Safer Russian Roulette?

Eat raw, unpasteurized eggs? Indulge in tartare from time to time? Like to lick the cookie dough bowl and beaters?

If so, you’re playing a game of food-safety Russian roulette, and odds are that someday, if such unscrupulous activities continue unabated, you will hit that loaded chamber and come down with disease.

That last example above is the subject of much hemming and hawing of late (except these folks were likely just squeezing or spooning dough from the chub right from the fridge…), when consumption of raw cookie dough hospitalized 30-odd people.

Of course, the industry should be (and is) working toward safer processing and handling protocols on and ongoing basis. But when an op-ed writer in The New York Times decides to wait until the very last line of their piece (almost an afterthought…) to suggest that it’s a mistake—and dangerous—to eat raw cookie dough (particularly manufactured cookie dough!) after lambasting the industry for its food-safety shortcomings, something has gone horribly wrong with our logical patterns of thought. Perhaps I should drive my car to the store blindfolded and then sue Chrysler when I end up in the hospital. Both lines of reasoning are equally spurious.

Perhaps it’s a situation of too little information, but E. coli is literally everywhere, and we should all take the appropriate preventative measures Mom always told us about. It’s just common sense, people.