Goodbye Raw Cookie Dough
I don’t think many people could have missed the recent news regarding the recall of millions of salmonella contaminated eggs. If you’d like to read more of the details on this recall, you can find them on fellow About.com Guide Vince Ianelli’s Pediatrics Guide site. What I’d like like to share with you are the lessons I’ve learned from this situation:
Lesson 1: Mom, you’re always right. You know it, I know it, and now the world knows it. We should never eat unbaked cookie dough unless we used pasteurized eggs to make it. It doesn’t matter how tempting that chocolate morsel is peeking out of the top of the mound of dough. I used to believe that because I very carefully cracked the egg so that it didn’t come in contact with the shell, the salmonella wouldn’t get into my dough. Wrong, the salmonella is now in the egg, not just on the shell.
Lesson 2: Mom, here’s another point that you’ve been right about. Always wash your hands before, during, and after cooking. If you touch the shells or touch the raw egg and touch something else without washing up, you’ve possibly contaminated your kitchen with bacteria. It seems extreme, but salmonella poisoning is pretty extreme too.
Lesson 3: Don’t eat runny eggs in restaurants. Your eggs should be very cooked. Apparently a lot of the illnesses have been contracted in restaurants. I really don’t want to think about what goes on in restaurant kitchens, but it’s as bad as you might imagine.
Lesson 4: Save your food packaging. If you were one of the many people who transferred your eggs to your refrigerator door, you don’t know whether you have a recalled egg, do you?
Lesson 5: Okay, I’m going to get a little political on this one. There really is such a thing as a company that is too big. From what I’ve been reading on this recall, our country’s egg producers are limited to a very few that produce millions and millions of eggs. For the sake of argument, and to leave PETA out of this one, let’s put aside for a moment the feelings of those poor chickens in their lousy living conditions. On a simply pragmatic level, with all of those chickens living in such close quarters, it’s a no brainer that if one is ill it will be easy for the whole lot of them to be contaminated. Additionally, if one is fed tainted food, many are going to eat tainted food. And if one makes bad eggs, most likely they’re all going to be dropping bad eggs that will be distributed pretty widely through our markets. That’s simply the way industrial farming works. Practically speaking, smaller is better when it limits the potential scale of damages from a problem like this one.
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4 Responses to “Goodbye Raw Cookie Dough”
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All true, but what do you think this sad egg episode will do to the food industry infrastructure. Will megafarms become smaller or will there be more antibiotics and irradition of food?
Good post. I, too, am guilty of eating raw cookie dough. After all, who can resist? I always felt that since I wash the eggs before I crack them I took an extra step and I was safe, but now we hear that the salmonella is inside the egg too. Unfortunately we can take nothing for granted and nothing is safe anymore. Still, I’ll play the odds and I will continue to eat possibly salmonella tainted eggs, possibly e-coli contaminated hamburgers, possibly e-coli contaminated spinach etc. etc.
I think that as long as you cook the eggs and practice good kitchen hygiene you’ll still be fine with the eggs. Spinach salad is another story. And hamburgers should be cooked until ugly, but I still need pink.
I believe, if anything, the megafarms will get bigger. I think there will be a lot more government regulations, more hoops through which all farms, big and small will need to jump, and it will become even more cost prohibitive to be a smaller farm. Sadly. I just heard today that up in New York they’re talking about requiring hens to be immunized. That’s extra expense for one. I also wonder how that will work on our systems. I think that many are beginning to believe that antibiotic treated cattle is contributing to human antibiotic resistance. So what’s going to happen with salmonella immunizations? Will that make it harder to treat people that catch salmonella from a different source?