Can I eat soft ice cream when pregnant?
Really, soft ice cream?! I thought that was a mandatory staple of pregnancy – well, okay, maybe just mine.
Anyway, some people have heard of this one and some people are reading this (possibly while eating a Peanut Buster Parfait) and thinking WTF?!
Once again listeria is the fear here.
Listeria monocytogenes has the potential to be present in all raw foods. So really, if you plan to eat during your pregnancy, you run the risk of coming in contact with listeria. It's one of the nastier bacterias and pregnant women are 20 times more likely to become infected than non-pregnant healthy adults. I talk about it a little more in soft cheese.
Here are the two ways you could potentially pick up listeria through soft serve.
One is through contaminated milk but most countries have strict regulations about the commercial sale of milk so it has most likely been pasteurized which would kill most, if not all, of the bacteria.
The second reason they pick on soft-serve is because there is more potential for contamination post-pasteurization than there is with hard ice cream. So, soft-serve ice cream mix is stored and transported at refrigeration temperatures and listeria can survive in that kind of environment. Plus, if it is run through a dirty machine or the jerk ahead of you at a self-serve machine has traces of stuff that would make Purell shudder, then you can pick it up.
Since self-pasteurizing machines have been introduced in the many of the major fast food organizations, the incidence of contamination is relatively uncommon.
The nitty gritty. Yep, it is possible but the risks are still very, very low.
search: listeria in soft serve ice cream
8 Comments
Reader Comments (8)
File this under "thank goodness I didn't know this while pregnant" or "maybe THAT'S what's wrong with the three of them". I swear I would have died without mah weekly Oreo Blizzard ...
This post ups my want for a vanilla with sprinkles or a brownie blizzard... looks like momma's got a stop to make on the way home.
Fingers in my ears! I can't hear you! No way I'm giving up Mr. Softee.
You can take away my freedom, but you cannot take away my 49 cent McDonalds soft serve cone.
When you hear about people getting food poisoning, HOW OFTEN is it "they had a batch of contaminated ice cream", compared with say "the chicken was undercooked at the bbq" or "the restaurant had cockroaches the size of rats"??? I have never, EVER heard of anyone getting food poisoning from eating ice cream. I think the odds must be somewhere close to being struck by a meteorite. Theoretically possible, but I'm not going around wearing a tin hat.
Oh here I actually know something! Only because my husband started out in a food court. They failed one of their health inspections because their soft serve came back with this stuff growing in it. It turns out that when people empty a machine to clean it they sometimes don't want to waste what was left, so they will store it improperly in buckets while they clean the machine and then put it back in. This causes a host of other problems as well. BUT if the place has health inspections a lot and passes them (you can ask if you want to see the reports) then you are safe to eat it... I however am a fan of all these new "frozen yogurt" places this pregnancy! And as a added note I would like to point out that it wasn't my husband refilling the machine with improperly stored materials... he is a huge germ a phobe!
Wow, this is some good info. I didn't know about contamination post-pasteurization from soft serve ice cream. Virginia Beach Cakes
Of course I find this out AFTER the fact. I never crave milkshakes, but while pregnant, I have started. I've had 2 milkshakes in the past 2 weeks & now am super worried about listeria poisoning.