I follow Seasoned Advice on the Stack Exchange network, and find it invaluable for questions about vintage cooking. However, it is also occasionally very disheartening. The feed is filled with questions like The minced meat fell down the ground! Is it safe?

Well, if you eat it raw, it probably isn’t. That has nothing to do with whether it fell on the ground or not. But it’s hard to blame people for worrying over—almost literally—spilt milk when you’ve got a news media and fear culture that feeds off of such fears and creates as much fear as it can, even—especially—where joy and laughter abound.

Back in December, for example, a group of scientists “found” that bacteria transfer takes place very quickly, “thus debunking the five-second rule once and for all.”

It’s the sort of experiment only an autist who doesn’t understand people could perform, and only a finger nanny opposed to all fun could promote. It debunks absolutely nothing, because it completely misunderstands what it means when someone invokes the five-second rule. The five-second rule (or ten-second rule, or whatever) is a joke with a very serious meaning. No one believes that if you drop something on the floor it’s not going to be contaminated as long as you pick it up within five seconds. That isn’t what the five-second rule is about.

Okay, maybe not this floor. (For the record, I enjoy black licorice, or anything flavored with aniseed.)

If you drop a favorite food on the floor, those five seconds stretch forever. No sane person will throw out their favorite cookie because it fell on a clean dining room floor. If you drop a disliked food, on the other hand, those five seconds pass within a nanosecond.

“Whoops! Can’t eat that black licorice. It fell right into the garbage can, all on its own!”

The five-second rule is a recognition that life comes before safety. The decision to eat comes before the invocation of the rule. The rule is a joke, invoked regardless of how long the item has been on the floor once the decision has been made. It’s a recognition that everything is contaminated, and the question of whether to eat it is a compromise between how contaminated it is and how enjoyable it is.

It’s all a tradeoff.

I hate even writing about this. It is just begging the universe for a bout of irony. But it’s too important to let go. Life is a tradeoff.

Mike Rowe has a saying, Safety Third, which I’ll let him describe, but the encroaching takeover of all aspects of life by a safety-over-all mindset is dangerously unsafe. We are killing people with safety-first rules that do not take consequences into account. From Vision Zero blocking the passage of emergency vehicles to social distancing blocking people from health care to government regulators telling manufacturers to stop testing on people outside the average the harridans of safety are literally killing people. It’s the horror movie version of Benjamin Franklin’s maximum about liberty and safety. Those would would give up joy to purchase a little temporary safety, will lose both joy and safety.

I find it both amazing and frightening watching our national paranoia take over the kitchen. The home should be a respite from fear, and the kitchen the happiest place in the home.

I was recently in a discussion about eggs, and the consensus was, if they’re left out for an hour, toss them.

Eggs.

I grew up in a very rural area. Not only did my parents buy eggs that had been sitting out in people’s front yard all morning, when they did buy eggs from the grocery story it took an hour to get home. That’s not counting visiting friends and family. The choice isn’t between safety and dying. The choice is between safety and life. We’re being told to live a life of imprisonment and slavery in order to add a tiny percentage to our chances of survival.

It’s gotten so bad you’ve got people telling 89-year-old chefs that they’re going to die unless they acquiesce to modern kitchen paranoia. Here’s a comment I saw recently under a Jacques Pépin video for “a favorite chicken recipe from my hometown in France. I hope you cook this with your family and friends this weekend.”

I love Jacque, but as I watch the video I see him touching the raw chicken and then dip his hand into the salt well, as many chefs do. Not a safe practice.

The guy’s been cooking for how many decades? Three quarters of a century. He’s still alive, and still happy. It’s possible he knows something about ingredients and kitchen safety that you’re missing.

I suspect the real problem is that he really is so damn happy in all of his videos. More than anyone since Eddie Doucette, Pépin makes cooking fun. To the harridans of safety, fun is dangerous on its own.

Sour milk is another example. Like marijuana (and like eggs, for that matter) the cry goes out that today’s sour milk is not the same as your hippy grandmother’s. All it does is spoil, it doesn’t sour. Throw it out!

I’ve been eating sour milk my whole life. My mother used sour milk whenever it went bad, from at least the seventies and well into the twenty-first century. She’d literally freeze it for use later if she didn’t have an immediate need for it. I have followed her lead for as long as I’ve been baking. I’ll even substitute sour milk for sweet milk if a baking recipe doesn’t specifically call for sweet milk and I have sour on hand. Sour milk makes most quickbreads and cakes rise better and taste better.

Sour Milk Sugar Cookies

Servings: 48
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Ursuline Rapes
St. Mary’s Altar Society Cookbooks
America’s Bicentennial Cook Book Featuring Favorite Recipes From Hesperia, Michigan

Ingredients

• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup sour milk
• 1 tsp soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 2-½ cups flour

Steps

1. Mix ingredients in order.
2. Drop by large teaspoons onto greased baking sheet.
3. Bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes.

We always got to lick the batter after making cookies or cake. Batter that contained not only raw eggs and sour milk but also raw flour, another modern bugaboo. Undoubtedly it would have been more difficult for our mom to keep making her safety trade off in favor of our happiness if one of us had died. But it was the correct choice.

Most of the time, if not always, the choices that the harridans of safety attempt to force on us in the name of “safety first” are made without any sense of the tradeoffs involved. People who call for vision zero—zero traffic deaths—do so in ways that block emergency vehicles from saving lives. They squeeze bicycles into unsafe and invisible side lanes while thinning the motor vehicle lanes around them, making it more dangerous to cycle both recreationally and with a specific destination in mind. They are literally killing people in their pursuit for safety first. Again, though, it’s all a head fake: like the other targets of the harridans of safety, the vision zero movement is less about safety than a war on human happiness.

A “Belfast cake”, made with Graham flour, eggs, and sour milk. The raw dough is almost as good as the baked muffin.

Raw shortbread dough is almost as good as raw cookie dough.

Milk. Raw eggs. That’s pretty much the sum of the ingredients in this recipe from my mom’s ca. 1960 high school notebook.

Old-fashioned coriander cookies. Sour milk and coriander. Eggs and flour. Always lick the bowl once these are in the oven!

The mandate turning our cars into giant air bags with wheels attached was originally made without any acknowledgement of the dangers that air bags posed to people on either side of average height. The car manufacturers knew and resisted adding airbags beyond making airbags an optional feature. The regulators told them to stop testing on short and tall people. The mandates continue today without any acknowledgement of what we’re losing by diverting so much development from new safety features in favor of an increasingly rube goldberg feature.

A life worth living should always come first. Living it comes second. And only then safety for more of it. A life that isn’t being lived, a life of selfish finger nannying, is not a life that needs prolonging. A life lived well is worthy of sacrifices for more of it. A life of safety first is not.

I will continue to lick the cookie batter. Even when I use sour milk, eggs, and flour to make them. And… I will drink delicious raw egg for breakfast:

Milk Fluff

Servings: 3
Preparation Time: 20 minutes
Kathy Stratton
Mom’s High School Cooking Notebook, 1960

Ingredients

• 1 egg of trusted provenance
• 3-4 tsp sugar
• pinch of salt
• 1-½ cup cold milk
• ½ tsp vanilla
• pinch of nutmeg

Steps

1. Separate egg white and egg yolk into separate bowls half an hour or so ahead of time so that egg whites approach room temperature.
2. Beat egg white slightly.
3. Add 2 teaspoons of the sugar.
4. Beat until almost stiff.
5. Add salt to egg yolk. and beat until thick and lemon-colored, adding remaining sugar while beating.
6. Add cold milk and vanilla slowly, while continuing to beat.
7. Fold in egg white.
8. Pour into glass and garnish with nutmeg.
9. Consider sprinkling pistachios or toasted hazelnut on top as well.