‘Tis the time of year for baking cookies. And where there are cookies, can there be cookie dough far behind?
If you’re anything like me, you not only scrape the bowl and spoon to get every last precious morsel of the raw cookie dough, but you omit one or two cookies from the final batch in order to have extra dough to feast on.
Well, according to a warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, you shouldn’t.
ABC News fills in some of the details:
While the potential risks of consuming raw eggs have are widely known, the FDA’s new warning highlights the potential risks of consuming flour raw.
“Flour is derived from a grain that comes directly from the field and typically is not treated to kill bacteria,” Dr. Leslie Smoot a senior adviser in the FDA’s Office of Food Safety, said in a statement.
The warning comes after an FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation that linked an E. coli outbreak to contaminated flour and resulted in the recall of 10 million pounds of flour, including unbleached, all-purpose and self-rising varieties, according to the FDA.
“The concern is that the specific flour came from a grain that was contaminated with the bacteria E. coli and that flour has the potential to cause human illness,” Dr. Michael Levine, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told ABC News.
I know: Humbug, right?
At the very least, you should probably avoid having the kiddies lick the bowl. Ditto for anyone in the household with a compromised immune system. Better safe than sorry.
