I have started cooking with Hannah. I get her to do actual cooking tasks, like cracking eggs, pouring in pre-measured ingredients, or sprinkling cheese. I bought her a small whisk and rubber spatula so she can have kid-sized tools. She loves this, and I like sharing this time with her. We’re being social, Hannah’s learning about food, and there’s no TV in sight. Later, when it’s time to eat the food it’s ‘her’ food she takes great pride in the finished product.
I ran into a bit of a dilemma a week or so ago when we made chocolate chip cookies together. What about raw cookie dough? The conventional wisdom is that raw eggs are dangerous. After all, raw eggs can contain salmonella. You don’t want your kids to get salmonella, right? The only alternative is to avoid eggs or use the pasteurized variety, which come in little cartons and may not behave exactly like regular eggs.
One of the great joys of my childhood was destroying the kitchen helping my mom bake, and the best part was licking the spoon. This was 25 years ago, when raw eggs were considered health food. Nobody seemed the least bit concerned about raw eggs, unless they had allergies. So I wonder, has something changed, or are we just more concerned than we used to be?
I thought about using pasteurized eggs, but it’s not for me. I’m trying to reduce my carbon footprint. I buy local free-range organic eggs. I pay more, because it’s worth it to me. I don’t want to use a product shipped from who knows where, from chickens who are treated who knows how, in extra packaging, with extra processing steps. So, I wanted to know, how big is the risk, really?
I took to the internet, and found this site. What I found was that out of 300 million Americans, approximately 1.3 million will contract salmonella each year (although, I would assume this is from various sources, not just eggs). Approximately 1 out of every 10,000 raw eggs contains salmonella, meaning that the chance that egg is bad is 0.01%. And, for healthy people the risk associated with salmonella is low. Of 1.3 million people who contract it, 600 die, and most of those are immune-compromised. By my math, then, the likelihood that we will eat raw cookie dough and die is less than 5 out of 100 million. Compare that with the more than 41 out of 100 million chance that I will die on my daily commute (see here).
So, what did I do? Hannah and I sampled the dough. Of course everyone has to make their own assessments. For now, though, mine is that life is too short to worry about things like this. And cookie dough is just too delicious.
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