Most Americans would never even contemplate voluntarily putting a piece of of undercooked pork in their mouths, let alone a raw one.
Much of the fear surrounding undercooked pork stems from one bogeyman: trichinosis, a potentially fatal disease caused by a parasitic roundworm. That threat is now largely absent, ever since hog farmers stopped feeding their pigs actual garbage (in the US, we can thank the federal Swine Health Protection Act of 1980). According to the CDC, only 20 cases were reported per year between 2008 and 2010; compare that to the 1.2 million illnesses and 450 deaths caused by salmonella annually in the US.
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Still, fear of trichinosis has caused us to recoil at the faintest blush within our pork chops and sausages, largely thanks to an old federal recommendation to cook our pork to a Sahara-dry 160 degrees Fahrenheit. The USDA relaxed that recommendation back in 2011, lowering the temperature to 145. And that’s still too high, if you ask some chefs.
But don’t say that to the onsen-hot-spring-loving nation of Japan, the government of which recently announced that it will bar restaurants from serving raw pork.
Japan’s health ministry approved the ban—which includes both raw muscle meat and organs such as liver—on Wednesday, citing concerns that raw swine could contain not trichinosis-causing roundworms, but hepatitis E.
According to the Japan Times, pork will have to heated to 63 degrees Celsius (about 145 degrees Fahrenheit) for an insane 30 minutes, or 75 degrees (167 degrees Fahrenheit) for at least one minute. (Remember, kids: Pasteurization is a function of both temperature and time. If you jumped into a vat of boiling water, you’d die pretty quickly. If you were forced to sit in a 130-degree Fahrenheit jacuzzi, you wouldn’t expire quite so fast, but you’d eventually cook through)
Raw pork chefs who flout the ban, which will go into effect mid-June, will face up to two years in jail or a fine of ¥2 million (about $16,100).
That means you can say sayonara to sharing some pork liver sashimi over a glass of Asahi Super Dry. It also spells bad news for the country’s 190 restaurants that the ministry claims serve raw pork.
It’s not the first time that the Japanese government has made a culinary intervention, though. In 2012, it banned the sale of raw beef liver after an outbreak of E. coli. This time around, it’s in response to the record high of 146 hepatitis E cases reported in 2014, up from 55 in 2011.
