[mtkd]

Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes

6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?'

First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"

[ncallaway]

Dear lord please don’t use an AI overview answer for food safety.

If you made a bet with your friend and are using the AI overview to settle it, fine. But please please click on an actual result from a trusted source if you’re deciding what temperature to cook meat to

[sothatsit]

The problem is that SEO has made it hard to find trustworthy sites in the first place. The places I trust the most now for getting random information is Reddit and Wikipedia, which is absolutely ridiculous as they are terrible options.

But SEO slop machines have made it so hard to find the good websites without putting in more legwork than makes sense a lot of the time. Funnily enough, this makes AI look like a good option to cut through all the noise despite its hallucinations. That's obviously not acceptable when it comes to food safety concerns though.

[zahlman]

I've been finding that the proliferation of AI slop is at its worst on recipe/cooking/nutrition sites, so....

[jkingsman]

Mmm, I see this cutting both ways -- generally, I'd agree; safety critical things should not be left to an AI. However, cooking temperatures are information that has a factual ground truth (or at least one that has been decided on), has VERY broad distribution on the internet, and generally is a single, short "kernel" of information that has become subject to slop-ifying and "here's an article when you're looking for about 30 characters of information or less" that is prolific on the web.

So, I'd agree -- safety info from an LLM is bad. But generally, the /flavor/ (heh) of information that such data comprises is REALLY good to get from LLMs (as opposed to nuanced opinions or subjective feedback).

[edanm]

Idk. Maybe that's true today (though even today I'm not sure) but how long before AI becomes better than just finding random text on a website?

After all, AI can theoretically ask follow-up questions that are relevant, can explain subtleties peculiar to a specific situation or request, can rephrase things in ways that are clearer for the end user.

Btw, "What temperature should a food be cooked to" is a classic example of something where lots of people and lots of sources repeat incorrect information, which is often ignored by people who actually cook. Famously, the temp that is often "recommended" is only the temp at which bacteria/whatever is killed instantly - but is often too hot to make the food taste good. What is normally recommended is to cook to a lower temperature but keep the food at that temperature for a bit longer, which has the same effect safety-wise but is much better.

[maerch]

Meanwhile, in Germany, you can get raw pork with raw onions on a bread roll at just about every other bakery.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett

When I searched for the safe temperature for pork (in German), I found this as the first link (Kagi search engine)

> Ideally, pork should taste pink, with a core temperature between 58 and 59 degrees Celsius. You can determine the exact temperature using a meat thermometer. Is that not a health concern? Not anymore, as nutrition expert Dagmar von Cramm confirms: > “Trichinae inspection in Germany is so strict — even for wild boars — that there is no longer any danger.”

https://www.stern.de/genuss/essen/warum-sie-schweinefleisch-...

Stern is a major magazine in Germany.

[bee_rider]

I was just thinking that EU sources might be a good place to look for this sort of thing, given that we never really know what basic public health facts will be deemed political in the US on any given day. But, this reveals a bit of a problem—of course, you guys have food safety standards, so advice they is safe over there might not be applicable in the US.

[badc0ffee]

Should "Taste pink", you say

[greazy]

I googled (Australia) "what temp is pork safe at?", top three hits:

1. https://www.foodsafety.asn.au/australians-clueless-about-saf... 2. https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/safe-minimum-i... 3. https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/

All three were highly informative, well cited sources from reputable websites.

[wiseowise]

Only your second link provides good information in a convenient format (both F and C), first and third are useless.

[didibus]

Funny story, I used that to know the cooked temperature of burgers, it said medium-rare was 130. I proceeded to eating it and all, but then like half way through, I noticed the middle of this burger is really red looking, doesn't seem normal, and suddenly I remembered, wait, ground beef is always supposed to be 160, 130 medium-rare is for steak.

I then chatted that back to it, and it was like, oh ya, I made a mistake, you're right, sorry.

Anyways, luckily I did not get sick.

Moral of the story, don't get mentally lazy and use AI to save you the brain it takes for simple answers.

[what]

Do you actually put a thermometer in your burgers/steaks/meat when you’re cooking? That seems really weird.

Why are people downvoting this? I’ve literally never seen anyone use a thermometer to cook a burger or steak or pork chop. A whole roasted turkey, sure.

[carlosjobim]

> Anyways, luckily I did not get sick.

Why would you purchase meat that you suspect is diseased? Even if you cook it well-done, all the (now dead) bacteria and their byproducts are still inside. I don't understand why people do this to themselves? If I have any suspicion about some meat, I'll throw it away. I'm not going to cook it.

[brookst]

Safe Temperatures for Pork

People have been eating pork for over 40,000 years. There’s speculation about whether pork or beef was first a part of the human diet.

(5000 words later)

The USDA recommends cooking pork to at least 145 degrees.

[BoorishBears]

I searched it.

First result under the overview is the National Pork Board, shows the answer above the fold, and includes visual references: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/

Most of the time if there isn't a straightforward primary source in the top results, Google's AI overview won't get it right either.

Given the enormous scale and latency constraints they're dealing with, they're not using SOTA models, and they're probably not feeding the model 5000 words worth of context from every result on the page.

[ImaCake]

Not only that, it includes a link to the USDA reference so you can verify it yourself. I have switched back to google because of how useful I find the RAG overviews.

[wat10000]

The link is the only useful part, since you can’t trust the summary.

Maybe they could just show the links that match your query and skip the overview. Sounds like a billion-dollar startup idea, wonder why nobody’s done it.

[hansvm]

As of a couple weeks ago it had a variety of unsafe food recommendations regarding sous vide, e.g. suggesting 129F for 4+ hours for venison backstrap. That works great some of the time but has a very real risk of bacterial infiltration (133F being similar in texture and much safer, or 2hr being a safer cook time if you want to stick to 129F).

Trust it if you want I guess. Be cautious though.

[zahlman]

A shorter cook time is safer? Do you sear it afterwards or something?

[mitthrowaway2]

Google's search rankings are also the thing driving those ridiculous articles to the top, which is the only reason so many of them get written...

[ljlolel]

And also why they incentivized all this human written training data that will no longer be incentivized

[squigz]

I wonder how people have such awful experiences with (traditional) Google when I don't and really never have.

First result: https://www.porkcdn.com/sites/porkbeinspired/library/2014/06...

Second result: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/

[kriro]

On Google: """what temp in C is pork safe at?"""

AI: 63C

First result: Five year old reddit thread (F only discussion, USDA mentioned).

Second result: ThermoWorks blog (with 63C).

Third result: FoodSafety.gov (with 63C)

Forth result: USDA (with 63C)

Seems reasonable enough to scan 3-4 results to get some government source.

[wat10000]

It’s only useful if you can trust it, and you very much cannot.

I know you can’t necessarily trust anything online, but when the first hit is from the National Pork Board, I’m confident the answer is good.

[pasc1878]

But for the OP it is not as it does not give a temperature in their preferred units and probably USDA gives the wrong temperature in their locality.

[eviks]

> 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?

No it wasn't, most of the first page results have the temperature right there in the summary, many of them with both F and C, and unlike the AI response, there is much lower chance of hallucinated results.

So you've gained nothing

PS Trying the same search with -ai gets you the full table with temperatures, unlike with the AI summary where you have to click to get more details, so the new AI summary is strictly worse

[stereolambda]

Honestly the SEO talk sounds like reflexive coping in this discourse. I get that WWW has cheapened quality, but we now have the tech that could defeat most of the SEO and other trash tactics on the search engine side. Text analysis as a task is cracked open. Google and such could detect dark patterns with LLMs, or even just deep learning. This would probably be more reliable than answering factual queries.

The problem is there is no money and fame in using it that way, or at least so people think in the current moment. But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.

Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.

[zahlman]

> But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.

We could.

But it will absolutely not happen unless and until it can be more profitable than Google's current model.

What's your plan?

> Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.

Well, yes. That's the problem. Why rely on the same random liars as taste-makers?

[sgentle]

"full moon time NY"

> The next full moon in New York will be on August 9th, 2025, at 3:55 a.m.

"full moon time LA"

> The next full moon in Los Angeles will be on August 9, 2025, at 3:55 AM PDT.

I mean, it certainly gives an immediate answer...

[grey-area]

Why do you think that answer is correct? I mean maybe it is, or maybe it’s by the same user who recommended eating rocks (which ‘AI’ also recommended).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o

[__turbobrew__]

This is the first search result for me: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/general-food...

[refactor_master]

It doesn't take long to find SEO slop trying to sell you something:

When our grandmothers and grandfathers were growing up, there was a real threat to their health that we don’t face anymore. No, I’m not talking about the lack of antibiotics, nor the scarcity of nutritious food. It was trichinosis, a parasitic disease that used to be caught from undercooked pork.

The legitimate worry of trichinosis led their mothers to cook their pork until it was very well done. They learned to cook it that way and passed that cooking knowledge down to their offspring, and so on down to us. The result? We’ve all eaten a lot of too-dry, overcooked pork.

But hark! The danger is, for the most part, past, and we can all enjoy our pork as the succulent meat it was always intended to be. With proper temperature control, we can have better pork than our ancestors ever dreamed of. Here, we’ll look at a more nuanced way of thinking about pork temperatures than you’ve likely encountered before."

Sorry, what temperature was it again?

Luckily there's the National Pork Board which has bought its way to the top, just below the AI overview. So this time around I won't die from undercooked pork at least.

[SwtCyber]

The issue is more when those same tools start replacing deeper content or misrepresenting nuanced info

[croes]

Don’t forget to add glue and rocks

[Rapzid]

AI overview also says 165f is the best temperature to cook chicken breast to. Which is and always has been bollocks.

[Rapzid]

And it's trained at least a few people how to ruin chicken breast :D

[Jean-Papoulos]

Incredible, you are the problem. Didn't think I'd see such an idiotic answer on HN, please for the love of god do not use AI to know what is safe to eat.

[8note]

id consider that google thinks its good enough for people to base their food safety off of it, and they deserve to get sued for whatever theyre worth for providing said recommendations when somebody trusts them and gets sick