10 Signs Your Chicken Has Gone Bad - Daily Meal

First, let's make something abundantly clear: you should never deliberately ingest chicken that shows any signs of having gone bad. This is how you end up becoming part of those one million people annually with food poisoning from poultry. Still, you may accidentally bite into some bad chicken that didn't exhibit any other symptoms of rottenness. Should this happen, the taste has been reported as resembling something acid, bitter, heavily metallic, or ammonia. If you detect those things, or anything else distinctly off from the normal taste, immediately spit the chicken out and don't eat anymore.

Why is it so vital not to eat bad chicken? It goes back to raw chicken frequently containing pathogenic bacteria such as salmonella, campylobacter and clostridium perfringens. The amounts present in fresh chicken are usually mitigated by proper food handling and cooking it to at least 165 degrees. But the longer your chicken hangs around, the more bacteria proliferate. Gizmodo points out that in the right conditions — or the wrong conditions, as it were — bacteria can double every half hour.

Campylobacter is particularly dangerous. WebMD says it has been known to cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, and the Minnesota Department of Health adds that it is responsible for the campylobacteriosis infection. It's easy to see why you should stop eating chicken at any hint of a "fowl" taste — though interestingly, the spoilage bacteria that create bad odors are far less likely to cause sickness than pathogenic bacteria.

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