Medium Rare Chicken / Chicken Sashimi

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About

Medium Rare Chicken / Chicken Sashimi refers to the practice of people consuming undercooked chicken, generally considered a dangerous practice that can lead to diseases like salmonella. After entering the public eye via a Facebook troll post, the concept of consuming undercooked chicken appeared in various news articles either talking about the merits or gathering reactions to the practice.

Origin

On January 6th, 2017, Facebook user Morgan Jane Gibbs^[1] posted a picture of several undercooked strips of chicken with the caption:

"Just made chicken medium rare chicken strips. They're so good can't believe ive neever tried it like this before. Can't wait to dig into this with my homemade salad and veges.
#healthy #newyearsresolution #clean #cleaneating"

The post 841 likes and reactions as well as 342 shares. In the comments section of the post, it became clear Gibbs was trolling and did not intend to eat the undercooked chicken. Delish^[2] pointed out that an exchange where Gibbs, warned against salmonella, said "it's chicken not salmon" demonstrated that the post was a well-disguised troll.

Spread

Despite it being a troll, the post was spread by people who did not understand the joke, which in turn led to a discussion of the merits/safety of eating undercooked chicken. Two weeks after Gibbs' post, Vice's food platform Munchies^[3] ran a piece discussing the safety of undercooked chicken. Munchies notes that while chicken is treated like salmon or steak in Japan, foods that are commonly and safely eaten raw, they interview a food biologist who strongly discourages eating chicken raw.

As the concept spread online, it sparked imitators who posted pictures of raw and "medium rare chicken," though it's unclear if they were also trolling. Twitter Moments^[4] compiled several tweets of people posting pictures of undercooked chicken on March 9th, 2017 (examples shown below).

The concept was again brought to the public consciousness following a Buzzfeed article^[5] posted July 20th, 2017 compiling examples of people cooking "medium rare chicken." This in turn led to a post on /r/OutOfTheLoop^[6] asking about the spike in people talking about undercooked chicken.

Chicken Sashimi

On September 5th, 2017, Food & Wine tweeted a link to an article asking "Is chicken sashimi safe?"^[7] "Sashimi" is a Japanese type of preparation in which the meat is basically raw.

This led to a similar series of reactions as people had to medium rare chicken, leading to another Twitter Moment.^[8]