Hehehe...before you read this, please know that I myself am highly amused and somewhat ashamed of myself for even being ired enough to write such a passionate response to today's shining example of the drivel that makes headline news on the Yahoo! front page.
But anyway, I'll place it here just so you too can make fun of me and my "righteous" anger. Ha!
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THE ARTICLE on Yahoo! front page--Sat Dec 23, 2006:
End of a Childhood Ritual
Posted by Cheryl Koch, M.S., R.D.
on Thu, Dec 07, 2006, 9:30 am PST
One of my fondest childhood memories is licking the bowl clean of batter when my grandmother or mother baked cookies and cakes. As far as I was concerned, the best part of any baked dessert was the raw batter before it was placed in the oven.
Today, as the mother of a young child, I'm the one who's busy trying out new recipes for the holidays, and my son is my kitchen helper. But I now find myself hesitating to pass on that bowl I once savored so much.
I'm a nutritionist, after all, so I'm more aware than most people of the warnings about raw batter, homemade mayonnaise, and egg-laden sauces like Caesar dressing and Hollandaise sauce. The reason is a type of bacteria called salmonella enteritidis that's found in raw eggs. It was once thought that salmonella only infected eggs whose shells were cracked. Now experts have determined that all eggs carry the risk of salmonella.
To avoid the risks associated with salmonella and raw eggs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests the following recommendations:
-Keep eggs refrigerated and promptly refrigerate unused or leftover foods that contain eggs both cooked and raw.
-Discard cracked or dirty eggs.
-Follow basic food safety rules, such as proper hand-washing and cleaning cooking utensils with soap and water after contact with raw eggs.
-Eat eggs promptly after cooking. Do not keep eggs warm or at room temperature for longer than 2 hours.
-Avoid eating raw eggs in homemade ice cream or eggnog. Commercially manufactured ice cream and eggnog are made with pasteurized eggs and have not been linked with salmonella enteritidis infections.
-Avoid restaurant dishes made with raw or undercooked, unpasteurized eggs. Restaurants should use pasteurized eggs in any recipe that calls for raw eggs, such as Hollandaise sauce or Caesar salad dressing. If you have concerns, ask your server if pasteurized eggs are used at that establishment.
-An estimated one in 10,000 eggs carries salmonella bacteria that may cause serious problems in children, the elderly, and people with weak immune systems. So take heed. Just because the egg looks clean and the shell is intact, it still isn't safe to lick the bowl.
MY COMMENT:
I guess it's your job to warn the public on such a "health risk." Thank you, Cheryl, for letting us know about your own neurotic decision to end a time-honored tradition in your family, as a result of your own overprotectiveness. And thank you for attempting to present us with these facts without "officially" advising the public to do the same. The slant of your article is obvious--you're just HINTING that we should do the same. I get it...to do anything otherwise would just make us bad parents.
Frankly, you'd hold more journalistic credibility if you presented in your article a recorded example of even one case of a child dying from salmonella caught from "licking the bowl." Even that would be enough to satisfy me, as I'm sure other people would too. I can just see it now...scads of rolls of raw cookie dough yanked from refrigerator aisles in supermarkets coast to coast; front-page news of the latest salmonella outbreaks; tearful mothers being interviewed on "60 Minutes", sobbingly lamenting, "Oh, if ONLY I hadn't fed little Jimmy the cookie dough. But I thought it was SAFE! They told me it was SAFE!"...and so on.
This article is of exactly the same ilk as the myriad of other alarmist viewpoints the mainstream media feeds the general public. The world's already faced The Black Death, and cookie dough just isn't a second coming. Yahoo! is really reaching, as usual. Please understand, it's not that I'm holding you personally responsible--your article is typical of Yahoo!'s pseudo-factual journalism...publishing opinion pieces by random "experts", carefully crafted to appear as hard news. I only hope they paid you a pretty penny.
'Tis the season, I suppose.
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