New York Times columnist and food fashionista Mark Bittman has continued his long history of trading food safety for food porn.

Earlier this month, Bittman wrote of his love of beef tartare, or raw beef. Or lamb. Or fish.

A Toronto chef who asked not to be identified for fear of tipping off the city’s public-health inspectors, gushed in Toronto’s Globe and Mail about his love of the raw pork.

“Raw pork is some of the sweetest-tasting meat I’ve ever had.” At his Italian restaurant, he sources his pork directly from a traditional small-scale farm (at $4.50 a pound, more than double what most restaurants pay for pork) and puts it on his menu as salsiccia cruda – literally, raw sausage. Ground in-house on the same day the pig arrives at the restaurant, the meat is seasoned with salt, pepper, fennel, coriander and chili and served on crostini with olive oil.

He is careful to point out that he would never make the traditional Italian delicacy from ground supermarket meat – “in North America, unless you have a farmer, you don’t know where your pigs are coming from” – and that his pork is fresh out of the slaughterhouse. “Horse on the menu causes much more of a problem then raw pork,” he says.

Because we all eat, so we’re all good at microbial risk assessment.