This salmonella scare seems kinda over-the-top. Cook your eggs, no salmonella. Hasn't this been a rule since forever?

@MrPDX

Not for many world cultures who've created a great deal of traditional recipes using raw eggs (that we still enjoy today).

I've seen many menus recently that have raw egg warnings on them.

@PAC, true but it's been known that you take a risk with uncooked eggs. That's why you're not supposed to eat raw cookie dough, but you do it anyway because it tastes good. Don't want e-coli in your hamburger? Cook it well done. It's a trade-off between what we want to eat and what's the safest for us to eat. What I'm not getting is why salmonella is the crisis of the week...eggs having salmonella is not news. Lots of eggs having salmonella is not news. The knowledge that cooking eggs makes them safer to eat has been around a long time, and in many world cultures. Rather than recalling a half-billion eggs, why not just say "cook your eggs if you want to be sure they're safe to eat"?

For many months I ate a raw egg drink every day as part of a specific healing diet (inherited intestinal issues). I ate maybe hundreds of raw eggs? I never had a problem, but I bought local farm or organic eggs or they came from friends' chickens. I don't think the risk is all that great when not using industrial-farm eggs.

The problem is non local mass food. It you buy a burger from a local butcher it was probably one cow. Eggs from old style small farm less than 100 chickens. Salad from farmer's market maybe five acres. Now mass factory food blends 10,000 pounds of burger to make meat chubs, 70% of battery layers are in sheds containing 20,000 to 100,000 birds, and bag salads batches appear to be around 30,000 bags each from the recall data.

Crap why didn't I look up the recall data before I ate that salad tonight Fresh Express has another 3,000 bad cases. It is only listeria, e.coli and salmonella I needed to loose weight that was why I was eating salad in the first place.

The problem is non local mass food. It you buy a burger from a local butcher it was probably one cow. Eggs from old style small farm less than 100 chickens. Salad from farmer's market maybe five acres. Now mass factory food blends 10,000 pounds of burger to make meat chubs, 70% of battery layers are in sheds containing 20,000 to 100,000 birds, and bag salads batches appear to be around 30,000 bags each from the recall data.

Crap why didn't I look up the recall data before I ate that salad tonight Fresh Express has another 3,000 bad cases. It is only listeria, e.coli and salmonella I needed to loose weight that was why I was eating salad in the first place.

@MrPDX

I see your point. I think the reason it's news is because the salmonella is actually inside the egg, rather than on the egg, which is rare. So people who thought they were safe cooking eggs over-easy, or medium, might have thought they were safe. In fact, that runny yolk was putting them at risk.

The risk of salmonella from runny yolks is somewhat rare considering that most chickens predisposed to harboring salmonella in their ovaries (which is then transferred to the inside of the egg) are tested out of the system by the USDA.

Unfortunately, in this case, it looks like tainted food supply may have been the culprit.

MMMMMMM I LOVE SALMON.

I love how people seem to read this post and get the wrong takeaway from it. You are MORE at danger with your backyard or organic eggs. Why? Because there is less testing and regulation, etc.

However, industrial farming, when it does have a problem, puts MORE people at risk. This is a classic case of the benefits and problems of centralization. Each system has their advantages and disadvantages, the main one being whether the responsibility should be more on the individual or on the bureaucracy and whether problems when they occur will be more isolated and prevalent or rare and system-wide.