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No. 5986: Jon, the Lethal Chef

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Jon, the Lethal Chef

First | Previous | 2025-10-08 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=5986

Strip by: shiningpikablu252

Jon {whistling as he starts cooking what are supposed to be perfectly-rounded steaks}: ♪
Jon: How does everyone want their steak done?
Mom: Medium with extra salt
Dad: Rare with a little sear
Doc Boy: Medium well with cheese
Liz: Medium rare with a French dressing glaze
Jon: Got it!
{cue grill going up in heavy smoke}
Jon: How's about extra crispy?
Liz, Doc Boy, Dad, Mom: Screw it, we're outta here!
Garfield, Odie: We're in!

The author writes:

Don't quit your day job, Jon...

The original strip, to be quite blunt, struck a bad chord with me... in the middle line. In the original strip, Jon was cooking burgers, and got requests anywhere from rare to medium well. This makes me think that Jim and/or his assistants got their burger-cooking advice from UHF and not Bill Nye the Science Guy — and if Jon was anywhere skilled enough to deliver the burgers as ordered, he could have well killed his parents as well as Liz! Did nobody here learn a lesson from that 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak? With steak, the dangerous stuff tends to stay on the outside (and thus gets killed by heat sooner), hence lower internal temperatures are indeed safer for steak; grind that beef up for burgers, though, and the dangerous stuff can get all over the insides. Doc Boy might have survived since medium well could be cooked well enough to fall into the no-pink part of the internal temperature spectrum for ground beef, and the professional side of foodservice standards suggest you might be able to get away at 68°C (that's 155°F for those numskull Americans not willing to accept that metric's the future), mid-way between the steak standards for medium-well and well-done; Dad, on the other hand, clearly had a death wish since rare is nowhere even close to done by modern burger standards (even the burgers involved in the 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak were cooked to 60°C — or 140°F for those who still don't get metric — between medium-rare and medium by the steak standards). Let's just say Jon's ineptitude at cooking saved a few lives in the original...

To be fair to UHF, though, it wasn't that they failed in their research, it's that it was made at a time (1989, to be specific) when burgers cooked in the same temperature ranges as steaks actually were considered as safe as steak. Science has marched on since then. The standards nowadays preaching 71°C (160°F for those non-metric folk) as the minimum for non-professional-stock burgers weren't around when UHF was made — those came about as a result of that Jack in the Box outbreak, and were in place when Bill Nye the Science Guy covered them in the episode "Germs" in April 1995.

Two potential ideas for a remix came into my head, I opted to use the less-morbid one of changing the meal Jon's cooking into steaks (which you can indeed cut round like burgers), then having Jon's family and Liz turn around and leave when Jon botches the cooking. (My other potential idea? Keep the burgers, but basically have Mom, Dad, and Liz directly state their death wishes with Doc Boy stating he wanted to live.)

(Also, the 71°C standard? That's specifically for bovine meat, such as beef and bison; it's suggested that standard also works with pork and lamb. If the meat's poultry, such as chicken or turkey, the standard's even higher at 74°C — or 165°F to the non-metric-understanders — and veggie burgers are suggested to also be cooked to that standard as well. Apologies if I've put morbid ideas of cooking the U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm gang into your heads...)

Original strip: 2023-07-02.