Almost everyone misunderstands the recommendations. 165 F is only meant to be held for 1 second. To achieve the same level of pathogen reduction, you can trade temperature for time.
No, nobody misunderstands them. The recommendations leave out time entirely. People aren’t misunderstanding them, they’re just overly simplified. That’s why they’re bad. You are correct that you can do lower temperatures for longer, but FDA guidelines don’t mention this.
“The safe cooking temperature for all poultry products, including ground chicken and turkey, stays the same at 165 ºF.”
These are the same guidelines you encounter in the restaurant world, however in packaged food production you submit your recipes to process authorities who actually do consult time/temperature charts. But for restaurant and home guidelines they assume (not incorrectly) that it is basically impossible to ensure the restaurant or home chef cooked the chicken until the coolest part was at 145 for 2 minutes or whatever TF time/temp is needed to get the required salmonella reduction.
I didn't mean to say that recommendations give explicit alternatives. A temperature recommendation without explicit time is implicitly instantaneous, and without explicit location is implicitly at the coldest spot. From that, you can infer that the recommendation might be overkill, but not by how much.
I didn't know that they officially reduced the temperature and added a rest time, despite the article announcing the changes being over a decade old, so thank you for the link. I'm curious if it was in response to something like so many people ignoring the recommendation that they were getting sick, or if the baked ham industry advocated for it.
