When eating steak, you get a lot of options available to you. As well as choosing the sauce, you can select how well cooked you’d like it, from the (intolerable) “blue” end of the spectrum to the equally unappetizing “well done”.
People on the Internet have noticed (surprisingly often) that you don’t get these sorts of options with chicken. If you want chicken, they’re cooking the hell out of it, whether you want it “rare” or not.
The reason for this is pretty simple; they don’t want to be sued when you come down with food poisoning.
“When cooked, chicken can be a nutritious choice, but raw chicken can be contaminated with Campylobacter, Salmonella, or Clostridium perfringens germs,” the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains. “If you eat undercooked chicken, you can get a foodborne illness, also called food poisoning. You can also get sick if you eat other foods or beverages that are contaminated by raw chicken or its juices.”
Beef steak can be eaten raw, because they are single cuts of muscle. This means that bacteria present during slaughter or further handling are generally restricted to the outside of the meat. This can be seared off at a high temperature, leaving the insides rare but the overall steak safe to eat.
Chicken, while also available in big, single chunks, is more porous in structure than beef. This means that pathogens can get deeper into the meat. To make sure that the meat is safe to eat, you need to cook it all the way through, meaning that a medium rare chicken burger is very much off the menu to anyone who isn’t also a fan of diarrhea.
