Most of us learned a long time ago that eating raw food derived from animals is a bad idea. Animals, you see, carry bacteria and other nasty buggers that can make us sick but that are generally destroyed by cooking.

The January edition of "Consumer Reports" features a breathy report headlined "Dirty Birds." It turns out, according to this report, that 83 percent of chickens studied by the magazine contain campylobacter or salmonella, both bacteria that cause foodborne illness.

The necessity of cooking chicken is not a new notion. Cavemen cooked food over fire. Even they knew chomping down on a raw animal could lead to ahem intestinal distress.