Your Chicken Is No Longer Pink. That Doesn’t Mean It’s Safe to Eat. (Published 2020) (2024)

As we wait out this pandemic, chances are you’re at home, cooking. Perhaps you’ve baked a million loaves of bread and your sourdough starter is overflowing. If Google Trends is any indication of what comes next, after “banana bread” and “pancakes,” people are seeking “chicken recipes.”

Chicken is America’s most popular meat. But undercooked chicken, when contaminated, is also a leading source of food-borne illness. So how do you avoid giving yourself and your isolation-mates food poisoning?

Many people, including Solveig Langsrud, a scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture Research, assume chicken follows a simple rule-of-thumb: Pink chicken turned white means “done.” It’s similar to how we cook other meats.

“Consumers can see that if you have a hamburger, and it turns from red to brown, it’s approximately around the temperature where the meat becomes safe,” said Dr. Langsrud.

But was this true? Did it line up with temperature recommendations?

As scientific literature offered no clear answer to her questions, Dr. Langsrud and her colleagues have identified common problems with recommendations and practices for cooking chicken safely at home. In a study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, they showed that home cooks often follow intuition and color, disregarding temperature recommendations. Intuition and color sometimes aren’t enough to ensure safety. These can be alleviated with a few expert tips.

To study how cooks at home follow safety recommendations, researchers filmed 75 households in five European countries. From a random but nonrepresentative sample, they also conducted an online survey of nearly 4,000 households in the same countries that say they cook chicken.