When it comes to steak, medium-rare is an optimal state. I grew up in a “well-done” family, so when I finally got to try the medium-rare version, it tasted heavenly. Though my family now likes to constantly joke that I like my food “mooing,” I think they’d bite their tongues if they met Wendy Marshall, a woman Unilad reported who has been enjoying raw meat since she was a child. Over the last two decades Marshall has been almost exclusively eating the uncooked “delicacy,” so much so it landed the 28-year-old tattoo shop owner on TLC’s My Strange Addiction, where she reportedly stated, “I love ripping the flesh straight off the bone.”
And it is an obsession she is fully aware is slightly off-putting. “I do understand that it’s not socially acceptable to eat raw meat,” Marshall confessed in the episode, according to the New York Post. “People kind of gag or they look at me crazy, but I don’t care.”
The obsession began reportedly with her grandmother. The two would spend time together eating meat raw and “bonding.” Sadly, Marshall’s grandmother died five years ago of bladder cancer.
Eating raw meat can expose you to harmful and sometimes life-threatening bacteria including salmonella, campylobacter, listeria and E. coli. The National Library of Medicine states that according to the World Health Organization “an estimated 600 million people are affected and 420,000 deaths occur annually due to foodborne diseases.”
Some types of raw meat dishes such as tartare, sushi, oysters, and ceviche appear on menus, but that doesn’t necessarily mitigate the risk of food-borne illnesses.
What Marshall should worry about is the warning nurse Vanessa Cabrera gave her if she continued with her fixation, after she noticed E. Coli had been present in her system for some time.
“In seeing that you don’t have any symptoms, it leads me to believe that it’s been there for such a long time that your body is adapted to it,” she stated.
She noted that due to the length of time it survived inside her gut, she has likely built up a resistance to nearly every type of antibiotic.
“So if you were to get sick with any other type of illness coupled with that bacteria there, it would be very difficult for the antibiotics to work,” she added, per the Post.
Marshall has since vowed that she would only eat raw meat grass-fed from a good source and vowed not to eat raw ground beef at all. “For my health, to be here for my children, and for my husband and family,” she stated, according to Unilad.
Well, at least it is a step in the right direction.
