If you are serious about working in a terminal, then I highly recommend learning modern replacements for the old tools.
In this case ripgrep (or rg) https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep is phenomenal. Especially for searching recursively in a large directory tree it is unbelievably quicker than regular grep.
It won't be installed on any random machine, so grep is still useful, but if you regularly need to text search in files then there are better tools.
Smoked salmon looks "raw" largely because it is raw. It has never been heated.
Smoking the fish does indeed give a very different flavour to non-smoked fillet. That shouldn't be any great surprise.
Why is it safe? Well good quality raw salmon is also safe (see sushi). But the smoking does have an effect of preserving the fish and making it less of an environment where bacteria would thrive.