Almost everything in a well-built store cupboard has already been through a kill step. Tins were sterilised in the can. Pasta was dried. Rice was milled and dried. Flour was not. It was grown in a field, harvested and ground, and nothing in that sequence is designed to kill bacteria.
The Centers for Disease Control put it plainly:
Most flour is raw. That means it hasn’t been treated to kill germs that cause food poisoning, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Salmonella.
Source: CDC, Raw Flour and Dough
And the Food Standards Agency, on the UK picture specifically:
Food poisoning bacteria have been found in flour and pastry products in the UK, and there are examples from other countries where similar products have been linked to outbreaks of illness.
Source: Food Standards Agency, Handling flour and flour products safely
The advice
The FSA’s instruction is short:
Do not eat or taste uncooked flour or flour products, such as pastry, cookie dough, pizza dough and batter, such as cake mix, unless labelling indicates they are ready to eat.
What removes the risk is heat, and only heat:
Germs are killed only when flour is baked or cooked.
Source: CDC, Raw Flour and Dough
So the flatbread is fine. The dough on the spoon is the problem.
This has nothing to do with the date on the bag
This is the part worth holding on to, because it runs against the instinct.
Flour has two clocks and they are unrelated. One is quality: it goes stale and eventually rancid, which is covered in keeping oil and flour alive. The other is this page, and it is not a clock at all. A bag of flour is no more likely to carry Salmonella on the day it expires than on the day it was milled, because nothing about sitting in a cupboard either creates the hazard or removes it.
Which means the two mistakes people make are opposite ones: treating in-date flour as though it were sterile, and treating out-of-date flour as though it were dangerous. The first is the one that causes illness.
Handling
The FSA’s hygiene advice treats flour the way you would treat raw meat, and for the same reason:
Wash hands thoroughly with soap and warm water before and after handling flour, uncooked pastry, or dough
clean all surfaces properly - wash bowls, utensils, and surfaces with warm, soapy water or your usual surface cleaner
Keep flour and flour mixes (e.g. bread or cake mix) in a sealed bag or container - flour can spread easily and contaminate other foods
That last one does double duty. A sealed container is also what keeps flour dry and keeps insects out, so the storage that protects the flour is the same storage that stops it contaminating everything around it.
This matters more away from a kitchen. A van, an awning or a camp table gives you less water, fewer surfaces and nowhere good to put a bowl of dough down. If you are making flatbread on a trip, think about where your hands go between mixing and eating, because that is the step a kitchen usually handles for you without being asked.
Who should be most careful
It is particularly important for vulnerable people, such as young children, those with compromised immune systems and older people, to follow this advice because their immune system may not be able to fight off infections as easily.
Source: Food Standards Agency, Handling flour and flour products safely
Young children are worth naming twice, because the raw dough spoon is traditionally handed to them.
How common is this, really?
Not very. A 2024 UKHSA survey of UK flour products found the incidence low, which is why this is a “do not taste the dough” page and not a “do not keep flour” page. Flour is an excellent thing to have in a pantry and every flatbread on this site depends on it.
But low incidence and zero incidence are different numbers, the cost of complying is nothing at all, and the people most likely to eat raw dough are the people least able to cope with the consequences.