Why the U.S. Chills Its Eggs and Most of the World Doesn't (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Why the U.S. Chills Its Eggs and Most of the World Doesn't (2014)

npr.org

161 pointslongdefeat214 comments

Because they scrub the protective coating off them, making them much more vulnerable to spoiling. #stopclickbait

Australia only started washing eggs recently, in the last 10-20 years. Before then you could leave eggs on the bench for 2+ weeks with no issues, now they need to be refrigerated if you're going to keep them longer than a couple of weeks. It's silly.

Is that really a clickbait headline? I mean sure it’s phrased as a question, but you can’t just put a whole lede as the headline.

It's a simple question with a simple answer, yet it sounds curious and draws you in. The answer really shouldn't surprise you at all. In fact, you could be forgiven for reading and coming out on the other side of your reading experience asking yourself "why did I read this again?". If that is not clickbait, then what is it?

> really shouldn't surprise you

It did surprise me very much since I don't know much about that field, and the article itself had a lot more curious/useful/new to me info like, quote, "We don't have massive [food safety] issues on either side of the Atlantic. Both methods seem to work" that expanded on the title. I hate clickbait as much as anyone else, but this didn't look like it.

The criteria for clickbait can't be "some people may already know this". Congrats for having all this knowledge before reading the article though.

Also the article says the coating is scraped off, but then the eggs are sprayed with oil to make them non-porous again which I hadn’t heard before

From the article:

> Why go to the trouble of washing eggs? A lot of it has to do with fear of salmonella.

> [...]

> eggs contaminated with salmonella are responsible for about 142,000 illnesses a year in the U.S., according to the Food and Drug Administration

So let me get this straight: back in 2014, despite egg washing being a practice for decades, there were STILL 142,000 people getting ill from them each year?

Sounds like 2014 had some solid data on the fact that it was a pointless practice.

Surely you'd need to know how many people get Salmonella poisoning from non-washed eggs (either historically or elsewhere in the world) to draw this conclusion.

Here in the UK we don't wash our eggs as part of the production process. We have a "British Lion" safety mark on British-produced eggs as part of our food standards. Recently they were declared safe to eat raw even if you're pregnant as there were no cases of salmonella linked to them in 2016.

Germany had 12'000 cases of salmonella in 2016, 14'000 in 2017. USA has 300 Megacitizens, Germany 80. Germany vaccinates the chickens and does not wash or refrigerate eggs in the supermarket.

So, atleast in germany, you're 3 times less likely to get infected by salmonella, relative to the population.

I would however note that there is no reliable statistic on how many of those are due to eggs and how many are from other sources, considering meat and other products can carry it as well.

You can just look towards most of Europe for that data, only a few countries wash their eggs here.

Surely the rest of the world not washing their eggs means that you have those statistics freely available from any number of modern record-keeping nations, like France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and so on and so forth?

What's even more amazing is that we address Salmonella by washing eggs rather than vaccinating hens. In many European countries, all laying hens are vaccinated, and you can make and eat raw eggs in all kinds of great things like chocolate mousse without worrying about Salmonella.

It's genuinely baffling.

EU has a higher salmonella rate than the USA.

Germany (not the EU) has a 3 times lower salmonella rate than the US (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19816018)

Do you have a source for this? It seems to be difficult to get exact numbers on this, but the BBC quotes data (for the UK and for “developed European countries”, whatever that means, so not exactly for the EU, and comparing to North America instead of just the US) that seem to suggest the opposite: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562

Uk, which does this properly, has a vastly lower rate.

In the U.K., from roughly 1995 to 2008, the number of vaccinated chickens went from 0% to 85%, and the rate of Salmonella went down by about 87.5%.

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2013/01/poultry-vaccinations-...

The interviewee in the news report you've mentioned was probably cherry-picking. She said that "the number of laboratory-confirmed cases of illness dropped from more than 18,000 in 1993 to just 459 in 2010", but that 459 figure is most likely an outlier. According to Annual Epidemiological Report for 2016: Salmonellosis (https://ecdc.europa.eu/sites/portal/files/documents/AER_for_...), there were 8K to 10K confirmed Salmonella cases per year in the UK from 2012 to 2016.

On the other hand, according to Galiş et al. (2013), "Control of Salmonella Contamination of Shell Eggs—Preharvest and Postharvest Methods: A Review" (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1541-4337.1...), vaccination of chickens against Salmonella is _banned_ in Ireland. Yet, the country has the second lowest incidence rate of Salmonellosis (5.6-7.1 cases per 10K population over the five-year period 2012-2016, second only to Portugal) among all countries in the EU. In contrast, the incidence rates in the UK over the same period were significantly higher (12-15 cases per 10K).

Why are the Irish figures so low? Perhaps the Irish eat fewer eggs than the others. Perhaps most Salmonella infections are due not to eggs, but to other contaminated foods or poor kitchen hygiene. While vaccination of chickens against Salmonella is effective against egg-based Salmonella infection alone, without a detailed breakdown of numbers, we cannot tell what's its impact on the overall incidence rate.

You can look at the study she's referencing to the interviewer. It's pretty persuasive. Take a look at Figure 1. https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/56/5/705/347767

I'm not saying that the only way to control Salmonella is vaccination, but it is clearly an extremely effective method.

It's not the washing that does anything, it's the fridge - it keeps the salmonella from growing.

Other countries immunize their chickens. In the US only about half the chickens are immunized.

The washing does to something; eggs have a protective layer on the outside. Washing them removes it. With this layer, an egg cannot be invaded by bacteria after it's been laid.

Vaccinating the chickens and keeping the eggs unwashed is basically as much natural protection as you can get from nature, washing them means you have to protect the egg yourself a lot more, otherwise salmonella and other bacteria can infect it.

I'm sorry, but that is just not factually correct.

> With this layer, an egg cannot be invaded by bacteria after it's been laid.

They spray mineral oil, which works just as well. This layer the chicken leaves is just some oil, not magic. You do NOT need to refrigerate washed eggs in the US. You just don't.

Try it if you don't believe me. Take some eggs and leave them out for 2 months - they'll be just fine.

> washing them means you have to protect the egg yourself a lot more, otherwise salmonella and other bacteria can infect it.

See this is not factual either. Salmonella infects the eggs before they are laid, not after. That's why vaccinating the chickens works.

And as I said above, there is no additional protection needed with washed eggs.

Refrigerating eggs in the US is SOLELY to keep salmonella from multiplying inside the eggs. Despite what this article says it is NOT about washing the eggs which is simply done because they have unsightly feces on them, that's all.

This is genuinely incredible to me - with all the problems the US (among others) has with using broad-spectrum treatments to improve animal growth, we can't be bothered to vaccinate them?

Costs money!

Is the vaccine patented?

If not, someone ought to be able to make a big spinning needle-wheel to vaccinate chicks at a rate of 10 per second from a big bucket of vaccine.

If there's a patent, you can bet it'll be billed at a couple of dollars per dose, which is totally infeasable when 1 cent per chick can be the profit margin.

The vaccine costs $0.01 per chicken. And no, that's not a typo. Labor is a bit more, but not much - it's done in bulk by spraying it.

Buy some here: https://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail.html?pgguid=FBE23AC3-EB6...

$41.40 for 5,000 doses.

Actually still sounds quite expensive... Like that's more than the cost of the drinking water or electricity for lighting for the whole life of the chicken...

But that's not how you do cost benefit analysis. If the cost to vaccinate a chicken is one or even several cents per chicken, then you're calculating the price offset based on the total yield of that chicken, i.e. the eggs that chicken produces.

Production chickens have a one day laying cycle, so you get about an egg a day, for about a year before production drops off to less than that. So that's 5 cents on a minimum of 350 eggs (more if the chicken is kept despite production drop-off), which would be a staggeringly irrelevant price increase per egg if vaccination would be legislated into being a mandatory practice.

Which it should be.

Years ago.

Bro, if you think this is click bait then you clearly never looked at buzz feed or listicle websites. Sure there is a simple answer but this is an article explaining the history of it not a quora question...

It's a headline which leads with a question but doesn't give the answer, forcing you to click on it. Is that not the definition of clickbait? I mean sure, it's not as egregious as BuzzFeed et. al. but it still meets the criteria.

This is similar to saying books titled "Why ML is successful for image processing" or "How to meditate in a busy world" (both examples presumably don't exist) are clickbait because they state the question they are answering without the answer. It seems almost irresponsible to boil down an answer as long-winded as that in this article into a few words.

The article delivers on the title. That's good enough for me

Can't we achieve same effect by just washing eggs before consumption?

I always wash the eggs I receive from farm under running water before I cook them into omelette.

I can't recall ever seeing refrigerated eggs in Australia. Where do you find them?

The refrigerator?

I left Australia 8 years ago but the 5 years living there, they were never refrigerated... never seen eggs in fridges :S

This is interesting. Scandinavia is mentioned as another refrigerating part of the world, yet as a Swede, I don't think I've ever seen cold eggs in stores. On the other hand, virtually everyone I know buys room-temperature eggs, get home, and promptly put them in the fridge.

The theory goes - and it may be part urban myth - is that you should not refrigerate eggs if the shops in your country don't. There'll have been no refrigeration at any point in the supply chain. Frost free fridges are extremely dry and will shorten the fresh lifespan of the eggs as the shell isn't perfectly air tight, and supposedly - this may be the part that's urban myth - can also damage the natural protective coating.

Certainly we've never had problems with eggs staying fresh in the cupboard for months, and would never put them in the fridge. Course it's not common to get that old, but we often go past the 2 weeks best before date. First thing to do with a new fridge is throw away the pointless egg tray. :)

At least in Italy it is stamped on the package to refrigerate after purchase.

Ditto in Finland. Eggs are stored on shelves, unrefrigerated.

The eggs from the chickens my wife and I raise on the farm can be stored for about 4 weeks at room temperatures. Probably more, but we usually use the eggs or trade them away long before that.

Putting a six-pack of eggs in the refrigerator is one thing though. If you have larger quantities than that, it's rather unpractical (and unnecessary) to store them in a refrigerator.

Off topic: I think the OTOH idiom is for weighing opposing facts. You aren't doing that here: the lack of store refrigeration and the room temp purchase are equivalent. Being mentioned is the opposite, but that was in a distant clause.

I won't say the usage is definitely wrong (being English, after all), but it struck me as interesting.

I put the blame squarely on my lack of patience for editing on the phone. You're right, of course. I started writing one thing and then changed my mind partway through the sentence.

I'm in Norway: All of the eggs are refrigerated in the stores around here. Oddly enough, I asked my soon-to-be Norwegian spouse about this before I moved here from the US just because I read a similar article.

In Denmark eggs in supermarkets are in fridges with the milk etc., and people usually keep eggs in their fridges at home as well.

Danish supermarkets refrigerate eggs, but the eggs are also unwashed. It's probably the same in Sweden :)

That sounds unusual, unwashed refrigerated eggs collect moisture in the trip form the shop to home that allows some of the pathogens to pass through the shell

Pretty sure they're in open-fronted cooled shelving or refrigerators in every supermarket I visit in Adelaide.

Where are you from? I'm in Perth, maybe we're different to "over east"?

Perth here too, and Coles has a non-refridgerated aisle of eggs at the two Coles stores I usually shop at. I've always kept eggs in the fridge after buying them, though.

Now I'm intrigued how different stores / Woolies / Aldi handle this...

Huh, weird. The Woolies, Coles and IGA near me all have them refridgerated. We don't bother keeping them in the fridge when we get home but that's because a dozen will only last a few days.

Just bought some from Coles.

But at Coles, they're not sold in refrigerated sections. At least the ones I've been to in Melbourne.

Bought free range eggs at Coles yesterday. I still put them in the fridge when I get home out of habit; not sure why now. :)

Edit: Found this article, probably inspired by TFA linked to story. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/should-you-refrigerate-eg...

I stopped refrigerating eggs, when i found out I can make better fried eggs if they're at room temperature. :)

"if you keep your eggs in the fridge, then you should let them come to room temperature before cooking – if you start with a cold egg, then you're more likely to end up overcooking the yolk trying to get the white to set."

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2012/no...

Huh. Now here's news I can use!

Ah. Thanks! That explains so many failed fried eggs.. :)

I'm in Queensland. At the Coles I go to, they are definitely refrigerated. I have been to NSW ones where they aren't. Maybe in Queensland it is policy. That seems plausible.

I live on NSW Central Coast. Woolworths at Gosford has them in the fridge; five minutes down the road at Coles Wyoming, they are not refrigerated.

Perhaps because it’s hotter in Queensland

Some Coles seem to have them in the fridge, though most seem to still be at room temperature. Same at Woolies I think (don't shop there much though)

Woolworths. I believe Coles has them on a normal shelf.

I'm in the US and I don't refrigerate my eggs. I haven't in years. They last for months.

We also are in the US and don't refrigerate. Because, we get a lot of our eggs from our neighbors, who have a dozen hens. Interestingly, my wife is from a farming background and never refrigerates the eggs, and I am from a city background (Canada, actually) and habitually refrigerate my eggs like I was taught to do as a child.

European (German) here. Though I've been traveling to the US a couple of times I've never realized the fact that eggs are washed and refrigerated there. Here in Germany eggs come with a best-before date and an additional date stating when you should put them in the refrigerator. Example for eggs bought in the second half of March: best before April 16 2019, chill from April 10 2019.

I usually put eggs in the fridge once I got them from the grocery store, so they will last a bit longer. I've never run into any issues with this and it seems to be way less energy-intensive.

Thanks for this post: I've always wondered why I don't have a problem with eating eggs from my backyard hens, even after a couple of weeks sitting on my benchtop, whereas the supermarkets always have them chilled (I'm in Oz). I never knew about the thin film layer on the outside!

Honest question: how do you clean your eggs? Chickens are not fastidious about where they poop.

When you have 6-20 hens the issue is a bit different from several hundreds. The nesting box tends to be pretty clean and you put in fresh hay to encourage them to lay the eggs there rather than some hidden part of the yard (a constant risk, and spoiled eggs smells similar to that of a decomposing animal except it seems to continues forever).

They don't tend to poop when laying eggs and usually leave the nest imminently when done, being quite loud and signaling to the rest of the troop. Collecting a newly laid egg becomes a bit of routine, and I get a feeling so is the laying of an egg by the hens.

Working with animals you also do get a bit more used to chicken poop and just deal with it if an egg here and there is not perfectly clean. I tend to wash those before using them in cooking. It is pretty fair trade for getting: "free" eggs, insect management in the garden, weed removal, and naturally enjoyment of having social animals.

As you say, where the chickens lay is always scrupulously clean (--They keep it that way, moreso than us). The boxes are elevated and they go there just to lay (& tend to sleep nearby, but elsewhere). I've never had poo on the eggs: but even if there were, I'd pretty much ignore it.

My parents kept chickens when I was growing up and this is what I remember too, from all the times I was tasked with collecting eggs from the (elevated) boxes.

This. As long as the nest boxes have fresh hay in them and you keep track of any nests (and brooding hens) in the garden, then the eggs rarely need cleaning.

We had one hen who insisted on doing her business in the nest boxes and that obviously ruined the fun. The soup was really nice though. :D

How do you make chickens eat weeds, but not your crops (sorry, I know nothing about farming)?

Its mostly about the size. For rose bushes and berry bushes it is pretty simple. For other things, seeding are kept inside during winter (Swedish climate) so by the time they get planted they are big enough that the chicken leaves them alone. Some plants do need a mesh net like strawberries where the chickens will leave the plants alone but sometimes goes after the fruits. There is also large sized steel meshes for the exceptions where plants are large enough to not be eaten but so small or freshly planted that a chicken that is scratching the soil would ruin the plant.

(The context is our garden around the house, not a professional farm. Can't say anything if this could be used in a larger setting.)

They are not really dirty in a way that requires washing before storing. There sre at worst maybe small feathers sticking to it.

Then you can still wash them right before you use them, if you fear that something could get into the egg when you crack it.

Hens shit out of the same orifice that they lay eggs from. It is called the cloaca. I always imagined that the feculence on my eggs comes not from concerted manure dispersal over them, but from the remnants of past stools.

Now I'm curious. Do you know what a cloaca is and how it is related to eggs?

Are you referring to the passing poo and eggs through the same hole?

"When a hen lays an egg, her uterus turns inside out beyond the cloaca that the egg never touches the nasty stuff."

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/06/chicken-reprod...

I did not know that!

I do...my wife actually has some hens. I don't see how that contradicts my question at all. We end up with eggs that I am not eager to be handling/storing without washing, but apparently the rest of world manages this, so I am curious how.

No contradiction at all. I just thought it would be funny if you were worried about chicken poo and were ignorant about that part of hen anatomy.

Turns out I was the ignorant one, as per benj111's reply below.

Sounds like paranoia to clean them. Never heard of that.

How often and how much exactly is the outer shell touching your food?

Paranoia? Probably.

But we have eggs that have chicken st on them. (Not covered, but a spot here and there is plenty to make me squeamish). I'm not eager to be handling these, nor keeping them around the kitchen, without washing, but apparently the world has figured this out, so I'm honestly curious what they do.

How often do you clean your hands after touching your eggs.

When handling raw meat, I always clean my hands and separate the working surfaces. For eggs, I don't.

I rely on my immunesystem here. I trained it all my life. (I do separate chicken though)

Not the original commenter but at my place we generally don't clean ours... and they are usually not soiled. Making sure we change out the straw in the nesting box regularly helps a lot.

I also crack the egg on a flat surface so the shell doesnt get pushed inwards.

I don't. I simply put the raw egg into a seperate container so I can see if the egg is bad but otherwise, as long as I'm not putting the whole shell into the food, I don't mind (it's not rare that I get eggs form the supermarket with poop and feathers stuck to it)

The eggs we get from our parents' hens we wash before we cook with them and keep them refrigerated along with chicken poo in cardboard egg boxes. Eggs from the store are already washed but we haven't fond any was good as the ones that we get from our parents' hens.

I eat eggs from my parents chickens for my whole live. Some of the eggs have dirt and shit on them, but I don't think I ever cleaned an egg before I opened it. I am still alive and healthy :)

My local supermarket — a Coles — doesn’t refrigerate their eggs. They’re on a steel shelf next to the bread.

I’m slightly curious about how this whole egg washing and storage system works.

Yeah we (Australia) are super inconsistent on this. The same brand eggs, in the same supermarket chain, in neighbouring suburbs, are stored differently. My local Coles they're refrigerated, the suburb over they're not. It makes no sense.

It depends on their source. If they’re washed they need to be refrigerated, and if they’re not they can just hang out at room temp.

It's funny that if you tried to sell US eggs in the UK, they'd be illegal, and the UK eggs would be illegal in the US.

But Japan has the best eggs and you can eat them raw or half-cooked without any fear of salmonella.

UK eggs are safe to eat raw.

The advice warning people to cook them was from the 80s and was rescinded a couple of years ago, thanks in large part to he improvement in conditions and husbandry that the other posts in here are talking about. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41568998

I would also stress that the UK's production is now well over 50% free-range and organic. These concepts are still pretty alien to Japan. If you're only familiar with caged eggs, I would really suggest you get out there and try some other breeds on organic farms.

I cant speak for US eggs, but UK eggs have been safe for decades [1].

This study [2] found salmonella in 13% of Japanese eggs, (although doesn't seem to be supported by [3]).

So I think you need to support your assertion.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-41568998

[2] https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijmicro/2013/463095/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3622169/

There are plenty of countries where you can eat the eggs raw. You just need eggs laid by chickens in a normal environment, rather than from the insanely messed up industrial chicken industry that some western countries have opted for.

You got this mixed up. The reason why you can eat Japanese eggs raw is because they're almost exclusively battery eggs.

Nearly. The reason you can eat them raw is that the vaccinate them. This is orthogonal to whether you battery farm them.

How does industrial chicken rearing change the quality of the eggs such that it's no longer edible raw?

I'm assuming it's because the eggs end up quite dirty, therefore they must be washed, which removes the protective membrane. And perhaps the chickens are more prone to acquiring salmonella.

They feed the chickens concentrates and keep them in locked up in "batteries". Some of them die there and they're not removed immediately. There are plenty of horrid videos on Youtube.

Compare that to a soil growing chickens that scrape around for worms and eat grass, corn, wheat and leftovers from the kitchen. In fact that's the best part: you can feed them most most vegetable leftovers as long as they're fresh. Only the younger ones need to be fed some concentrates until they grow up because they're quite vulnerable to diseases carried by other birds, especially pigeons.

"Some of them die there and they're not removed immediately"

In the US I don't believe you have to remove the dead chickens before introducing a new generation of chickens to the shed.

So salmonella only occurs on factory farms? That’s a nonsense to suggest that. Backyard chickens seem to transmit salmonella at higher rates than factory chickens.

No, but antibiotic resistant Salmonella occurs mostly where chickens are given antibiotics mixed in their daily meals. That's standard pratcice in farms.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/02/561584723/bi...

I didn't say factory farms, but that seems very difficult for some people to understand. I said insanely messed up industrial chicken industry. The kind where you just leave your dead chickens to rot next to your live chickens, where you don't give a shit about disease and contaminants "because we'll clean the eggs later", where you don't maintain a minimal sanitary level because "that just costs money", etc.

You can run a chicken battery with perfectly healthy chickens, plenty of light, hen retirement once their production drops below profitable instead of making them "lay until they drop dead", etc.

I'll bite: why does Japan have the best eggs?

It's all about how they're farmed. Japanese take health and sanitation of chickens very seriously and they constantly do tests. Much more often than you'd see at US farms. US farmers depend on anti-bacterial washings of eggs and antibiotics in chicken feed as the primary defense against salmonella and other bacteria.

Since dishes made with raw eggs are so popular in Japan, they take all these precautions to the max. When I travel to Japan, I have zero worries when I crack a raw egg on top of my ramen, for example. Also, their omelettes are a lot runnier and taste different. I would never do that with US eggs. Also, their yolks are also much more orange/red in color. US eggs are mainly yellow in color.

You can read more here: http://jlec-pr.jp/egg

In Japan you only get 4 for the price of a dozen, and I didn't really notice a difference.

it's funny how folks from different countries throw shade on the ones that treat their eggs differently, as if that is an indication of which country is better. Every few months a thread on Reddit gets this going. Nice to see an article that says that both approaches work about the same.

Don't mistake it for blind nationalism.

I think EU countries are proud that they can achieve desirable outcomes like long-life, safe-raw, unrefrigerated eggs, through desirable practices. The EU's production is over 40% free range, an increasing chunk organic and depending on where you are, a choice in breed.

If those are the sorts of things that you care about, it is only right to "throw shade" on counties like the US, where 82%(!) of their layers are caged and you have to disinfect the eggs because of their awful conditions.

I was originally introduced to the concept of non refrigerated eggs on an episode of the Netflix (branded but not) Original The Big Family Cooking Showdown [0]. They did a home visit and I thought it was weird that they kept their eggs in a box near the windowsill. Obviously since it was common practice they didn't give a background about why it's done that was in England. I've since seen more than a fair share of cooking shows based abroad that have that same unrefrigerated eggs technique, in the back of my mind I'm thinking about the general shelf life and temperature that's needed to keep the eggs from spoiling.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Family_Cooking_Showdow...

Coming from an unrefrigerated country eggs last 4-6 weeks on the shelf at room temperature (<25°C) from laying date, so generally 3-4 after purchase. Not sure how long they last after washing + refrigeration but I assume it's pretty much the same.

3-5 weeks in the fridge and a year in the freezer [1].

[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-long-do-eggs-last

People from all over the world are reading this, just about coming to terms with the idea that Americans store eggs in the fridge and now you're saying they'd put them in the freezer? A step too far!

Honestly posting that link was the first time I'd ever heard of someone putting an egg in the freezer. Kinda grossed out right now, not gonna lie.

They're honestly exactly the same provided you let them thaw slowly first. Forewarning, I once I tried freezing the eggs in their shells and they exploded all over my freezer. Would not recommend.

I don't eat eggs anymore, but when I did back in my bodybuilding days I'd have containers with raw egg which I'd dump into boiling water for my poached eggs in the morning. These turned out alright. For scrambled eggs or omelettes, putting them in the pan still frozen is a recipe for disaster.

I buy them not refrigerated, and put them in the fridge at home because where I live "room temperature" can easily go as high as over 40C.

South Sardinia, Italy.

One thing this article doesn't touch on: the most obvious methed for detecting spoiled eggs is the smell of hydrogen sulfide. Refrigeration increases shelf life but detecting presence of a sulfurous smell is more difficult when the egg is refrigerated. If freshness is in question then allowing the egg to reach room temp prior to giving it 'the sniff test' is recommended.

I've always just done the float test, I don't know how reliable that is though.

Totally not an expert on eggs nor salmonella, but I've lived in some really dry places and eaten plenty months-old eggs without getting sick from them... The time-to-fail-float-test seems like it's as much about the relative humidity where the egg is stored, as it is about the age of the egg.

I think grandma's advice is probably best: Don't crack eggs straight in to whatever you're making. Easier to fish out shell pieces, and you're not going to accidentally mix in a rotten egg.

Nobody told me your grandma's advice, I had to learn that the hard way. In a week I spoiled two omelets and wasted 8 eggs because the last one I cracked into the pan was rotten—twice! Now I always crack each egg into a small bowl before mixing them

IIRC that measures time more than spoilage. In the sense that it takes time for eggs to spoil, it works well. You'll be tossing safe-but-old eggs, but eggs aren't that expensive.

Not reliable at all. It is reliable for freshness, but that only matters for some things like poached eggs.

Eggs last so long in the fridge I have never once experienced a spoiled one.

Maybe you've never once noticed a spoiled one? I don't intend to suggest a practice that increases food waste but IME with both fresh room temp and refrigerated eggs: they start to smell like sulphur when they go bad and it's easily noticeable when they are not cold.

If you don't notice, then it's hard to call it spoiled.

Maybe he just doesn't randomly buy eggs and keeps them in the fridge for months without eating them...

Doesn't overcooking produce the sulfur smell due to excessive denaturing of the protein?

How does denaturing a protein release sulfur? I never actually thought of where that sulfur comes of, and I don't know enough bio/chem if that should be obvious from "denaturing of the protein".

I assumed it was in amino acid side chains, but it's not my area of expertise. I do know that sulfides are part of some amino acids.

The egg yolk is high sulfur. The egg white is high protein.

So I doubt that.

I thought it was the white that has the sulphur. A quick Google seems to confirm that, but more to the point I find the white has a hint of it in its flavour.

According to this page [1] 'Each egg yolk contains 0.016 milligram of sulfur, and the white contains 0.195 milligram, according to B. Srilakshmi, author of "Food Science." '

[1] https://www.livestrong.com/article/289250-list-of-foods-high...

A quick google will equally confirm whichever answer you are trying to confirm. Some sites say it's the yolk. Others say it's the white.

Opposite example:

List of Foods That Contain Sulfur

Eggs. The yolk portion of an egg is high in sulfur.

https://livewell.jillianmichaels.com/list-foods-contain-sulf...

I have yet to find anything reliable, like a .gov site, addressing the question.

Sulfur issues run in my family. I have to limit my consumption of sulfur.

It's the yolk that's an issue for me, not the white, fwiw.

If I googled "egg white sulfur" you would have a point about confirmation bias. But I just googled "egg sulfur" and clicked on the top few results, all of which either pointed to the white or didn't mention either way.

Wow, wait till you hear about unrefrigerated milk!

https://newrepublic.com/article/119086/europes-unrefrigerate...

Long shelf life might be desireable, but the UHT process has a really bad effect on taste. I prefer buying fresh, short expiration date milk.

I also really don't like the taste of UHT milk (called "H-Milch" in German). For me it's undrinkable. I can also taste the difference in a cappuccino. Interestingly, like the_mitshuiko already said, UHT milk is not very common in Austria but extremely common in Germany. When I'm in Germany, I have a hard time finding a coffee shop that doesn't serve coffee with UHT milk. It is basically impossible and to be honest, it says a lot about the German food culture. In Austria, not even McDonald's uses UHT milk in its McCafes but in Germany, even the most expensive coffee shop with coffees for 4 € and up cheap out on the milk.

check this out..

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-05-01/fresh-milk-brea...

It’s a preference thing. UHT milk is not very common in Austria for normal consumption but it accounts for almost all milk sales in Austria. I’m sure some recipes take this into account. I found some pastries that explicitly called out to use UHT milk.

I don’t think either has a better taste. Lots if people also love lactose free milk which has a completely different taste.

The UHT process destroys milk proteins. I'd rather eat maturated cheese than drink UHT milk any day.

It doesn't destroy them - it denatures them meaning they have different form and size etc. You still have the same amino acids in there which is, if we believe in digestive science, all that we need (your body will also break the protein).

I am sure things are more complex then that simple explanation. While I expect less nutrition from UHT milk (vitamins are degraded on higher temperatures, fat globules change their structure etc) its probably safest option out there.

I prefer goat milk. Goats usually eat more diverse food, their milk is more similar to human milk than that of cow, is less industrialized etc.

I grew to love the UHT milk in France. It does tastes a bit different, but has some upsides too.

I loved the milk but then again it was chocolate. Maybe plain tastes different. I know i despise powdered milk.

Haha it’s an awful lot better than powdered milk :)

Crazy fact from the 19th century: if you store unwashed eggs in a slaked lime solution, they will last more than a year unrefrigerated:

https://youtu.be/yUYgguMz1qI

To this day in Chinese and related cuisines there is a technique for chemically preserving eggs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg

They're quite odd!

This really sucks if you are homeless and don't have a refrigerator. Another great source of protein unavailable. (as once it's washed, you can't safely keep them at room temp anymore).

If you are homeless, a much bigger problem is that raw eggs are fragile, easily broken and make a mess when broken. Plus most homeless people have no means to cook.

If you are homeless but living in a vehicle and have some means to cook, there are ways around such issues. For example, you can store cold items in a cooler, no refrigerator required.

When I was homeless and sleeping in a tent, we sometimes kept perishables for short periods by leaving them outside the tent overnight in cold weather or keeping them in the backpack and keeping it out of the sun. If careful, butter sometimes stayed semi solid for a few days.

Modern refrigeration is not the only possible solution. It's just the most familiar for most Americans.

you can eat raw eggs

Of course you can. You can also eat raw meat. Most people don't.

Plus, a high percentage of homeless Americans have serious health issues. If you are, for example, being treated for cancer, you aren't supposed to eat, for example, raw cookie dough because of the raw egg it contains.

Eating raw eggs is a common thing in india, for the protein(although this is incorrect as cooking eggs leads to more protein absorption). However if i were homeless, why wouldn't i just crack open an egg and eat it? There is almost zero risk of salmonella

Plus, you don't have to be homeless to not have a refrigerator. Plenty of people live under a roof, but without a refrigerator.

With that being said, I believe American eggs can still be safely kept at room temperature up to several weeks.

What if you hard boil? It's not like homeless people can go around cooking raw eggs on demand

> (as once it's washed, you can't safely keep them at room temp anymore).

Yes you can. I'm in the US and I've been keeping my eggs on the counter for years now. They last for months and I have not had a single spoiled one except if it was cracked.

Have hens.

We never put the eggs in the fridge. We leave them in the mudroom unrefridgerated until we need them, at which point the eggs het a rinse there before they go to the kitchen for immediate processing.

I heard it's not recommended to eat raw eggs in the US. Or perhaps part of the US. Is that a thing? E.g. do people avoid making mayonnaise?

I grew up being told that, due to "bad eggs" that could get you sick.

In the UK there was a massive scare about Salmonella in eggs in the 80's, which resulted in many people believing it was unsafe to eat raw eggs.

In reality the risk was tiny, and is now non-existent: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-41568998

The situation in the US may be different, though.

Okay understood. But does refrigerating them make them last longer? I'm nomading through South America and of course the eggs were not refrigerated. Didn't worry me much, but I still put them in the refrigerator with the assumption that a cold dark environment will make the last longer. no?

In the article it says "Another perk of consistent refrigeration is shelf life: It jumps from about 21 days to almost 50 days."

Thanks. I skimmed right past it I guess.

As an American I was always told to be cautious of eating undercooked or raw eggs because of the risk of salmonella. Is this still a real concern of the eggs are pasteurized and refrigerated?

Eggs aren't pasteurised, they're sanitised by washing in the US. As the article says this removes the protective coating that keeps bacteria out, so refrigeration is required to reduce bacteria infiltration.

The salmonella would be present on the outside of the egg, so if you're paranoid simply wash the egg immediately before use if you're going to consume it raw.

You're more likely to catch something from a salad these days anyway.

Pasteurized eggs are available. For example: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Davidson-s-Safest-Choice-Large-AA...

You can buy pasteurized eggs, either in-shell or as liquid egg products, in the U.S.

I haven't been able to find in-shell pasteurized eggs for years.

You can pasturize them yourself, but the margins are pretty tight, and there is no way to verify you were successful.

The risk is reduced with pasteurization.

Salmonella can contaminate both the outside of eggs through contact with environmental contamination, or inside the eggs from a hen colonized or infected with Salmonella.

Cook your eggs.

I don't believe most US eggs are pasteurized; it will be clearly noted, and the texture upon opening will be different, if they are. My understanding is such eggs are somewhat safer for use in recipes requiring "raw" eggs, but there's still some risk.

(The specific US-style washing-then-refrigeration in this article is just one way of minimizing shell-to-inside contamination that's distinct from pasteurization.)

About half the eggs in the US come from chickens that have been immunized against salmonella. There's no easy way to tell, but you can call them and ask.

I’ve been under the impression that it makes more of a difference if they are washed. Unwashed eggs are supposedly safer. Or so I though. I can’t find anything authoritative on safety: washed versus unwashed.

The presence of salmonella means the egg is real. It came from a bird's vaganus (cloaca) instead of being constructed by the likes of Cadbury.

Interestingly in France it depends on the shop. Some refrigerate, some not.

Then everyone I know of them promptly in the fridge at home.

> We ... Scandinavians, tend to be squeamish about our chicken eggs, so we bathe them and then have to refrigerate them.

Not here in Norway we don't.

No, that sounds inaccurate. Some stores do refrigerate them in Sweden, but they are certainly not washed.

In addition, if any of your hens are found to have salmonella, the entire hen population is killed off: http://www.svenskaagg.se/?p=20022

I have never seen eggs being refrigerated

I don't know if eggs are washed or not in Sweden, but I have never seen an egg with poop on it

They’re sold refrigerated in Norway, so I would assume most people keep them in the fridge at home?

I just keep them on the counter in the kitchen.

I've never come across a supermarket in Oslo that doesn't refrigerate their eggs.

Best quote: "a dirty egg with poop on it is no big deal. You brush it off when you get home"

Europe vaccinates chickens, USA doesn't. USA chlorinates chicken meat, Europe doesn't.

American chlorinated chicken is widely known about in Europe thanks to brexit

It was actually already widely known thanks to the TTIP negotiations (see e.g. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-ttip-fears/).

vaccination vs refridgeration

which uses less energy ?

[2014]

Thanks!

EU average rate of Salmonella is 23 per 100k people, USA is 16 per 100k. So it appears the USA way works better.

UK Laboratory reports per 100,000 population - 23.82 in 2006, and generally decreasing, lowest 12.63 in 2014[1]. US average - 13.1 per 100k (range 11-15, depending on year)[2]. I suspect the difference is not eggs, or if it is it's negligible.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689500/

Salmonella comes from a variety of sources. I don't see how you can reach your egg conclusion based on overall rates.

Food:

Contaminated eggs, poultry, meat, unpasteurized milk or juice, cheese, contaminated raw fruits and vegetables (alfalfa sprouts, melons), spices, and nuts

Animals and their environment:

Particularly reptiles (snakes, turtles, lizards), amphibians (frogs), birds (baby chicks) and pet food and treats.

https://www.foodsafety.gov/poisoning/causes/bacteriaviruses/...

Quite a bit more data on the EU in this report from the EFSA [1]. Search for "salmonellosis".

In short, there's a lot more going on that just eggs.

One interesting factoid is that in Finland, the egg production chain has been virtually salmonella free for decades. Cases of salmonellosis are mostly contracted abroad, the most common source being tourist trips to Thailand.

[1] https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/j.efsa...

Sorry, do you have some source data for that? Is the difference entirely attributable to the way eggs are stored and processed, or are the Europeans getting salmonella from other sources? It is my understanding that the US and EU have fairly different agricultural regulatory frameworks.

The _confirmed_ incidence rates in years 2015 and 2016 are 14.85 and 14.51 (cases per 100000 population) in the USA, and 21.0 and 20.4 in the EU. Sources:

* National Enteric Disease Surveillance: Salmonella Annual Report, 2016

https://www.cdc.gov/nationalsurveillance/pdfs/2016-Salmonell...

* Annual Epidemiological Report for 2016: Salmonellosis

https://ecdc.europa.eu/sites/portal/files/documents/AER_for_...

However, the incidence rates vary widely among European countries. Portugal had very low (< 4) incidence rates over the period 2012-2016, while the figures in Czech Republic over the same period were ridiculously high (around 100).

In the UK, where eggs sold on shelves apparently are required by law _not_ to be washed, the incidence rates in 2015 and 2016 are 14.6 and 15.1, which are on par with the US figures.

Does salmonella go under-reported in the USA due to healthcare not being free at the point of use?

Not sure but I suspect the EU to have larger regulatory variance among member countries, as well as likely overall lower cost barriers to obtaining a diagnoses.

I think a lot has to do with folks in the US being more OCD about cleaning their food. For example, most people in the US would never eat cheese that was crawling with visible mold and bacteria but the French prefer it that way (so I was told by a French friend. he said cheese must have 'the bugs')

On mobile, I googled some papers, but it would be too annoying to go back and copy paste. You can confirm these pretty quick though.

To say nothing of factors other than the type of food consumed, there are many other foods beyond eggs that could give someone salmonella...

That seems like a pretty small difference…

I was about to say the same...but I also wonder what the breakdown is based on cause. Maybe in the US egg based cases are practically 0 and other things like salads are higher. Hard to tell just based on this number alone.

There's also the big difference that raw egg based products are readily available in most European countries while in the US those same dishes do not use raw egg. Friends in the US are always blown away when they try chocolate mousse or home made tiramisu.

~50% higher incidence is a small difference? In the US that would be an extra ~23,000 cases of salmonella.

There's also issues of whether all of these differences can be accounted by eggs or reporting techniques.

So it appears the USA way works better.

Does it? Both the UK and EU mandate that hens be vaccinated against salmonella. This step pretty much eliminated eggs as a carrier of salmonella.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/business/25vaccine.html

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-amundsen-egg-was...

Europeans probably eat raw meat and eggs more often than Americans. Beef tartar isn't a dish that's commonly found on menus state-side. Is it even legal to serve a raw egg yolk in California?

1- salmonella is not due to eggs only, but meat and vegetable also

2- you probably read in the article like all of us that chicken in Europe are vaccinated against salmonella, while this is not mandatory in the US

Therefore I am not sure how you reach this conclusion.

"In America, unrefrigerated eggs can KILL you and you WON'T BELIEVE the reason why."

fixed

Mods, please change this garbage clickbait headline to, "Eggs need to be refrigerated in the US because they come pre-washed."

I don't see the original headline ("Why The U.S. Chills Its Eggs And Most Of The World Doesn't") as clickbaity. It states a simple fact and leaves me curious about why the rest of the world doesn't wash. Your suggested headline ("Eggs need to be refrigerated in the US because they come pre-washed) would have left me confused rather than curious. I'd be thinking: How is washing in any way relevant to refrigeration? It seems like a non sequitur.

It's not clickbait, it's slightly editorialized, but nothing in it is false. The US refrigerates their eggs, and most of the world does not.

If this isn't clickbait, what would you consider an example of clickbait?

How about: "Amazing thing the US does to your eggs that nobody else does"

Top 207 reasons why US chills its eggs?

Number 4 will blow your mind!

FWIW I think the title is just fine.

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