USDA now says cooked pork can be pink, at 145 degrees

Your grandmother may roll over in her grave, but pork can be pink now when cooked. The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday announced it had changed a decades-old guideline and now says that pork, and all whole meat cuts, only have to get to 145 degrees internally, not the 160 the agency had previously suggested.

"We found it was perfectly acceptable and that 160 was probably overkill," says Elisabeth Hagen, USDA's undersecretary for food safety.

Pork cooked under the new guidelines is going to be "more tender and a little more juicy," says Brad Barnes, director of culinary education at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Still, he doesn't think the USDA guidelines will cause all Americans to embrace the new, pinker pork. "My wife's family, they're all Bronx Italians. They won't really care what USDA says. It's going to need to be done — and done would be no traces of pink."

Trichinosis, a parasitic disease caused by eating raw or undercooked meat infected with roundworm larvae, was once common but is no longer a problem in commercially grown pork and hasn't been for years, says Ceci Snyder, with the National Pork Board in Des Moines. "Those myths die hard," she says.

Salmonella, not trichinosis, was "really the pathogen that we worry about the most in pork, so we had to be fully confident that salmonella would be killed," Hagen says.

How we eat pork Ham (including lunchmeat): 31.1% Sausage: 19.8% Bacon: 18.1% Lunchmeat (excluding ham): 10.3% Pork chops: 10.2% Fresh pork (excluding chops/ribs): 9.2% All other: 1.3% Source: National Pork Board



The shift should also make it easier for consumers to remember the safe cooking temperatures for meat, "145 for all whole cuts of red meat, 160 for ground red meat and 165 for poultry," Hagen says,

Once the pork chop or roast reaches 145 degrees as read by an instant-read thermometer, it needs to sit for three minutes to reach a safe internal temperature, the USDA guidelines recommend.

When the internal temperature hits 145, the external temperature will be higher. External heat kills bacteria on the surface of the meat. The interior of a muscle cut such as pork chops or steak is safe because bacteria can't reach it. That's why ground meat has to reach a higher temperature, because the grinding mixes any bacteria on the surface throughout the meat. Poultry has a higher temperature because salmonella is more prevalent in poultry.