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The Debunker: Is a Rare Steak Really "Bloody"?

by Ken Jennings

Ah, July, season of the backyard barbecue. If you're a vegetarian, we'll throw some kind of veggie burger on the grill and quietly pity you, but for most of us in the summer, meat is where it's at. But how much do you actually know about the flesh of the dead animals that you're consuming? Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings is here all month to chew the fat with us about some particularly stubborn meat misconceptions. Are you ready to work on your protein proficiency? Let's see what Ken's cooked up today.

The Debunker: Is a Rare Steak Really "Bloody"?

Remember Jack Rabbit Slim's, that '50s-style nostalgia restaurant from Pulp Fiction, the one with all the fake cars and celebrity look-alikes that looks like in real life it would have blown through its investors' capital in about a week? At Jack Rabbit Slim's, you may recall, the only two options for ordering your meat are "burnt to a crisp" or "bloody as hell." (What would happen to the poor diners who just want their steak or cheeseburger medium, I'd like to know. Would they be summarily run out of the diner by a waiter who looks like Joe McCarthy? Executed by a waiter who looks like Charles Starkweather?)

sizzle

It's not just Travolta and Uma. The rest of us squares colloquially refer to uncooked meat as "bloody" as well. That's because anyone who's ever cut into a rare steak or bought a pound of hamburger has seen that bright red fluid that oozes out. We're not supposed to think about it, we're supposed to call it "meat juices," but that's obviously blood, right? You buy chopped-up animal muscles, there will be blood. That's part of the deal.

Truth bomb, non-vegetarians: that's not blood. Consider white meats like pork and chicken. Not exactly dripping with red juice, right? But pigs and chickens have blood too. When any animal— pig, chicken, or cow —is slaughtered (please look away at this point, Morrissey) its blood is drained away from its body very quickly. That leftover juice is actually water mixed with a red-pigmented protein called myoglobin, which stores oxygen in slow-twitch muscle tissue. It's related to hemoglobin, the protein that stores oxygen in blood, but it's not quite the same thing. White meat comes from fast-twitch muscles, where less oxygen is stored away. Don't get me wrong: when your beef oozes pink, it's still some gross oxygenated animal juice. But it's not blood. Now we know why Dracula doesn't just live on rare steaks.

Quick Quiz: Hemoglobin and myoglobin bond to oxygen because each molecule has an atom of what metal in its center?

Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.