10 Foods That Food Safety Experts Never Eat

Ask someone who investigates foodborne illness for a living what they won't put on their plate, and the list is shorter—and stranger—than you'd expect.

It's not that these experts live in fear. Most will tell you that all food carries some risk, and the real skill is deciding which risks are worth taking. Frank Yiannas, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s former deputy commissioner for food policy and response, says he doesn't think of foods as simply "good" or "bad." Instead, "I approach everything with what I would say is a quantitative risk assessment," he says. "I'm calculated."

Still, after decades of investigating outbreaks—and, in some cases, having their own lives forever changed by foodborne illness—these experts have each decided a handful of foods simply aren't worth the gamble. Some of their no-go items are predictable; others might be sitting in your fridge right now. Here’s what came up again and again.

Raw milk and raw-milk cheese

There's almost no debate about this one. "It's ridiculous," says Bill Marler, a food-safety lawyer who has spent decades suing companies over outbreaks. He says he has represented families of children who have died or suffered kidney damage and neurological complications after foodborne illness linked to raw milk, and to him, the risk simply isn't worth it. It’s especially hard to justify when there's a safe alternative. “You have such a great thing called pasteurization,” he says. 

"It’s very risky," says Barbara Kowalcyk, director of the Institute of Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University, who avoids raw milk and cheeses made from it. "We've known that for decades." 

Kowalcyk knows the stakes of food safety in a deeply personal way. In 2001, she lost her young son to complications from a foodborne E. coli infection—a tragedy that led her to leave a career in pharmaceutical research and devote her life to food safety. (She believes her son’s illness was caused by tainted ground beef in a hamburger he’d eaten.)

Cantaloupe

Ask Darin Detwiler to name some of the riskiest produce in the grocery store, and he doesn't hesitate: cantaloupe. "You cannot adequately clean the outside of the cantaloupe," says Detwiler, an associate teaching professor of food policy at Northeastern University and author of Food Safety: Past, Present, and Predictions. Once you run a knife through the rough rind, he says, you drag whatever's on the surface straight into the flesh.

If you love it anyway, his rule is to cut it and eat it right away—never let cut melon sit out for more than two hours. And he has one warning sign to watch for: cut melon that's been sitting too long can develop what looks like a dusting of powdered sugar on the surface. It isn't sugar. "That’s when the pathogens have grown so much you can actually see them," he says. He skips the fruit entirely. For Detwiler, some food risks simply aren't worth taking. After losing his young son in the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak, he devoted his career to food safety.

Raw oysters and shellfish

Raw oysters show up on a lot of experts' no-go lists. Shellfish are filter feeders, Marler explains—they pull water through their bodies, and "anything in the water that's contaminated, they suck it into their bodies." If the water is contaminated, there's a good chance your oyster is, too.

Detwiler ranks oysters among his personal top three foods to avoid. (Marler does, too.) Beyond the contaminated water, Detwiler says, they're linked to frequent illness outbreaks and can be notoriously difficult to trace back to their source. 

Sushi rolls

Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician and president of Parasites Without Borders, doesn't swear off sushi entirely. He does eat it—but only after inspecting it. Some fish parasites are large enough to spot with the naked eye: thin, reddish, thread-like worms visible in a pale piece of fish. "If you Google 'fish with parasite,' you'll probably lose your appetite," he says. He examines each piece before eating it and skips rolls altogether. "I'm not gonna [eat] the roll with something hidden in there," he says.

Undercooked pork

Jill Roberts, a molecular epidemiologist and professor at the University of South Florida College of Public Health, says pork is one meat she approaches with extra caution. She avoids thick cuts like pork tenderloin because they're harder to cook all the way through. "All I can see is Toxoplasma," she says. The parasite, which can also be spread through cat feces, has increasingly been linked to undercooked pork. "I'm just out on that one."

Sprouts

Raw sprouts are another easy pass for Kowalcyk. They've been linked to a long string of foodborne illness outbreaks, she says, "and there's really no good way to clean them." That's because contamination often starts before the sprouts are even grown: Bacteria can be present on the seeds themselves, and the warm, humid conditions needed for sprouting are also ideal for helping those bacteria multiply. Simply rinsing them under water isn't enough to reliably remove them. Cooking would make them safer—but then, she points out, you've lost the crunch that made them appealing in the first place. 

Pre-cut fruits and vegetables

Pre-cut fruits and vegetables are another easy pass. The convenience of a tub of pre-sliced melon or a bag of shredded carrots isn't worth giving up control over how your food is handled, Marler says. "You don't know how long it's been sitting around, or whether the knife, the cutting surface, or the hands that touched it were clean," he says.

Kowalcyk feels the same way. She'd rather buy produce whole and cut it herself than trust someone else to do it.

Raw eggs

Eggs are far safer today than they were 20 years ago, Marler notes—but he still won't eat them raw. That means no tasting cookie dough made with raw eggs, no licking brownie batter off the beaters, and no homemade Caesar dressing made with uncooked yolks. Most eggs sold in grocery stores aren't pasteurized, he notes, so if a recipe calls for raw eggs, he'd rather use pasteurized ones—or skip it altogether.