Unruffled by It All : Breakfast Bunch Shrugs at News That Illnesses Tied to Eggs Have Soared

Egg lovers are a hard-boiled bunch.

That’s why none of them were scrambling Tuesday to find something else for breakfast as health officials disclosed that an outbreak of salmonella contamination has been detected in raw eggs in Los Angeles and four other Southern California counties.

Authorities warned that illness spread by eggs has soared 900% in Los Angeles County and 1,782% in Orange County in the past five years. They urged food handlers and consumers to take extra precautions when cooking eggs.

But the breakfast crowd--digesting the bad news in the morning paper over plates of steaming omelets and eggs over easy--were wondering whether such warnings are all they’re cracked up to be.

“You don’t know what to believe--you read caffeine causes cancer and a few months later you read it doesn’t,” shrugged Pearl Hunt as she put down the paper and polished off an order of fried eggs at T-Bow’s, an egg-specialty breakfast restaurant in Canoga Park.

Indeed, the list of foods that recent government reports have fingered as potentially harmful is longer than the T-Bow’s menu itself.

Hamburger meat, hot-dogs, chicken, fish, milk, soft cheese, oysters and deli items have been singled out. So have pesticide-sprayed vegetables, pork, sliced cantaloupe, margarine and decaffeinated coffee.

“It seems to me the experts are crying wolf a lot too much,” chimed in Joe Hunt, a retired financial officer from West Hills who was living dangerously himself--eating a heaping order of hash browns and sausage.

“After all, like the guy said, life itself is a terminal illness.”

T-Bow’s owner Tom Chung nodded in agreement. His best seller is a $5.10 omelet called Eggs Golden Buck that features a cheese hollandaise sauce--but not the raw egg-based hollandaise that health officials warned is risky.

“What’s left that’s ‘safe’ to eat? Nothing,” Chung said.

The attitude was the same at the trendy Ocean Park Omelette Parlor in Santa Monica, where cooks have hatched $5.95 egg dishes with names like the Schwarzenegger, Rent Control and B-1 by the Numbers.

“We go through 800 dozen eggs a week,” boasted Robert Hausenbauer. “We do killer weekends.”

Well, not literally , he quickly corrected himself. “We’ve never had a problem with contamination,” he said. “We keep our eggs at 40 degrees and everything’s always clean. People know where to eat: where it’s clean.”

Out on the restaurant’s back patio, flight attendants Greta Fosse and Didi Lucas of Marina del Rey were nibbling at fruit-garnished plates of fried and scrambled eggs, respectively.

Fosse was glad to get the warning about the salmonella outbreak. Lucas wasn’t so sure.

“They go overboard with these things--everything causes cancer, everything I eat is going to give me a disease,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Across the patio, film production executive Max Sokolov of Santa Monica confessed to being more worried about cholesterol in his eggs over medium than salmonella bacteria.

“They say four eggs a week are OK,” he said. “I’m counting--I’ve got two here.”

At the next table over, Johnnie Harrison, a phone company administrator from Sacramento, was finishing her spinach omelet. “We’re always being told this will do this to you, that will do that to you,” she said. “No, I’m not going to stop eating.”

Communications company executive Kermit Woodson of West Los Angeles was eating a mushroom omelet. He said he was thankful for the government warnings--although this one “won’t affect my eating habits.”

In their advisory, health officials urged consumers to avoid eggs that are cracked and cooking surfaces and utensils that are dirty. Shoppers buying eggs for use at home Tuesday said those are common-sense precautions that they already take.

“We always keep things neat in the kitchen,” said Temple City auto mechanic Jesus Montes as he carefully placed a carton of Grade AA Large eggs in his cart at a Lucky supermarket in San Gabriel.

Added his wife, Sylvia, a teacher’s aide: “I think the government puts out too many warnings. You have to eat.”

At a Ralphs in South Pasadena, Zora Feran closely checked the carton she was buying for cracked shells. “I cook my eggs thoroughly. I try to be careful. But I take things with a grain of salt,” she said of food danger lists.

Back at T-Bow’s, meantime, Eleuterio E. Rodriguez was ready to take things with a few grains of bicarbonate of soda.

“Right now I’ve got stomach problems,” he said as he cut carefully into the stack of strawberry pancakes he had ordered. “I’m going to the doctor today, in fact.”

Rodriguez, a retired Lockheed tool designer, said he thinks he knows what caused his upset stomach.

“I think it might have been the eggs in some potato salad I ate the other day,” he said.