Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for January 24, 2023

I guess Mom didn’t see Rocky.

Don’t think the word “poisoning” threw Calvin off in the slightest.

Calvin: Who’s Sam and Ella?

I always preferred soft cookie dough as a kid. My mom’s cookies were always hard as rocks.

What was the previous nostalgic part of childhood which goes THBPPTH? Certainly not Mom’s home cooking for dinner.

Good moms let you lick the beaters. Great moms turn them off first.

Calvin channeling Bill the Cat in the last panel.

My mom made me drink raw eggs after puncturing them in both ends. I’m still alive

I still eat cookie dough. With raw eggs in it. So far, so good…

Back in the day, eggs seldom had salmonella, but modern farming practices have made it endemic. For years, I would take my chances with raw eggs in my homemade ice cream, until the increasing risk (and my increasing age) made me rethink the recipe. Nowadays, I pasteurize my eggs using a stick immersion sous-vide machine—safe and simple!

Somehow we all survived. And my “Amatxo” knew very well how delicious was the uncooked dough of any dessert…

So what? I like pancake mix and no sickness yet. Must be all the animals around strengthening the immune system.

Some readers have accused Mom of being neglectful and some of them have even accused her of wanting Calvin dead despite the many times she has saved Calvin from killing or harming himself. Today’s strip is another example of Mom’s protective side.

Calvin ask, says please and accepts a no???

In my house, the warning was always “You’ll get WORMS!”

Moms can take all the fun out of being six years old.

And before you ask, no you cannot have any cookies.

Are salmonella eggs cheaper?

I use eggbeaters. Since they’re pasteurized, I figure the risk is even lower.

I have made a summertime meal of a large smoothie with frozen fruit and 2 raw eggs almost daily for many years, and have never gotten sick. I’m 78 and still active.

In a world mostly comprised of packaged cookies, homemade is becoming rarer. But a friend told me that, since she and her hubby started working from home a couple years back, they found time to do more baking and meal prep work and found it a relief from all day office work. So not everything with covid was bad.

I think the point here is we used to let kids eat raw dough now it’s forbidden. Like so many things we enjoyed in the past, they have been “educated” out of us and we forbid our kids the same pleasures we enjoyed.

I wonder if mom has ever had eggnog

Another difference between here and there. Salmonella in eggs is almost nonexistent, but there were 22 cases in December. Livsmedelsverket (Swedish Food Agency) identified the strain and eggs were recalled by all the major distributors and one of the suppliers when the strain was traced to a certain stall of ‘free range indoors’ hens.

“I love it before it’s cooked”! Do you mean that you’ve had some before, Calvin?

Salmonella can get on the shells of eggs when birds lay eggs or when the eggs touch bird droppings (poop) after being laid. This is not a problem for commercial eggs (for example, eggs you buy at the grocery store) because companies wash eggs before they reach stores.

Salmonella also can contaminate the egg’s contents while it is forming inside the chicken before shells are formed. Today, a lot fewer egg-laying hens have this problem than during the 1980s and 1990s, so eggs are safer. But some eggs are still contaminated with Salmonella. 1 in 20,000. .005% chance o getting a salmonella egg.

Just yesterday I had the pleasure of scraping the bowl of my wife’s wonderful chocolate chip cookie batter. She’s promised to make another batch today. The batter I don’t eat (and doesn’t get cooked) will be frozen so I can have more cookies (or batter) later.

This is a good week!

The encouraging part is he ASKED first.

He should have said. Can I eat some and then go sun bathe outside…Oh I forgot Calvin would never ask to bathe!

And now you can go to Kroger and buy containers of Chocolate Chip Cookie dough MADE to be eaten with a spoon. Go figure…

I had a friend when I was a child whose mother would give hm raw Hamburg when she was making supper

I used to be allowed to scrape the bowl when my mother made cake. Then she tried a newfangled thing “cake mix”. Scraping that bowl was definitely not allowed because she didn’t know what was in it!

Psht. I used to make chocolate chip cookie dough and skip the baking, just eat it raw. Now I just buy the pre-made dough. Saves a few steps.

It was going to be nostalgic anyway.

Childhood memories: Firecrackers, matches, water balloons, skinned knees, etc. All the good stuff.

Oh, this will sound snarky, but city folks are the only ones who fret about ingesting raw egg and raw milk. Those of us raised on country farms know better.

Wow! I must have died from that; repeatedly… 65 years ago.

I remember all of us kids eating raw cookie dough and even licking beater after the cake batter has been poured into the baking pans

I’ve never heard of chocolate chip cookie dough being called batter.

For all the people who say “we kids used to eat uncooked things all the time and we were fine”: We also used to think that asbestos was harmless.

Didn’t Sal Monella run that Tocco truck a few years back?

I eat raw fresh eggs from my chickens all the time. I’m 72, never got sick from them. We are the only country that pasteurizes eggs, which destroys the near invisible coating called the “bloom” or “cuticle” on the shell, that protects it from rotting and bacteria. In fact most countries never refrigerate their eggs and they don’t have the salmonella problem we have in America. I leave my fresh eggs out for over a week they are fine at room temperature. I think our country and the liberal mind set of germ phobia is doing more damage than good.

I remember a mall restaurant chain called “Orange Julius.” Back in the ‘70s, you could pay a little extra and have a raw egg blended in with it.

Our mom let us lick the cookie batter with the raw egg and we never got sick. That only means we were lucky, not that the risk wasn’t there. I’m glad to be living in more enlightened times.

It used to be that chicken eggs were so sterile that they were used as a culture medium to grow pure strains of bacteria. Thanks to the overuse of antibiotics and battery chicken raising, some of the eggs come out of the chicken already infected with salmonella. It is really not safe to eat anything with raw eggs in it; it’s not just Mom being fussy.

That’s the price you pay for living in America Calvin. In europe the vaccinate their chickens to combat against salmonella and there it is illegal to sell washed eggs. There eggs are left out at room temperature with no issue.

For the record – I have been eating raw chocolate chip cookie dough for over 60 years now, and it has never made me sick. A bellyache from eating too, much, sure – but never actually sick.

And the next time we make a batch, I fully intend to extend my streak.

I still eat raw cookie dough and I am fairly old now….haven’t suffered from it, as far as I can tell….

My kids and I have eaten raw cookie dough for years and have never gotten salmonella. The odds against it have to be enormous.

Totally agree with Calvin. I’ve eaten raw cookie dough a gazillion times.

If I’m going to bake anything, it’ll be cheesecake

This is one of our favorite C&H — thbppth indeed.

All the things we did as kids ,now they say are dangerous. How did all the kids survive?

Does cookie dough actually taste good before it’s baked?

Salmonella? Wasn’t she Cinder’s sister?

I quoted this one to my mum so much I’m sure she got so sick of it. :P

My mom fed us eggnog back in the 70’s. It was made with raw eggs, sugar, vanilla and milk. No one ever got sick from drinking it.

Sounds like a follow-up to “Scientific Progress Goes Boink.”

This myth comes from ages ago when people used unclean and old eggs for cooking. This is VERY rare now days. Cookie dough is great !!

Calvin yearns for the ‘salmonella experience’!!!

yeah… like polio (sigh)

Ah, remember the good ol’ days before Cigarettes caused cancer……

My store sells a product called Edible Cookie Dough, safe for eating directly but not formulated to be able to be baked into cookies

Way back when my son was in 6th grade, some 15+ years ago, he found a recipe for ‘cookie dough batter’ that contained no eggs. The purpose was for those who wanted to eat cookie dough and not have to worry. Can’t tell you how many times he made that, ate it, and loved it.

You can buy chocolate chip cookie dough that says “safe to eat raw” right on the package. I thought that was awesome. And, I ate it.

Every time I make cookies %25 of it gets eaten in the batter form.

And that would be bad, why? Then you could get the dog you both wanted.

Just wait till 2020 hits, bud

Over the years, I’ve eaten at least a gallon of raw cookie/cake dough and have never been ill; fat but not ill.

eat it all the time

I’ve eaten raw cookie dough my entire 71 years and never gotten sick. Just don’t use eggs that come with cracks in them. Easy-peasy.

I’ve had plenty of raw eggs. I make at least one batch of EggNog at the holidays and that contains a dozen raw eggs. Of course it also has Brandy.

This was how I learned about the risk of salmonella poisoning! Funny thing; I brought up this particular strip to a friend a couple days ago at a convention!

I have the third panel of this trimmed for a FB profile icon I sometimes rotate in. I think I need to go change it to this now.

The International Association for Food Protection had Five labs test 32,220 batches of flour and found E. coli in one sample, for an incidence rate of 0.003 percent.

I haven’t found a single documented case of anyone dying from eating cookie dough.

So, I think I will take my chances, since I have eaten it since the 1950s without a problem.