Eat cookies, not cookie dough: Flour may carry bacteria

Always cook your cookies.

The Food and Drug Administration warned this week that Americans shouldn’t eat cookie dough or other raw batters, even if it’s egg-free, due to the risk of contracting E. coli .

Many might think it’s the risk of salmonella and raw eggs that the FDA wants Americans to avoid. But this warning is about tainted flour after E. coli outbreaks in recent months were linked to cookie dough made with flour manufactured by General Mills.

And the reason is sort of disgusting: animal excrement. When birds and other animals do their business above wheat fields, they can spread bacteria from their infected feces onto the grain. That wheat is later processed into flour. While the process does try to kill pathogens, it’s not as intense as, for example, pasteurizing milk.

“There’s no treatment to effectively make sure there’s no bacteria in the flour,” said Martin Wiedmann, food safety professor at Cornell University.

So if you eat cookie dough, you might be eating, in a sense, the diseased-remnants of bird poop.

Risk of becoming infected is nearly nullified when you boil, bake, roast, microwave or otherwise heat and cook with flour. None of that happens when you eat dough, and you’re exposed to much of what happened to the wheat before it came into your kitchen.

It’s affected dozens already. As of June 8, 42 cases had been reported in 21 states, with 11 hospitalizations. A General Mills processing facility in Kansas City, Missouri, was cited as the source of the outbreak.