Hi - Harold McGee is a well-respected baking science writer, and we appreciate your link to this article. Yes, it's true, during the process of making the starter/bread certain bacteria form, and they can be harmful if you ingest them - so you wouldn't want to sample the raw dough, any more than you'd want to taste dough made with raw eggs, for fear of salmonella. Thankfully, the toxins produced by the bacteria are inactivated when the bread bakes, so you don't need to fear enjoying your baked salt-rising bread. As McGee notes, there are no known cases of illness caused by eating salt-rising bread – so, as long as you don't sample the starter or raw dough, you should be fine. Thanks for posting here, though; as a result, I'm going to add a note to the recipe about tasting only the baked bread, not the raw dough or starter. Enjoy - PJH

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