Go Ahead, Lick That Spoon

Not long ago, I made a marble pound cake. Marble pound cake requires making
a vanilla batter, adding chocolate to half of it, and then swirling the batters
together in a pan. This meant that once my loaf pan was in the oven, I had two bowls and two spoons coated in
sweet, egg-y batter. I licked them all clean. Please dont be alarmed by my lack of manners: I was by myself at the
time. Every time I have made a type of cake or cookie for the recipe column I write for Slate, Ive unfailingly
consumed some of the uncooked mixture. Heck, every time Ive made a type of cake or cookie just for fun, Ive
unfailingly consumed some of the uncooked mixture. And I have never in my 27 years gotten salmonella poisoning.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: I estimate that Ive baked cookies, cake, or brownies once a month, on
average, since I started baking by myself around the age of 12 and that I have tasted the dough or batter every
time. Lets say that each of those batches of cookies, cake, or brownies has contained two eggsa conservative
estimate. This means that I have ingested the innards ofat the very least360 uncooked eggs in my life. And this
isnt even counting the many times I licked brownie batter from my fingers as a small child, in direct defiance of my
elders continual warnings: Dont eat that, youll get salmonella. Have I just been lucky not to encounter any
salmonella-infected eggs in my career as a spoon-licker?
Why have those prophecies turned out to be false? Is salmonella not
as common as my parents, aunts, and teachers thought when they
drilled caution into my head when I was in elementary school in the
1990s? Have I just been lucky not to encounter any salmonella-
infected eggs in my career as a spoon-licker?
Salmonella Enteritidis is the subtype of salmonella thats most
commonly responsible for salmonellosis, otherwise known as
salmonella poisoning. Unfortunately, SE doesnt produce any visible
symptoms in egg-laying hens, which means that it can pass through
henhouses undetected until consumers start complaining of diarrhea
and vomiting, which are sometimes so severe that they lead to
hospitalization.
Egg producers have succeeded at reducing the rate of salmonella
infection in egg-laying hens since the early 1990s. But there are
other reasons salmonella infection is uncommon. Infected hens dont
always lay infected eggsonly rarely does the salmonella bacteria
enter a hens ovaries and, consequently, its eggs. Using data from
the 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that one in 20,000 eggs is internally
contaminated with salmonella.
But lets say an infected egg does make it into a consumers kitchen. If the egg is kept at or below a temperature of
45 degrees, the salmonella bacteria will have no opportunity to grow. If the amount of bacteria in the egg remains
relatively small, its perfectly conceivable that a spoon-licker like myself would simply miss the infected portion of
the egg, which would end up getting killed in the oven or washed down the sink.
Finally, even if that bacteria does end up in your mouth and stomach, it might not make you sick. Salmonella, like a
lot of food-borne bacteria, are what we think of as opportunistic organisms, in that they really dont compete very
well with a lot of other bacteria and microbes that are not only in nature, but also are in the human intestinal
system, says David McSwane, a retired public health professor at Indiana University and the co-author of
Essentials of Food Safety and Sanitation.
Naturally, if you consume a large enough quantity of salmonella, not even your vigorous gut bacteria will save you
from illness. And if youre a child, elderly, pregnant, HIV-positive, or on chemotherapyor facing some other
immune-compromising medical situationyou could get sick from consuming just a small quantity of SE. If you
want to eliminate your odds of getting salmonellosis from eggs, you can buy pasteurized eggs. On the down side,
pasteurized eggs are more expensive than unpasteurized eggs and dont produce very fluffy meringues (although
in standard cookie recipes, they work fine).
Still, speaking personally, the statistics havent scared me off unpasteurized eggs for good. If I continued
consuming batter and dough containing about two raw eggs per month, I would likely encounter only one SE-
contaminated egg over the course of 833 years. And if I remain generally healthy, I might not even get sick from
that SE-contaminated egg. Of course, by the time Im 860, my immune system will probably be weak enough that
Ill want to avoid unpasteurized eggs. In the meantime, though, Ill take my chances on that cake batter.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/03/salmonella_and_raw_eggs_how_i_ve
_eaten_tons_of_cookie_dough_and_never_gotten.html