Actually, a lot of the stuff about meat going bad is cultural, and/or misinformation.
People rarely eat fresh meat. It’s hard to do, because it takes a while to get the meat from butchering to shops to the table, and also, fresh meat just is not very good.
Ever heard of dry-aged steak? It’s a delicacy. People pay a premium for that.
It’s basically meat that’s been left to sit around for a long time.
It smells and tastes a bit funky, and the outer layer is often discarded.
It’s really good, despite how it may look.
My grandmother told me that during the war, they ate everything.
Including stuff like badgers, which apparently is very tough meat. The idea here was to kill it and empty it, and then nail the carcass to a beam in the attic.
After a couple of weeks, the meat had become tender enough for the carcass to fall off the nail, and then it was ready to be prepared.
Letting venison get tenderized is a normal practice.
Maggots look bad to our eyes, but you can actually eat them. And they produce an antibiotic film, that protects the meat from bacteria, and they eat up the most rotten bits. They are actually used in medicine to treat wounds by eating dead parts, and coating the wound in their antibiotic mucus.
It might sound strange, but keep in mind that casu marzu (maggot infected cheese) is considered a delicacy.
Many cultures waited until there were a couple of maggots to start eating the meat: it was not considered a big deal like it would be now.
Now, don’t get me wrong here:
Meat can, and does spoil in certain circumstances. And can be dangerous to consume, even when cooked, because of toxins that build up.
So you can’t just go around eating any old meat.
That’s why most cultures err on the side of “better safe than sorry”, and stick to whatever preparation methods they know are safe. And you should do that too.
However, know that there are also many things that leave the meat looking or smelling different, and that does not mean it has gone bad.
Adding this here, because it seems that a lot of people seem to find this very controversial.
We eat a LOT of rotten food.
It’s super tasty.
Cheese, wine, beer, yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, traditional bread, pickles, vinegar, kefir, buttermilk, chocolate, miso, natto, fish sauce, stinky tofu, tempeh, …
Fermenting stuff is not new.
You set up the conditions for certain microorganisms to be the ones most likely to develop, and then you let things rot for a while. Sometimes you want to make sure to pre-contaminate the food.
It’s called food preservation, but really, it’s just letting the food continue to be decomposed in a way that makes it easy for us to digest.