Look around the modern culinary landscape, and you will find an absolute clown show. We are living in a golden age of food recalls, yet people continue to act like washing a strawberry or cooking a piece of meat to a safe internal temperature is some kind of tyrannical human rights violation. Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria outbreaks hit the news cycle with the predictability of the changing seasons, and every single time, people clutch their pearls and wonder how such a tragedy could possibly occur.

Here is how: Because people are lazy, gullible, and completely detached from basic biology.

For the past few decades, we have allowed entertainment television and social media algorithms to rewrite the rules of human survival. We traded food safety for foodie aesthetics. We listened to camera-ready personalities who care infinitely more about how a dish looks under a ring light than whether it will send you to the emergency room with explosive, violently miserable gastrointestinal distress. It is time to wake up, ditch the pretentious nonsense, and return to the fundamental rule of human civilization: Wash and cook your damn food.

The Celebrity Chef Brain-Drain

Let’s start with the root of this intellectual rot: the Food Network, streaming cooking shows, and the army of “influencer chefs” who treat the kitchen like a stylistic runway instead of a laboratory dealing with raw biological matter.

For years, television personalities have brainwashed the general public into believing that cooking food properly is a sign of culinary illiteracy. If your meat isn’t weeping pink juice, if your eggs aren’t shimmering with a gelatinous, un-coagulated slime, or if your vegetables haven’t been dragged straight from an unwashed plastic clamshell into your mouth, you are apparently an unsophisticated peasant.

Take Bobby Flay and the relentless obsession with soft-scrambled, runny eggs. Entire generations of home cooks have been taught that if an egg looks like it was rescued halfway through the frying process, it is somehow a luxury item. It is not a luxury item; it is a vehicle for Salmonella. Real cooking requires respect for the temperature thresholds needed to kill pathogens. Yet, because a guy with frosted tips on television tells you that eggs need to be runny to be gourmet, millions of morons happily risk food poisoning every single morning just to eat a plate of warm, yellow snot.

This extends directly to the cult of raw egg aioli. True, shelf-stable mayonnaise uses pasteurized, homogenized eggs and high acid content (vinegar or lemon juice) to create an environment hostile to bacteria. But the modern foodie thinks they are a culinary genius by cracking a raw farm-fresh egg into a food processor with some garlic and olive oil, ignoring the porous nature of eggshells and the exterior contamination of the farmyard. When they inevitably spend forty-eight hours hugging a toilet bowl, they blame bad luck instead of their own unmitigated stupidity.

The Lazy Death of Basic Hygiene

Let’s talk about the absolute bare minimum: washing your produce.

Go to any grocery store, watch a suburbanite pick up a container of blackberries, throw them into their shopping cart, and then watch them eat them straight out of that plastic prison five minutes later in the parking lot. It takes ten seconds to run water over fruit. Ten seconds. But people are too bone-lazy to do it.

Those berries have been handled by field workers with varying access to sanitation, packed in dusty warehouses, sneezed on by random shoppers testing firmness, and exposed to who knows what kind of agricultural runoff or animal droppings. Yet people treat pre-packaged fruit like it’s a sterile medical device.

Then you have the multi-billion-dollar scam known as the “salad kit.” Pre-bagged lettuce and salad kits are an absolute joke. First of all, it is infinitely cheaper to buy whole heads of lettuce, chop them yourself, and make your own dressing. But laziness won, so people buy the pre-bagged stuff. And because the bag says “triple washed,” absolute simpletons assume that means “sterile.” It doesn’t. “Triple washed” means it went through an industrial chlorine bath that lowered the bacteria count, but it doesn’t make it bulletproof. And when people buy regular greens or unpackaged veggies? They don’t wash them at all.

Sure, we can point fingers at places like Chipotle, where minimum-wage workers rushed off their feet in chaotic commercial kitchens fail to sanitize surfaces properly, resulting in cyclical outbreaks of E. coli and norovirus. Chipotle sucks for cutting corners. But let’s be honest: at home, people are just as bad, if not worse, because no health inspector is going to knock on your kitchen door to check if you rinsed your spinach.

The Rare Meat Cult and the Myth of “Juiciness”

Nowhere is this modern culinary brain-washing more dangerous than in the meat department. Somewhere along the line, the public was convinced that cooking beef past medium-rare is a culinary sin.

People now obsess over cooking steaks and burgers to internal temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit, completely ignoring the guidelines established by food safety authorities. The official recommendation for ground beef is to cook it thoroughly to 160 degrees to kill harmful strains of E. coli bacteria. But the modern foodie turns their nose up at well-done or even medium burgers, insisting that they need it “bleeding” or else there is no flavor.

Newsflash: that “flavor” you are so desperately defending is nothing more than myoglobin (which isn’t even blood, folks, it’s protein water), connective tissue, and unrendered, greasy fat. You aren’t tasting the soul of the cow; you are tasting a breeding ground for foodborne pathogens. When you grind beef, surface bacteria from the outside of the cut get distributed throughout the entire mass. Eating a rare burger is essentially playing Russian roulette with a pathogen that can cause kidney failure.

And don’t even get started on pork. For generations, people were terrified of trichinosis, and for good reason—pork used to be heavily prone to parasitic worms. Thanks to modern farming practices, trichinosis has dropped significantly, but the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that modern chefs are now telling people to cook pork chops to 135 degrees so they stay “juicy.”

Juicy? Let’s call it what it is: raw, undercooked muscle fiber sitting in unrendered fat that didn’t burn off because you pulled the meat off the heat thirty degrees too early. Historically, pork was recommended to be cooked thoroughly—up into the higher temperature ranges—to ensure absolute safety. But modern food culture has decided that dry-as-a-bone hipster pork chops are desirable as long as they are pink in the middle.

A Direct Rewind to History

This entire disaster is nothing more than a historical amnesia loop.

Go back to the 1950s and 1960s. As industrial food production expanded and processed foods entered the market, people started cutting corners on food safety, hygiene, and proper thermal processing. What happened? Foodborne illness outbreaks spiked. Hospitals were flooded with cases of preventable bacterial infections. That exact crisis forced the FDA and public health agencies to step in, conduct rigorous scientific studies, and establish the strict cooking temperatures and food handling guidelines that we rely on today.

Those guidelines weren’t pulled out of thin air to ruin your dinner party; they were written in blood, illness, and institutional misery.

Yet, here we are in the twenty-first century, repeating the exact same cycle. We have traded science for aesthetic trends. We have let internet food personalities convince us that our grandparents were just ignorant hardshells who didn’t understand “flavor,” when in reality, our grandparents just wanted to survive dinner without a trip to the intensive care unit.

Just Cook Your Damn Food

It is time to snap out of this collective delusion. Culinary pretension is not worth organ failure. Food styling is not worth a week of violent cramping and dehydration.

• Wash your produce. Take the ten seconds. Use water. Scrub the skin. Stop eating dirt and agricultural chemicals off raw berries and lettuce just because you are impatient.

• Cook your meat. Stop acting like a medium-rare burger is a badge of honor. Reach for the digital meat thermometer, hit the proper internal temperatures, and stop treating dinner like an exercise in biological hazard management.

• Stop listening to idiots on screens. If a television chef tells you to eat raw eggs, undercooked pork, or bleeding ground beef in the name of “authentic flavor,” turn the television off, throw away the apron, and use some common sense.

History has given us the blueprint for safe eating, and modern science has given us the tools to execute it. Stop being lazy, stop following dangerous trends, and for the love of everything holy: Just cook your damn food.