eli5: How is raw egg dangerous to eat (in America at least) but runny egg yolk is perfectly fine?
In: Biology
The premise is wrong. It’s not perfectly fine. If you go to any restaurant that serves eggs benedict, etc., you will find a warning on the menu that says there are risks to undercooked eggs.
That said, risk is a sliding scale. There is not a binary “100% safe” vs “100% dangerous”.
Your risk of foodborne illness from eating a single raw egg is quite low, but not zero. Let’s say it’s 1% chance of getting an illness (it’s actually much lower, but this is a simple number to look at.) Even the odds of getting it from a fully hard-boiled egg is not zero, but it’s much lower, perhaps 0.001%.
Partial cooking *reduces* that risk. There’s no single point where the risk jumps from 1% to 0%. Rather, at some amount of cooking it’s 0.7%. At some amount it’s 0.5%. At some amount it’s 0.3%, 0.1%, 0.01%, etc. It’s not a linear process, so you can’t just say “half cooked means half risk”, but there is some effect from partial cooking.
But ultimately, most of the runny-egg-yolk dishes are simply accepting the risk.
Earlier I said 1% as an example. The actual current estimate of is 1 in 20,000 eggs carrying salmonella, which translates to a 0.005% risk per egg. The average person eats about 300 eggs a year. If you ate *every egg* raw, that would come out to about a 1.5% risk per year of getting salmonella. On average, every person would get salmonella once every 67 years.
Of course those are averages (meaning some people will get “unlucky”) and we’re relatively risk averse. Most people wouldn’t actually want a 1% chance per year of getting salmonella. Still, it means that occasional runny or raw eggs aren’t an incredible risk; they rank *extremely* low on the list of “risky activities”.
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