Every kid has grown up hearing the same thing from adults: don't eat raw cookie dough. I myself was always a big advocate for shooting down the raw cookie dough eating haters. You heard this from your parents, friends, doctors, the internet, etc and I'm here to tell you that they are all right. Cookie dough is one of those guilty pleasures because the dough always tastes better than the actual baked cookies. There's nothing better than licking the batter off the spatula or taking a big spoonful, that is until you are unfortunate enough to actually get food poisoning from it.
Cookie dough contains a lot of delicious ingredients but the two that you have to look out for are eggs and flour. Raw flour can possibly contain the bacteria E.coli which can be killed off when baked. Raw eggs, on the other hand, can contain the germ Salmonella before being cooked. Until getting food poisoning from cookie dough and looking up some stuff about it, for some reason I never thought about raw flour being a threat to my health (I have no idea why). Now I have gone 20 years of my life never ever getting sick from eating raw cookie dough, so I just shook it off as something that parents would just tell their kids so they wouldn't eat the dough. That is up until yesterday when I got food poisoning from eating it.
A couple moments of pure happiness from eating delicious chocolate chip cookie dough was then followed by 10 hours of constant cramps, diarrhea, and extreme vomiting (yeah, really gross). Usually, when you get food poisoning you get symptoms anywhere from a few hours afterward to a day later; it was about 5 hours for me. I knew it was from the dough because I ate breakfast like normal that morning and the only other thing I ate was the dough and the cookies when they were done baking.
If you have never had food poisoning, it's no picnic. Getting up every 20 minutes to be violently ill for 10 hours is absolute hell. It's so bad that it makes you never want to have that raw cookie dough ever again. Nodding in and out of terrible sleep, being dehydrated, only having the strength to walk the short distance to the bathroom, it all sucks. Thank god for good Netflix shows, saltines, and vitamin water because without those things, having food poisoning is much worse.
Basically, think twice before having your favorite indulging treat. It could backfire and leave you lying in bed wishing you could travel back in time to have the patience to wait for baked cookies. Knowing myself I will probably never eat raw cookie dough that is made by myself. I feel like the pre-packaged dough that comes frozen is a safer bet since it has more preservatives. Unless you are someone who doesn't mind being sick, in that case, go for it and eat the raw dough no matter what the cost.
