they do things in their home. And when you get together, you kind of have to just like accept it may not be the way that, that I would do it from a grosser, you know, side of things. Certainly if I learned something about how they made a particular food and I did think it was risky, I for sure wouldn't eat the food. And I probably would tell them just because that's what I do, right? Like my job is educating people about food safety amongst other things. So, and I would try to do it in a polite way. It depends on the person and how well you know them and how bad the risk is and all of that. But yeah, I mean, to get to the question from the original poster is, would the stock be okay to serve to guests? See, that's an interesting phrasing. because if the question is, would the stock be safe to serve to guests? The answer is yes. Is it okay to serve it to guests? Not necessarily because people would be grossed out by it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's not a science question or a risk question. So I'm not risky, but I don't think we're answering the question that was asked. We're going to rephrase this as, is it risky or not to do it? Oh, yeah, yeah. But good, I mean, good job, Carlos, on getting us this one. And then absolutely, like you said, it's the reason why we do this is there are perceptions about this is unquote unhygienic, which is not the same as risky, right? Like there are different interpretations of what unhygienic means. And if it's a perception of gross, that's, you know, that's different. So anyway, not to dance around this one too much anymore, but I think we're two not riskies on making stock with chewed or licked chicken bones, normal style. This has been another episode of Risky or Not. If you have questions for us, you can reach me, Professor Ben Chapman at Benjamin Chapman on Twitter, the X, or at Ben Chapman NCSU on Blue Sky, or my co-host, Dr. Don Chaffner at Bug Counter on all the social medias. Or you can send us questions and feedback on our website at riskyornot.com. They are when they're left unchecked, and it could mean a trip to the hospital for someone. Our customers. Wow. Ourselves. All right. Our chicken. Alright. And our reputation. Alright, alright. You made bacteria on me right now. Clean, clean, and then clean again. Bacteria. Bacteria. Look, there's bacteria. Bacteria. Bacteria. You might not see them, but they're there. Bacteria. Bacteria. Everything you touch. Bacteria. Bacteria. That's right. Salmonella bacteria. Salmonella bacteria. Salmonella bacteria. you
