We hate to be the ones to tell you this, but you have to stop eating raw cookie dough

What’s that famous Nabokov quote about raw chocolate chip cookie dough? Oh, yes:

Cookie dough, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Cook-ie-dough: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Coo. Kee. Do.

Truly, eating raw cookie dough straight out of the bowl is one of life’s greatest joys. And now the FDA is trying to take it away from us.  The government agency issued a warning earlier this week against eating raw cookie dough. And just in case you’re thinking, “they’re probably talking about raw eggs and I don’t put eggs in my cookie dough SPECIFICALLY so I can eat it raw, suckers!”, well, we have some bad news. The warning is about flour.

Yes, flour.

An outbreak of E.coli has been linked to contaminated flour, which means that seemingly safe pantry staple now needs to be cooked to be safe to eat. General Mills has issued a recall of 10 million pounds of flour. And just to be on the safe side, raw cookie dough — along with brownie batter and cake batter and all the other things that make life delicious and wonderful — is now off-limits. Store-bought products like ice cream containing “raw” cookie dough are actually OK because the dough in those products is heat-treated to kill potential contaminants.

Ah well, if absence makes the heart grow fonder, once this warning is lifted, we can only imagine how sweet that first gooey bite is going to taste. Until then, we’ll keep yearning. And filling the void with cookie dough ice cream.