| HN Mirror

Indeed, US shell eggs aren't pasteurized unless they're sold as such, and few are. Also, our chickens aren't usually innoculated against (or preemptively treated with antibiotics) for salmonella, etc. as they are in some places (which is generally why US water-chilled chickens have something like a 1 in 4 chance of having enough salmonella to sicken you, yet you can eat raw chicken as confidently as you can raw beef in some countries— it's not because their poultry industry is cleaner or some other BS folk explanation.) And while the acid usually stops it from reproducing, there's not a snowball's chance in hell you're making mayo acidic enough to actually kill it, and that stuff can survive for months in wet environments.

That said, I've made mayonnaise with unpasteurized US shell eggs literally thousands of times, tasting every time, and eaten it at restaurants hundreds of times. What anyone considers "safe" is relative. Fine dining restaurants across the globe sell millions of portions of it per day, as they do beef tartare, carpaccio, sashimi, French style buttercream and meringue, raw oysters, clams, flip cocktails, and zillions of other 'unsafe' things. US restaurants must sell tens of millions of runny-yolk eggs, and millions of Hamburgers not brought to 145 degrees internally.

They don't do so entirely without incident, but it's well within many people's risk tolerance threshold. Surveillance for outbreaks of serious strains (eg Salmonella Heidelberg, E. Coli OH157, etc) is pretty good— people usually seek medical treatment when the serious symptoms start, most GPs and emergency medicine practiciners are pretty good at knowing when they need to test, and epidemiologists do follow up before they even hit the requisite 3 cases to be considered an outbreak.