Jill Harness
Raw Eggs: Delicious & Nutritious?
by Jill Harness - December 9, 2009 - 12:25 PM

Gep

Americans have been told their whole lives to avoid eating raw eggs for fear of salmonella poisoning, but in many other countries (including Japan), raw eggs are a common treat. Boing Boing’s Lisa Katayama explores this strange contradiction in her recent taste test of raw eggs.

Lisa has enjoyed plenty of raw eggs in Japan, but as soon as she hits California and finds the cartons with safe handling instructions, she immediately has reverted to eating scrambled eggs. Curious, she did a bit of investigating. As it turns out, your chance of contracting salmonella from a raw egg is only 1 in 20,000. So if you’d like to take the risk, try tamago kake gohan, a traditional Japanese dish with a raw egg in rice with a dash of soy sauce.

[Image courtesy of gep's Flickr stream.]

« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Click here to get a Risk-Free issue of mental_floss magazine
Comments (13)

  1. I have eaten, but don’t like, totally raw eggs. I do really like over easy or sunny side up eggs, and I like my scrambled eggs soft.

    reCaptcha: Exacta pushtu.
    I’m a fan of the East German Exakta camera, which was labeled “Exacta” in some markets. I wonder if this text is referring to that. Sometimes I’ve wondered what book I’m assisting in transcribing, but never quite so much as today.

    posted by Dave on 12-9-2009 at 12:50 pm

  2. runny egg yolk tastes like snot to me

    posted by ellen on 12-9-2009 at 2:44 pm

  3. I am Polish, and there was a treat we made with raw egg yolk. My dad would take 2 eggs, seprate the yolk out into a cup add some sugar, a splash of vanilla and some coco powder and just beat that like crazy by hand until it was smooth and creamy. Let me tell, that stuff is so good. And it makes for great childhood memories.

    posted by Katie on 12-9-2009 at 3:02 pm

  4. That sounds delicious, Katie. I’m going to have to try that out one day.

    posted by nikki on 12-9-2009 at 3:28 pm

  5. Yuck!! Who eats snot!

    posted by julio iglesias on 12-9-2009 at 3:59 pm

  6. Ellen, better to eat an egg that tastes like snot than to eat snot that tastes like an egg. :-)

    Oh, no, you didn’t!

    posted by hyacinth on 12-9-2009 at 4:06 pm

  7. I’d eat a raw egg if it gave the the ability to wrestle and fight like a true luchador.

    posted by Admiral Byrd on 12-9-2009 at 4:33 pm

  8. Scallions, Chinese barbecue sauce, soy sauce, 1 raw egg.

    The best sauce for Chinese hot pot.

    posted by shadydentist on 12-9-2009 at 8:50 pm

  9. Everywhere in the world except America doesn’t seem to care – we just don’t eat them because they taste disgusting :P

    Could this maybe be a case of sensationalism becoming ‘fact’?

    posted by Bakedpotatoes on 12-9-2009 at 11:19 pm

  10. Reminds me of that scene in Napoleon Dynamite where the old farmer is ladling out raw eggs lunch punch.

    When I was a teenager I used to egg a raw egg in milk for breakfast. I’d add a drop of vanilla to the concoction. Not my favorite but it got me through a morning of working cattle.

    posted by Lisa on 12-10-2009 at 9:10 am

  11. I’ve eaten raw eggs on a couple of occasions, mostly just to do it. They do taste kind of gross, and the yolk is hard to swallow, but I never got sick from them.

    posted by Bert on 12-10-2009 at 10:58 am

  12. Katie – my grandmonther used to give us something very similar. I’ve never tried it with cocoa tho. She told us that the sugar cooked the egg yolk so we didn’t have to worry about salmonella. I’m not sure if that’s true, but that’s what she said! It could explain why none of us (5 girls) got sick from it.

    posted by Kelly on 12-10-2009 at 5:37 pm

  13. My great grandfather used to take one egg, crack it, drop all but the shell into a glass of water, and drink it – every day. Thought of it still sends shivers down my spine.

    posted by Anaximander on 12-10-2009 at 7:38 pm

Comment

commenting policy