Enlarge By Justin Sullivan, Getty Images Lupe Mercado cracks eggs into a pan as he prepares breakfast for customers at Lundy's Home Cooking in San Rafael, Calif. HOW TO CHECK EGGS HOW TO CHECK EGGS Eggs affected by the recall are sold under the following brands: Albertson, Boomsma's, Dutch Farms, Farm Fresh, Hillandale, Kemps, Lucerne, Lund, Mountain Dairy, Ralph's, Shoreland, Sunshine and Trafficanda. The eggs are in cartons from plant numbers 1026, 1413 and 1946, with dates ranging from 136 to 225. Dates and codes can be found stamped on the end of the egg carton. The plant number begins with P, then the number. The date follows the plant number. For example: P-1946 223. No more sunny side up. No more eggs Benedict. No more almost-set scrambled eggs. After of one of the largest egg recalls on record, critics say the egg industry is resorting to the worst tactic of all: blaming the victim. More than 1,400 illnesses now appear to be tied to an outbreak of salmonella enteritidis definitively linked to eggs produced on two Iowa farms. "Consumers that were sickened reportedly all ate eggs that were not properly or thoroughly cooked. Eggs need to be cooked so that the whites and yolks are firm (not runny), which should kill any bacteria," says Mitch Head, spokesman for the United Egg Producers. The message seems to be that anyone who eats them otherwise should be aware they're eating the food-safety equivalent of steak tartare, a dish of raw, seasoned, minced beef first popularized in France. "Some people may not think of an egg as you would ground beef, but they need to start," says Krista Eberle of the United Egg Producers' Egg Safety Center. "It may sound harsh, and I don't mean it to sound that way. But all the responsibility cannot be placed on the farmer. Somewhere along the line, consumers have to be responsible for what they put in their bodies." Consumers who don't cook their eggs all the way through "are taking a risk on themselves," she says. SALMONELLA HUNT: Focus on feed sources in egg recall HINTS OF PROBLEM: Public alerts on egg risk delayed Q&A: What you need to know about egg recall Last week in a series of morning TV interviews, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told consumers that they should reject over-easy eggs and avoid "runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast." This isn't sitting well with food-safety advocates. "Telling me that, basically, 'You didn't cook it right' — it's just offensive," says Nancy Donley, board president of Safe Tables Our Priority, or S.T.O.P., a food-safety consumer group. "The problem isn't how consumers are preparing the food. The problem is that the food is contaminated," she says. "They keep trying to push the responsibility onto consumers. They're just not taking their own responsibility." Be specific If consumers are really being held accountable as the last line of defense in the food-safety farm-to-fork line, then the egg industry needs to be explicit about it, says Carol Tucker-Foreman, who was an assistant secretary of Agriculture under President Carter and who has worked on food policy at Consumer Federation of America for decades. "Should egg cartons be required to carry a message that says: 'Warning — to protect your health and the health of those in your household, you should assume that these eggs are contaminated with salmonella enteritidis and must be handled carefully in order to avoid possible illness'?" she asks. People who study food safety say the whole idea is wrong simply because it doesn't get at the real danger: cross-contamination. If indeed eggs now need to be treated "like hazardous waste," says Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University, then the issue isn't so much the egg on the plate as the egg in the bowl, on the counter and on the stove. "You know, when you're making scrambled eggs and egg ends up on the counter?" he says. His team at K-State has spent hundreds of hours videotaping home cooks working in kitchens. What the researchers found is that when people use eggs in cooking, raw egg ends up all over the place, on hands, dish towels, utensils, the stove, everywhere. People are basically "delusional at how good they are at handling food," he says. Which isn't to say the message is new that raw eggs are potentially hazardous. Restaurant chains have been aware of the danger for years. Not that they've stopped serving what now should be called undercooked eggs. Nor have all the enticing photos of sunny-side-up eggs disappeared from their menus. But they do warn people. At IHOP, all egg dishes that can come undercooked are marked with an asterisk. A note at the bottom of the menu says "Notice: Items marked with an * may be cooked to order. Consuming raw or undercooked meat or eggs may increase your risk of food-borne illness." At Denny's, the wording is "Eggs served over easy, poached, sunny side up or soft boiled may be undercooked and will only be served upon the consumer's request." And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long advised consumers that "Consumption of raw or undercooked eggs should be avoided, especially by young children, elderly persons, and persons with weakened immune systems or debilitating illness." So what's a fully cooked egg? For egg whites, it means getting them to between 145 and 149 degrees, Eberle says. For yolks, it's between 148 and 149. EGG CRISIS: Interest up in food-safety bill A TABLE NEAR YOU: Eggs from Iowa farms YOUR MONEY: Amid egg recall, prices rise However, it's very difficult for consumers to know exactly what temperature they're getting their eggs to, especially when home stove temperatures vary so much, Eberle says. Egg standards It is possible to get an egg to a temperature that thoroughly kills the bacteria without hard-boiling it. That's exactly what's done with pasteurized eggs. These eggs are heated in a water bath to exactly 140 degrees and held there for 3½ minutes. The bacteria are killed, but the egg doesn't cook, she says. But while those eggs may be safe, and still liquid, they're not quite up to the standards of Francisco Migoya, a chef and professor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. He says he might use them for hollandaise sauce or a sponge cake, but not where the full egg taste is key, such as in scrambled eggs. "Something happens in them that the flavor, the texture, transforms. It doesn't coagulate as well." For the Apple Pie Bakery Café he runs on the school's campus, he goes through 90 flats of 30 eggs a day. He knows the farmer where the eggs come from personally and is certain of their safety. If he weren't, he simply wouldn't make certain dishes, he says. "I would rather be a place that just makes really good scrambled eggs or a fantastic egg salad than a place that makes really bad eggs Benedict." For home cooks, the message isn't coming as a huge surprise, says Kathleen Purvis, food editor at The Charlotte Observer. "The cooks I hear from are strongly aware of the potential danger," she says. But that doesn't mean they're going along with the program. She's "also hearing a backlash from cooks when we do include warnings, almost a defiance about taking any precautions," she says. It's the same when their recipes insist the food be refrigerated quickly. 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