Raw Beef Liver's Fate Cooked

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Raw Beef Liver’s Fate Cooked

Bloomberg News
A shopper looks at packages of beef at a supermarket in Tokyo.

Restaurants in Japan will be banned from serving raw beef liver starting July 1 after a panel of food safety experts deemed that it posed too great a health risk if consumed uncooked. The move, announced Tuesday by the health ministry, slices into a proud part of Japan’s culinary culture, banishing a crowd favorite dish at bars and Japanese barbecue restaurants. It’s the equivalent of hot wings vanishing from American bar menus.

The culprit is E.coli — more specifically, a potentially deadly strain of the pathogen called O-157. Because it can produce a powerful toxin, it can cause serious illness, even in small doses. The government panel — the Pharmaceutical Affairs and Food Sanitation Council that operates under the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare — said its verdict is the only preventative measure effective enough to ensure consumer health. The panel concludes other food-safety protocols are insufficient amid recent tests that have shown for the first time the pathogen can fester inside the meat as well as on its surface. Of the 173 cow livers tested from 16 different locations nationwide, three samples were found to be contaminated with the O-157 strain inside the meat, not just on its exterior, according to inspections conducted by Iwate University last fall. (Five samples had exterior contaminations.)

The potential contamination inside the meat makes it much more difficult to detect and kill without applying heat. While there are effective ways to eliminate the harmful pathogen on the outer part of the meat, such as dousing it with disinfectant, the ministry said it does not yet know how to treat the inside of the meat. A health ministry official in the food safety department told JRT Thursday that if a suitable way to reduce the level of microbes inside is found, the ban could be reconsidered. But figuring out the silver bullet seems a ways off.

Henceforth, restaurants will be required to cook beef liver at 63 degrees Celsius (145.4 degrees Fahrenheit) for a minimum 30 minutes, or 75 degrees Celsius for at least one minute, before serving the meat. Failure to comply could result in a ¥2 million fine as well as two years in jail.

The government looked into tightening food safety measures on raw meats following an outbreak of E.coli-related food poisoning last April. The incident killed five people, including a six-year-old boy, and about 180 more were stricken after eating a Korean-style steak tartare dish at a Japanese barbecue chain, according to the health ministry.

A couple months later, the government urged businesses to show self-restraint in serving raw beef — yet 13 people were affected by raw beef-related food poisoning since July, according to the health ministry. Over 850 people have been hospitalized for food poisoning after consuming raw beef liver from 1998 through the end of 2011. About 9% of those cases were caused by E.coli contamination. There are about 25,000 cases of food-born related sicknesses every year in Japan.

In April, a food safety panel under the Cabinet Office backed the plan to restrict serving raw beef liver. The new rules also target raw beef liver sold to households. Raw beef liver will remain on refrigerated shelves, but stores will be required to put up signs advising consumers to only eat the meat cooked.

Often served in a coat of soy sauce, a touch of sesame oil, garlic, and chopped scallions, raw beef liver is a popular appetizer at bars and Japanese barbecue restaurants, known as yakiniku-ya. The liver market is not a major player in the overall sale of meats in Japan. Annual sales of liver — beef and other types, raw and cooked — total about ¥40 billion ($500 million), a small fraction of the estimated ¥3 trillion for all domestic meat sales, according to the All Japan Meat Industry Co-operative Association.

Still, the prohibition of the food, which feels like biting into tough jelly, has already been met with fierce resistance from industry groups and consumers. The AJMICA has protested the panel’s deliberations, saying this could be the beginning of an endless campaign to remove other raw foods from Japanese dining tables — a particularly serious charge in a nation heavily reliant on raw foods. “If this direction continues, they could also say ‘eating raw eggs is dangerous so it will be banned.’ And following the same logic, we may no longer be able to eat sashimi because the most number of food poisoning cases comes from raw fish,” the group wrote in a letter to the health ministry in early May. More food-poisoning illnesses spring from raw fish, in large part because the volume consumed far exceeds other foods. But the ministry official said it targeted beef liver because of the enormous strength of the pathogen.

The health ministry said it received 1,500 comments from the public over a one-month period prior to the decision this week. Most people said they were against the ban, leaving comments saying they wanted to eat the meat regardless of the risk, and that the decision should be left up to the consumer. About 66% of 50,000 responses in a Yahoo! poll last July were opposed to the plan.

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