A beautifully cooked rare piece of Scottish fillet steak with stilton sauce has long been one of my favourite meals (I'm drooling just thinking about it now). But pregnant women of today all know that rare steak is completely taboo although I'm sure that you'd only have to go back 20/30 years to find women breaking this and many more of 'the rules' which todays mums to be have to follow. The mums from that generation frequently smoked and drank alcohol throughout their pregnancies, and wouldn't have considered giving up rare steak, pate, runny eggs etc etc and many of life's other pleasures like hot baths. Give it another 20 years and I imagine there'll be hundreds of extra rules for those poor mums.
Look at the guidance on the Food Standards Agency website or the NHS website and they make it quite clear that all meat needs to be cooked thoroughly so it sounds like a fairly straight forwards rule. However I was very surprised to see in my NHS issued 'The Pregnancy Book' the following advice:-
'It's fine to eat steaks and other whole cuts of beef and lamb rare, as long as the outside has been properly cooked or sealed'
A complete contradiction to the advice on their website and a matter of massive excitement in this household!! Being a very sensible and wary sort of person, I didn't through caution to the wind and run out for the largest piece of steak I could find. Instead, I texted (how modern!) my midwife for her advice and she said that she wouldn't eat it rare, I should stick to the safe side and have it well done. Which is, as far as I'm concerned, a waste of a nice piece of meat. I would prefer to abstain completely than ruin something which has the potential to be divine.
I've done some further research since then but all I seem to be able to find is individual's opinions on the subject rather than any actual research, facts or statistics. The women seem to be split in to two camps; it's not worth the risk and abstaining shouldn't be hard for 9 months or all of the bacteria are on the outside and will be killed by searing the steak so go for it.
So I feel like I have to make my decision based on other people's opinions rather than on actual facts and it's really quite a hard one. Of course I don't want to risk any problems with my baby but I also don't want to wrap myself up in cotton wool and be annoyingly overprotective or paranoid. Medically I have a book saying it's ok but a midwife saying it's not, the FSA and NHS websites both say no.
Right, decision made.......drum roll......I'm not going to eat rare steak - for now. If I get actual cravings for it later on in pregnancy then I probably will because baby knows best but at the moment, when I would just be eating it for me, I will hold off because I don't want to end up beating myself up if 'the worst' does happen.
Bah humbug. Where's the chocolate? (in limited amounts of course, wouldn't want to have too much caffeine!)
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