Why are some egg yolks so orange? | Hacker News Reader

Why are some egg yolks so orange?

foodunfolded.com

275 pointsazizsaya253 comments

J. Kenji López-Alt has a bit in his Food Lab book where he explores the effect of yolk colour on taste. Paraphrasing, the takeaway is that people generally perceive redder/deeper yolks as more flavoursome, but if you remove this factor (with food colouring, say), then people can't tell the difference. He summarises this in a twitter thread: [1]

[1]: https://nitter.net/kenjilopezalt/status/1176542696724320256

Some french tv channel did a quick game test, asking a bunch of students to sip colored soda and guess the flavour. Green was mint, Red was strawberry, Yellow was citrus, they were all strawberry. Surprising "reality".

I’ve always wondered if part of the reason the “clear” craze for sodas died off is that you didn’t have the right signals to tell you what it tastes like.

What about canned soda? If drinking from a can it's pretty hard to see what color the soda is, without making a point of checking.

I wonder if the can color is then the signal?

color is probably associated with certain flavors. For most people our eyesight is used to identify things more so then other senses. If you don't see the color you probably have to work slightly harder to identify what is being eaten. How many people have a tongue so accurate they can eat/drink food blindfolded and identify it?

A food scientist came to my high school and did a similar demonstration with us - except with different flavors of koolaid. Students reported red as cherry, purple as grape ... but they were actually the same flavor and only differed in color.

We did an experiment in class, where we drank sodas blindfolded. Not only did we fail to distinguish Coke Cola and Pepsi, we couldn't even tell sprite from coke!

I would have never believed that they taste so incredibly similar without the experiment.

Coke and Pepsi do not taste the same, and Sprite does not taste like either of them.

It's not simply a matter of different amounts of sugar, they use different "natural flavors" and have different levels of carbonation.

The difference in flavors is roughly similar to the difference between an IPA, a double IPA, and a cider.

My guess is that some common ingredients have such strong flavor that the other ingredients are covered. We could reliably distinguish between coke and Diet Coke though.

My mom refused to believe that I could taste the difference between caffeine-free Diet Coke and the normal Diet Coke. She was trying to get me to decaffeinate myself.

So, she made me take a blind taste test. I proved I was right and that I really could taste the difference, and she stopped trying to force me to decaffeinate myself.

She was quite surprised and unhappy that I was right and that I really could taste the difference. But to her credit, she upheld her end of the bargain.

It's pretty cool that you can literally taste caffeine. Is it more of a flavor or a smell?

It was a difference in flavor. At the time, I attributed it to the decaffeination process that was used, thus causing the drink to taste different. It was a mild difference, but detectable. And I didn't like the different taste.

Thinking back on it, it could just have been that the caffeinated drinks came from a newer batch and the decaffeinated drinks came from an older batch. Or maybe they were canned in different facilities, which might be using different water.

I don't think my mom controlled for all the potentially confounding variables.

But all of these experts on the internet say you can't even tell the difference between coffee and tea if you're blindfolded let alone different types of soda so clearly you're wrong! /s

Seriously, though, one unreplicated headline-grabbing result can generate so very much "science says..." type rhetoric.

The Sprite vs Coke thing is surprising; Coke vs Diet Coke is not. I regularly find that I'm given Diet Coke even though I asked for regular. Aspartame and most other artificial sweeteners have a very distinctive flavor and I can generally detect it even in items I don't expect to find it in.

Likewise 'full fat' Coke tastes syrupy and sticky compared to artificially sweetened Coke. It's not so much a flavour thing as a texture thing.

I'm skeptical. Coca Cola and Pepsi have fairly distinct flavor profiles. There are some that I could see being more problematic. Like RC vs Pepsi, which have a similar profile. But Sprite? Nah, that's got a strong citrus component that definitely doesn't exist in a cola.

> But Sprite? Nah, that's got a strong citrus component that definitely doesn't exist in a cola.

It may surprise you to find out, then, that Coca-Cola is actually a lemon-lime soda. In fact, all Colas are predominantly citrus flavored.

"The primary modern flavoring ingredients in a cola drink are citrus oils (from orange, lime, and lemon peels), cinnamon, vanilla, and an acidic flavorant." [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola

Oh, they are probably indeed different. But the question wasn’t whether they were different; it was whether we could tell the difference in a blind folded test.

62 students, 50% error rate.

The same thing is true about red and white wine. Color it all red and no one can tell the difference.

I'm sorry, but that just isn't true. No doubt some wines cross over, but the tannins present in much red wine are notable by their absence from pretty much all white wine.

Yes, this. Red and white don't taste that similar to me.

My nose isn't great, especially compared to my wife's, but I could tell you 100% of the time if I was tasting red or white while blindfolded.

Would you be able to tell if you weren't blindfolded and it was white wine that had food colouring added to it so that it appeared as red?

Would your sense of taste overpower what your eyes were telling you?

I absolutely could do this, even with food coloring.

Please report back after confirming :)

Let's see if I can convince the wife to open a bottle of white on a Sunday night. :-)

Heh, red wine makes me a bit nauseous while white feels like honey. I shall try blindfolded one day.

For people into this kind of stuff check out “Taste: What You’re Missing” from food scientist Barb Stucky.

It’s a pop science collection of stores about measuring tastes and food pleasure. I remember reading a chapter on texture and how one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cram, Ben Chohen, doesn’t have a sense of taste. When you can’t taste anything food, ice cream in particular, becomes very boring after the first couple bites. So the sense of pleasure comes from different textures rather than different flavors. That’s why B&J’s ice cream has so many chunky ingredients.

http://barbstuckey.com/the-shop/

>one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cram, Ben Chohen, doesn’t have a sense of taste.

That explains so much!

Over here in the bay area some Japanese markets have "golden yolk" brand eggs that have deep orange colored yolks. I don't know if they're more nutritious / taste better but the texture is different. When frying these and regular store bought eggs in the same pan, they hold their shape better. The store bought eggs spreads out more and the egg white tears more easily.

> Over here in the bay area some Japanese markets have "golden yolk" brand eggs that have deep orange colored yolks. I don't know if they're more nutritious / taste better but the texture is different. When frying these and regular store bought eggs in the same pan, they hold their shape better. The store bought eggs spreads out more and the egg white tears more easily.

Your issues sound more like age than quality; I worked on small hobby farms with 10 hens and large scale farms with 1000s of laying hens and altered their feed to try and change the yolk colour. It's what you'd expect, actually, the more bugs and less processed food they ate (especially grass) the more gamey the eggs tasted. The more bread we fed them, with butters and additives, the lighter the yolks got.

We gave them kitchen scraps, and they visited the compost heaps for bugs and let them roam the gardens as a form of pest control; during the spring/summer they were learning to hunt down field mice and grasshoppers and the yolks got blood red as a result of this increase in protein. The egg shells were determined by breed, and quite consistently the same color as their ear areas [0].

Store bough eggs could be weeks old before they arrive to your kitchen, and even longer since most won't eat them right away, too.

In short, chicken breeds and their respective diets will be the main determinant of egg color and yolk respectively.

They are also pretty mean when in large groups to other hens, the term 'pecking order' is real in nature and more-so with hens who will bully an often feebler hen in order to establish dominance within the pack. Having a rooster sort of calms them down, but not in terms of hierarchy as they are hard-wired to asset dominance within their group. These things really do behave like little raptors, which is why I ate like a dozen eggs a day when I farmed. They ware also cannibals who will eat their own eggs for no apparent reason--they were all well fed and had plenty of other options for food.

0: https://vjppoultry.com/2018/03/25/egg-color-and-colored-earl...

Ah, yes, that would be something I would be excited about in an egg - egg yolks that don't break easily. Many in my family love their eggs fried as "bulls eye" / "sunny side up" ( https://simpleindianrecipes.com/Home/Fried-Egg.aspx ).

Incidentally, that pictures actually shows another difference I noticed between these and "store bought" eggs. The store bought eggs the egg white when fried tend to get bubbly, where as the "golden yolk" eggs they tend to stay smooth. I prefer smooth, as the bubbly white gives a weird texture.

EDIT: I don't mean bubbly as in fried crispy kind of bubbly, but just air filled but not crispy kind.

But is that because of their past experience i.e. buying premium eggs vs cheap eggs before trained them into a bias?

It's not just colour acting as an equaliser, but people being unable to distinguish when you take yolk colour out of the equation entirely.

From the linked thread:

> "blindfolded tasters couldn’t really tell the difference between fresh pastures backyard eggs and 2-week old supermarket eggs"

Who were the participants? Random people off the street, or professional tasters who actually pay attention to what they're eating?

Hard to believe that discerning people exist!

It's the same as the claims that no one knows they are sick for weeks before symptoms. If you're unhealthy and living with that, yeah, I guess you might not notice feeling off

> no one knows they are sick for weeks before symptoms

Weeks? Regular colds and flu have incubation periods of just a few days. Diseases with incubation periods measured in weeks tend to be the more serious ones that don't occur often enough (thankfully) to be used as a good comparison point.

I mean, you can definitely tell the difference between, say, a mass-produced egg and one from a naturally raised chicken. The latter often has more orange-y yolks. That being said, some large-scale producers add stuff to the diet to get more orange yolks and some naturally raised eggs aren't super orange so yes, colour alone doesn't mean much.

It's almost as if you did not read the article, especially the last two sentences.

Almost like I was responding to a comment, not the article itself... That's why there's levels to comments.

There's a legitimate reason what one might hold that impression, although I'm not sure to what degree it is at play. A home grown chook that gets a lot of its diet from foraging insects and eating various scraps probably will have a more flavorful, eggier egg and due to the carotenes in the diet the yolk will be redder.

Of course, you can get the same orange yolk from adding caroteens to the feed of an industrially grown layer's feed with none of the associated other differences

Reminds me of the studies which show that wine connoisseurs are describing the colour, not the taste, of the wine. I've always found this highly suspect because I guarantee anyone who drinks wine regularly could fairly accurately judge what price bracket a wine came from, at least within a factor of 2-3. You could mistake a $10 wine for a $15 wine or vice versa but a $50 wine is noticeably different.

That is not in line with the blind taste tests I have seen. The vast majority of people not only can't pick out the more expensive wine, they also tend to prefer the cheaper wines.

I think he's talking about wine-lovers - not the vast majority of people by a large margin.

Even wine-likers would be able to tell, but the vast majority of people don't know much about any given niche, by definition. It's like saying "80% of people surveyed couldn't tell the difference between an AE86 and an AE85 just by driving them". Duh but the difference is there and not hard to spot if you know what you're looking for. We need to stop conflating general unfamiliarity with impossibility to distinguish.

The blind taste tests I have seen were of self proclaimed wine lovers.

I suggest you organise this with your friends - it is a lot of fun and you can enjoy an adult science experiment.

If you do want to try it, then two suggestions: 1. try to have some way to blind yourself from the results, 2. Make a decision whether you want everyone to get plastered or not.

I did this a few years ago and it was heaps of fun, but I wasn’t careful about amounts so we all got trolleyed by mistake.

I'm always down for this kind of science. We actually did a similar experiment with rum a while ago, I was of the opinion that spirits denatured a little after they'd been open a while and didn't taste as nice, others disagreed and so we did an experiment.

Two bottles of rum were bought and stored for several months, one unopened and one opened with a modest amount imbibed from it. Then a brand new one was bought as a control. For each round of testing, while the rest of us were out of the room we had a volunteer pour out and label a sample per bottle per tester and record the labels before randomizing their order. Each tester then tried each of their samples and wrote down which bottle we thought the sample had come from. Afterwards we cross referenced the guesses with the original samples.

The end results were inconclusive but indicated that there wasn't much if any difference. My new hypothesis is that the effect I observed was actually due to the coke I was using as a mixer getting stale but much more data is needed.

I have had some excellent $10 bottles of wine which hold their own against the $50 bottles.

I got five chickens last year and now have more eggs then I know what to do with (so we give a lot away). Everyone that has them says they are so much better and I have wondered if that is just due to them being able to see the chickens and their home. It is near impossible to hard boil the eggs they lay because the “membrane” (layer between the shell and egg-stuff) is so thick. The yolk is a darker yellow as well. I feed them mid-priced crumbles from tractor supply and give them scraps maybe once per week.

Kenji covered hard boiling eggs with scientific rigor: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-secrets-to-peeling-hard-boil...

We have backyard chickens and hard-boil a lot of eggs. The biggest effect on peel-ability: Start with boiling water, do not start the eggs in cold water.

For years I started with cold water because that's what Alton Brown said to do in Good Eats. And for years the eggs were a pain to peel. When I read Kenji's article, I switched, and immediately eggs became much easier to peel. Night and day.

No other factor comes close in terms of effect. Not age, not backyard vs store bought. Not the breed (at least, not for any of the dozen chicken breeds we have had). Start with boiling water and 9/10 eggs peel nicely, start with cold water and 9/10 eggs peel terribly.

I've been stuck in Egg Hell for years, and old cookbooks and Good Eats (which is so great and engaging on so many other topics).

And it was the Internet that just now added more votes for pre-boil and peel-ability.

Cool Internet, Cool.

I steam them to get consistent hot exterior temps. Plus it is easier to rinse them when they are in a steamer basket. And it uses less water. And the water is faster to boil.

Totally agree with you on this though.

I'm not sure how accurate this is, but I was told decades ago that starting with cold water was mostly based wanting to avoid scalded hands when placing the eggs into water or to avoid cracked shells from impact of the raw eggs with the pot or with each other.

If that's the case, tongs are your friend.

Add salt and they peel fine (they say vinegar too but I didn't find it so effective)

This is interesting to me because pressure cooker eggs start cold but after a few dozen batches, fresh eggs or old, I’ve never had a batch that was hard to peel. I do ice bath them though.

Do a blind taste test with store bought and home grown eggs. You will be able to tell. After years of eating home grown eggs, I nearly spit out store eggs when I had them. The texture and flavor is so bad it was an immediate involuntary response. Home eggs are velvety and rich in flavor. Store eggs tasted like bland rubber. I say the difference is as stark as comparing scrambled store eggs and reconstituted powdered eggs.

My wife claimed there was no difference for a very long time. She had the same experience when we needed to buy store eggs last winter.

Strangely, when going from store eggs to home eggs the difference isn't as pronounced.

I have been raising pastured free range egg chicks for years. If I don't see the color of the yolk, I can't tell the difference between mine and store bought.

Oddly enough, others can and cooks say the whites are much easier to whip.

How do you square your results with actual blind tests that show no results? How confident are you that you actually controlled for things like color?

Did I sit down with a blindfold on and eat unknown eggs? No. I will eat anything that is food. I had every intention of eating the store eggs with no hesitation. I even ate them after taking pause at involuntary revulsion to the tasteless gelatinous mass I was chewing on. I grew up eating store eggs. Now I will avoid them when possible.

Out of curiosity, did you do a blind test yourself?

Yes, when visiting friends and not knowing the provenance of their eggs until asking after putting eggs in my mouth.

Could that be down to your friends' skill at cooking eggs vs. your own?

Pretty hard to screw up scrambled eggs.

To be honest, I would also pay attention to the experience. Were you predisposed towards liking your friend's eggs? Were you having a great time? Those things matter -- haven't you ever found yourself enjoying your food because of the mood or your companions?

I think in order to make the comparison fairer, you should do a blind tasting of the two kinds of eggs at your home, in the same sitting, and under the same conditions as much as possible.

Overkill? Maybe, but also warranted, given that there are experiments out there asserting people cannot really tell the difference.

Ok, fair enough. Human perception is subject to all kinds of bias. My perception is that store bought eggs are vastly inferior to home grown. Whether that is just perception or truth matters little to me.

Store bought eggs are older, have the protective mucus coating removed, are washed with chemicals and come from chickens inundated with medication and fed the cheapest feed possible. If you think that none of those things affect flavor or texture I dont know what to say.

A fair comparison would compare home grown with non-premium eggs that most people are eating and are cost comparable. The test must also not be funded by an egg producer or supporter of big egg, if you grant calling egg factories as such.

I don't know if those things actually affect taste. Maybe they do. But do they?

There's a bunch of benefits to eating home grown eggs (or free range eggs): the hens are treated better, and you won't get all those nasty chemicals.

It's really not. Most scrambled eggs are overcooked, and what you use for oil (or butter) and anything you add (eg milk) has a large effect. Not to mention seasoning correctly.

I'm sure you liked them, but that's not really a blind tasting. There are uncontrolled variables in your experiment, plus no actual comparison!

https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=B...

Research says that the nutritional value is not significantly different between organic and backyard.

However, I expect the fact the backyard eggs are fresh laid is the big differentiator. The supply chain between farm and supermarket is huge, whilst backyard eggs can be laid that day.

In the US farmers have 28 days to get eggs in cartons. Once in cartoons eggs must be sold in 30 days. Store eggs can be quite old. Freshness is likely a big part of flavor. I suspect that the US egg washing method may affect flavor as well. Home eggs typically aren't washed and are only a few days old. The eggs I sell were laid that week.

What research are you talking about? I've found the opposite: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1487156557146210306?t...

Free Range is not the same as organic - if you compare backyard eggs to eggs that are basically someone else’s backyard it’s understandable there’s little difference.

Free range just means the chicken can go outside or turn around. It says nothing about the feed or breed.

I imagine the eggs used in the Polish study that outperformed backyard were organic and free range.

My friend had some eggs from his chickens in his backyard and I was surprised I didn’t like them as much as the Happy Egg Co. Heritage Breed eggs I buy at Sprouts. The eggs are $8 a dozen and the only eggs I’ll eat now. Everything else tastes off. Maybe the flavor is from the breed of chicken? The eggs are brown and blue.

They definitely have the same hard boiling issue with a strong membrane.

I want it to be placebo as these eggs are expensive and I spend a few hundred a month on them. But I’ve bought every expensive brand of egg I can (Vital Farms, among others, which _used_ to taste amazing then became popular maybe and tasted like any other egg?) and _only_ this brand tastes different than a bog standard cheap egg.

The same thing happened with Kerrygold butter. Regular cheap butter tastes like I’m eating Crisco now.

Dude get some chickens. My cost per dozen is around $3 at current feed prices and 60% laying rate. If you feed them your kitchen scraps the feed cost is even lower.

The eggs you get that dont peel well are fresh. Less than 2 weeks old. Home grown eggs are the same way until they age and dry out a bit.

How long do they keep producing eggs and what do you do with the chickens after?

I have chickens and while the eggs are great, what you have is new pets that also happen to produce eggs as a side-effect. (Assuming you live in a city and not on a farm) You treat them like any other pet. Chickens will live 3-10 years. One of my chickens died a year or so after she stopped laying, another chicken is now 10 and lays one or two eggs a year but is otherwise looking as healthy as they day we got her. I suppose you could kill them or even try to eat them but most layers are pretty skinny and would not make a great meal.

They will keep producing their whole life. However, production drops way off after 3 years. My wife isn't keen on butchering or I would make soup with old hens. I have some freeloading birds right now that will get to live out their life while only giving me manure and an occasional egg. When they die they become compost.

I do keep dual purpose birds in the event that food supplies require a sacrifice to feed my family. It costs a little more to feed heavier hens but the security is worth it.

> The eggs are $8 a dozen [...] and I spend a few hundred a month on them

You eat over 300 eggs a month?

It’s not that crazy the more I think about it. If he has a spouse and 2 kids (so 4 people in this house), and each person eats 3 eggs for breakfast everyday for 30 days that’s 360 eggs

also other cultures eat many savory egg dishes as well that makes egg use outside of breakfast quite common. my family of 4 goes through about that many eggs because of many lunch and dinner egg dishes we eat. I've been personally shocked by how many eggs we go through a week, but buying flats at local farmers markets has helped quite a bit.

That could become a health issue if this is longterm.

If you have a reason to think eggs are unhealthy, state the reason so that there can be a discussion. Eggs are as close to a miracle food that I know, and I think it would be a shame to discourage their consumption.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23676423/

egg consumption may be associated with an increased incidence of type 2 diabetes among the general population and CVD comorbidity among diabetic patients.

Huh. Diabetes is not what I expected. I looked at the discussion section;

>Accumulated epidemiologic evidence generated from this meta-analysis suggests that egg consumption is not associated with an increased risk of overall CVD, IHD, stroke, or mortality. However, compared with those who never consume eggs, those who eat 1 egg per day or more are 42% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes. Among diabetic patients, frequent egg consumers (ie, ≥ 1 egg/d) are 69% more likely to have CVD comorbidity.

>In the current meta-analysis, we observed a positive association between egg consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes. Although the findings were inconsistent, some animal studies suggested that high cholesterol feeding increased fasting plasma glucose concentrations or induced hyperinsulinemia and impaired glucose tolerance (61–63). Studies have also suggested that elevated serum cholesterol might be associated with an increased islet cholesterol content and directly induce β cell dysfunction by reducing glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (64, 65). In addition, studies have indicated that dietary cholesterol might be associated with chronic, low-grade inflammation (66, 67), which is a mechanism underlying the development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Moreover, our results on egg consumption and risk of diabetes are supported by some other human studies (38–40, 68) that do not meet our inclusion criteria... Of note, the possibility cannot be completely excluded that the observed positive associations between egg consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes are explained by residual confounding from unmeasured factors, because diabetes was the secondary outcome in most included studies. Nevertheless, future studies are warranted.

The USDA prohibits eggs from being called safe or nutritious because of their cholesterol and saturated fat content.

Video and transcript expanding on this available at https://nutritionfacts.org/video/who-says-eggs-arent-healthy....

Personally, I would not pay any attention to that whatsoever.

Please share your rationale to further the conversation. Certainly each of us are responsible for our own decisions.

Because the recommendation appears to be based on faulty and even corrupt research done over sixty years ago.

It’s too much to go into here, but you could look at the introduction to Gary Taubes’ 2020 book. It’s in the Kindle sample.

I’m 80, have eaten at least two eggs a day for twenty years, and I’m fine. Not particularly overweight and no heart issues.

I read through the sample, thank you for referring it to me. I am somewhat familiar with keto/low-carb diets.

In reviewing Gary’s work, I did come across the study he did under Nutrition Science Initiative, and how the results didn’t support his claims. Have you had a chance to look into this?

(Aside: my dad is around your age, and has not yet quit smoking despite science since he doesn’t have any adverse effects. Be well!)

> 3 eggs for breakfast everyday

Ugh! I would start to crow if I would eat that much.

You buy 25 dozen eggs per month? How are you spending a few hundred a month on eggs even if they're $8/dozen

Okay maybe 12 dozen. But my family eats a lot of eggs!

how are you eating these eggs?

This is very true. Years ago we had chickens, and fresh eggs (laid over the past couple of days) were impossible to peel the shell from after hard boiling.

We started soft boiling, knocking the head off and using a small spoon to eat. It was either that or fried/scrambled.

I never did find out how long a fresh egg would have to age in order to become peelable when hard boiled.

Soft boiled, take the tops off with a chef's knife on a butcher block.

So long as the yolks are waxy, little mess. And it's fast and sweet.

I recently started using a pressure cooker (instant pot brand) to make hard cooked eggs. I use a 4 minute cooking time, instant release the pressure, then plunge the eggs right away into cold water to stop their cooking.

Even fresh eggs peel perfectly.

+1 to pressure cooker for a few mins + cold water bath. I tried all the tricks normally stated for hard boiling eggs, and always had half the eggs just refusing to come out of their shell. 100% of the time with my instant pot they just slip out of the shell.

I poach eggs for breakfast in my InstantPot. 3 eggs for 5 minutes on steam. I've found that eggs with orange yolks tend towards a jammy texture, but yellow yolks tend towards a drier texture.

When poaching eggs in water the usual way, a tablespoon of vinegar in the water keeps them together, not scattered all over the pan.

Thanks! I'm going to have to try that.

Hmm, seems serious eats doesn't agree, but I've tried everything over the years and the instant pot has worked best for me.

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-secrets-to-peeling-hard-boil...

If you're at all interested in storing eggs long term, look up "water glassing". It needs to be done with freshly laid eggs, but the eggs are still edible months later.

Keep the fresh eggs on the counter for a week or so before boiling, and your shell will come off properly.

We keep ours in a skelter and I boil a dozen of so when it starts to overflow. This has been my experience as well.

I have 17 chickens, 16 of them are hens. I get 9-12 a day and my neighbors love me because we don't eat them. The yolks are big and deep orange/yellow and people seem to love them. I have y purchased an egg in a few years so I have no frame of reference any more. They're free range and they eat everything they can find (snakes, frogs, lizards, bugs, plants) and all the feed and scratch I feed them.

If you do this, it's vital that you do not wash the bloom off. Once you wash eggs you have to refrigerate them.

No one does that except the egg processors

For particularly messy eggs I'll do it right before cracking them. But they stay dirty until it's time to cook.

I've seen many amateurs do it. There's been a big uptick over the past decade of people raising chickens in their back yards without having any experience or guidance. Not that you need a lot; just important to do some research.

I think that, separate from any objective difference in "quality" of the eggs, seeing happy chickens is a perfectly fine reason to derive more enjoyment from consuming the eggs in question.

When we had chickens I made a lot of flan and meringues, also stuff like lemon curd. Anything to keep up with the flood of eggs.

I finally found a full proof way of making any egg easy to peel. I wonder if it would work with eggs like these. I pressure steam then in an instant pot for about three minutes.

> near impossible to hard boil the eggs they lay because the “membrane”

I am curious about this. Is it maybe your boiling technique that is causing this hard membrane? Proteins toughen up if exposed to too much heat.

I get my eggs up to room temperature and drop them into boiling water for 6.5 minutes at sea level. Then I remove the hot water immediately and let them cool. These eggs (no matter where they come from) are always easy to peel and never too tough.

A brand in the UK called Clarence Court started producing a range of eggs (maybe a decade ago?) that have an intensely orange yolk [1] and this became a real differentiator, in some ways an indicator of quality. I know when an egg is Clarence Court in a restaurant for instance (and have confirmed numerous times). They are also delicious eating.

The effect is so profound that supermarket own brands have now also started producing similarly richly-orange-yolked eggs.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAe_TN_WsAAyQ9-.jpg:large

I noticed the supermarkets producing copycats and became suspicious of the method by which they achieved the colour. There's something qualitatively different about the darkened yolk in the Clarence Court eggs, and it makes me wonder about additives, I guess they're just adding caretinoids to the feed.

Yes! I completely agree. The yolks of Clarence Court-alikes just don’t feel as “rich”, whatever that means, and I can readily tell the difference when having yolk-heavy food like egg soldiers, for example.

English contingent on HN here going peak middle-class. :-)

Speaking as one of them!

> English contingent on HN here going peak middle-class

Put the Daily Mail down right this instant !

"I can readily tell the difference between Clarence court eggs and copycats..." is an extract from 'Middle Class British Problems' if ever I heard one! :)

Yes well I'm actually American :P

Sounds like you've been assimilated!

In the US there is a brand called Happy Egg with a dark orange yolk. They are my preferred brand now, because who wants to buy unhappy eggs? They are the only one I can find with dark orange yolk.

Happy Egg Co. eggs are my favorite! So much so that I emailed them during the early pandemic thanking them for making such amazing eggs.

Have you tried the Heritage breed and their other lines of eggs? I’ve found the cheaper eggs have the same dark orange yolk but the flavor of the Heritage breed eggs is absolutely divine. It’s ruined other eggs for me.

Interestingly Vital Farms used to have eggs that tasted great but perhaps as they got more popular and sourced eggs from more places, their eggs quality dropped and I stopped buying them.

Happy egg are my favorite as well. I have to say though, I tried their organic line and the yolks are indeed not as orange and a bit more runny. I actually buy the standard line for this reason

I buy these regularly but i always though it was down to the specific breed of chicken, in Clarence Court's case the use of a Burford Brown.

Why do all the images in this article have wrong/fake EXIF?

(Well, not all; it looks like that they copied the EXIF of the first image (which has the matching EXIF Image description of "Egg yolk in wooden spoon on eggs. Close up.", together with all the other camera/lens info) to all the other images for some reason. Nothing serious, but weird practice nevertheless.)

My guess is the intern who saved the photos wanted to make them the same dimensions copy and pasted all subsequent photos onto/from the first photo exporting from that; that's why the captions are the same for the rest of the photos.

Edit: and also notice the file names as in-article-eggyolks#.jpg which confirms my theory somebody saving over the original photo.

I’m curious to learn how you ran across this. A browser extension that surfaces the data? Or do you regularly go around downloading and inspecting images as you read?

Yeah, I use an extension [1] that shows EXIF data on hover. Very handy.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/exif-quickview/kji... (there are lots more advanced ones on Chrome store / AMO, but this works for me.)

What I've Learned did a video on eggs in Japan (where eggs are differentiated depending on feed):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjrxXC3kGf4

"The #1 Egg consumer is Japan. Here's why. ($70 vs $1 Egg)"

This was a nice little side tangent. Thanks for sharing.

While we’re at it, can we also talk about the use of glyphosate aka RoundUp in our farms? It’s routinely used before and after a harvest in order to accelerate desiccation and allow the farmers to have multiple yields in a single season. Dyeing egg yolks and dying organs from RoundUp what have we become.

[1] https://investigatemidwest.org/2019/05/26/controversial-pest...

[2] https://www.cornucopia.org/2017/10/glyphosate-use-desiccant-...

I'm a sucker for premium orange yolk eggs. My partner is sucker for buying eggs from a guy who grows them in his backyard.

Sometimes, especially when making creamy scrambled eggs I can almost taste fishy or shellfish flavour (not something I like). We are based in NZ and I've heard people use sea shells as a source of calcium for hens, but I find hard to believe that it could be it.

This will happen if you feed your chickens salmon or other fish. I have chickens and yes I occasionally my sons or wife will feed them left overs and it may be some salmon skin we did not eat, some fish bones and heads that we did not eat, etc. When we do this the eggs take on that taste. I don't like it either and if it does happen then I feed those eggs to the dog....

You should give them back to the hens. They prefer them fresh but they'll eat them cooked too. Producing an egg takes a lot of nutrients. They'll any that crack, to help replenish. They'll eventually eat the shells too, which helps with their digestion.

This is a good way to teach hens that "eggs are food" and they may start eating their own eggs before you can get to them.

I have not had that experience. None of my current hens, or the dozens I've had, will eat them unless they're cracked. I toss them eggs every day and of the egg bounces without breaking, they will tap it with their beak and then leave it be. I know it can happen but I've not had it happen in the four or five years I've been keeping chickens. Although we wouldn't mind. We have them as pets and don't eat many of the eggs.

That's good that you haven't had that experience. We haven't either with our hens, but enough of our neighbors have had that experience that I've received the "don't let hens eat eggs" advice from more than one one person who had firsthand experience with a hen getting accustomed to eating eggs, then breaking open most/all eggs before they could be collected, and then that hen had to be killed to save the eggs from the other hens.

Give fresh eggs a couple of days to a week to mellow. The flavour of a just-layed egg from a backyard chicken with a rich diet can be pretty intense.

The "fishy" taste is likely indicative of a higher omega 3 content, you get the same taste from 100% grass fed and finished beef and buffalo due to the higher omega 3 content.

Omega-3 doesn't taste like fish unless it's literally fish oil, which is often an additive to improve the 3-6 ratio of foods. Flax seed doesn't taste like fish...

Grass fed beef tasting "fishy"? I've never experienced that and can't imagine how it would work.

In my experience cheaper grass fed beef in the US commonly tastes gamey which can be interpreted as fishy.

More expensive grass fed doesn't have this problem, so it likely has to do with diet or the cut.

The difference could also be due to how long the beef is hung or aged. Beef tasting too “gamey” might not be hung long enough (suggestion made last night by small farmer friends, fwiw).

i guess it depends on what type of fish you eat. I often eat relatively fresh salmon. I wouldn't say it tastes fishy even though its fish. It tasty oily, so much oil comes out in the baking process.

> 100% grass fed and finished beef

I am not sure this is true. I live in a country (NZ) where most cattle are grass fed their entire lives. This is supposed to mean higher omega 3 content but I have never tasted a fishy taste. Not even once.

If grass fed and fishy taste are corrolated, I suspect there is another cause. Maybe organic fish containing grass fertiliser?

We just started smelling/tasting some fishy flavor with eggs from one of our hens. We suspected flaxseed in the feed we were giving, and switching feeds seems to have fixed it.

Brown egg layers are apparently more prone to this issue

I believe it's the choline. It tastes fishy and eggs have a very large content of it.

I don't know that backyard eggs would have more of it but the slight fishy taste in eggs is (and liver) is due to it.

Why would you be surprised? Why throw out scrap fish and seafood when you could sell it as chicken feed?

I have a few ex-battery hens and what I now view as a good egg is one you can crack into a pan of boiling water and it holds together, giving you a perfect poached egg in a couple of minutes. Store bought eggs tend to fall apart in water.

That's because store bought eggs are not fresh.

Not fresh is an understatement in many parts of the world. In the U.K., it’s up to 60 days - and in the U.S., it’s common for eggs in grocery stores to have been laid 6 months previously.

By law in the US farmers have up to 30 days to package eggs and then the eggs have to be sold within another 30 days, so the oldest eggs on the grocery shelf can be is 60 days. Most eggs are packaged and in a store for sale shortly after being laid.

EU legislation is that best before dates are at most 28 days from date of lay. Has the UK changed its law after Brexit? Not to my knowledge.

Red Lion stamped eggs still advertise the 28 day best before date. “For Lion eggs this must be shown on the shell (although this is not a legal requirement). Eggs have to be collected from farms at least twice a week and in practice most Lion eggs are delivered to the supermarket within 48 hours of being laid.”

Do you have a citation for this? I find this to be surprising given that I have heard the exact opposite: That efficient supply chains lead to eggs too fresh to easily deshell when hard boiled.

When I had my own hens I would deliberately age the eggs I intended to hard boil.

I'm similarly skeptical. Both the demand and supply for eggs are probably quite predictable (save for the occasional bird flu outbreak), so why would the industry create big egg buffers/stockpiles?

I get nauseous eating most store bought eggs, and it took me years and a couple of Reddit threads to realise this was the reason, as opposed to an allergy or whatever. Buying fresh I never have a problem.

I got whanging deadly headaches whenever i ate store / commercial eggs; I got chickens and discovered that its not actually the eggs thats the problem for me:

If i feed my chickens non-medicated feed, I'm able to enjoy their eggs. If i get them the feed with amoxicillin in it, headaches.

The wild thing is amoxicillin itself never seemed to have any bad side effect on me, I've done several courses of it over the years without trouble.

  > If i feed my chickens non-medicated feed, I'm able to enjoy their eggs. If i get them the feed with amoxicillin in it, headaches.

wow, i also get headaches when eating eggs... if its not amoxicillin itself, then what could it be?

I assume the chicken metabolizes some of it (or some other ingredient) into something that triggers that reaction in me. My family aren't affected by it, including my daughter. Its apparently not common.

I dunno how likely that is; the egg shouldn't have more than trace amounts of any contaminants in the chicken; the egg is filtered a step further than the meat is.

I found that salt enhanced the headache potential a lot, but with "clean" eggs it doesn't matter. but after this long i dont put salt on 'em anyhow.

Also, I grew up on a farm and ate a lot of eggs as a kid, those chickens weren't fed anything but some corn and were otherwise free range, so perhaps its a trained sensitivity?

  > I found that salt enhanced the headache potential a lot

wow, same here, i really wonder what it could be

  > so perhaps its a trained sensitivity?

interesting...i grew up in basically suburb, so not sure, but perhaps there are some other reasons... it would be a great research subject for sure

Wow, 6 months?! Why? Supply is pretty continuous, can keep them pretty much anywhere (even if there was just one county in one state suitable for rearing hens.. you could post them to any other faster than that?), what introduces such delay?

I am skeptical of that statement. It would be 6 times longer than the legally allowed time, for one thing.

Price stability requires a stockpile - there are egg warehouses dotted around the US, and they exist pretty much solely to ensure a regular supply and therefore predictable price of a very fundamental foodstuff.

I always think how come eggs can stay so fresh so long? Is there any other "whole" protein that stays fresh so long?

When you are trying to have babies, having them go off is a bit counter productive.

I suspect eggs just have a bunch of antibacterial compounds in the membrane and albumin.

As a kid I raised chickens and in the morning I could wait in the coop for an egg to drop. This egg always stood up in the pan. All fresh eggs stand up. The whites in store-bought eggs tend to be watery and spread out quickly, indicating that they've been sitting outside the chicken for an extended period.

Extra bit of trivia: the article mentions that southern Europe prefers darker orange, and indeed it's not uncommon in Italian to hear the egg be divided in "bianco e rosso" (White and red).

In recent years it seems the yellow color has become more common though.

I have seen eggs marketed specifically for pasta making which were darker orange to guarantee yellower pasta.

Their fanta is a darker orange too!

I don't know. I raise chickens. The only difference I've been able to determine between darker and lighter yolks are the age of the eggs. Same food for all the birds. If we don't go through the eggs fast enough, they go from orange to yellow. I'm not saying you can't fake it with additives, but the post must be missing something.

This is totally correct in my experience also raising chickens. Although, the old eggs from our chickens never got to be as colorless as the store bought.

Oxidation maybe? It would probably lead to color loss as carotenoids age. Would cause the yolks to eventually fade.

I just googled -- eggshells increase in permeability to oxygen after the first week, so my guess is this is what you are seeing!

I generally could care less about the color of an egg yolk but there’s one exception: the egg in ramen. It’s not that it tastes particularly better, marinating anything in soy sauce for a couple days will make it taste delicious. It’s often said we eat first with our eyes. I enjoy the contrast of colors. The dark red/orange looks much more appealing than a pale yellow yolk floating in a bowl of soup.

This also means that goose eggs are very yellow since their diet is nearly exclusively grass, at least when they are walking free.

Color is very important for food. My favorite story is the one [1] with wine tasting, where the same white wine was tasted twice by the same people, in one case with tasteless red color added. The taste was reported to be completely different. While it might be contributed to wine tasting being total BS, my favorite part of this study was that its author became a wine maker :-).

[1] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...

The color of food and drink certainly has suggestive power, but the popular conception of what that wine study shows, i.e. that wine tasting is complete junk, is itself complete junk.

A reddit comment summarizes it best: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4q6485/til_a...

I never said wine tasting was junk, but there is plenty of baloney in the reddit post. The worst part is the claim the author is not a scientist, merely an academic doing a study. Was his white coat missing? He did not attend Science University?

I also posted that the author is a wine maker, so it's clear he doesn't view the wine world as junk. My take away from it is that there's a lot going on in our head based on the input from the senses, that things are not black and white, and that it's difficult to rate things objectively because of it. And that this is completely fine, since we are humans and not machines, and if you can taste black currants in a wine and this makes you happy, knock yourself out.

Growing up as a 'white bread' kid in the 60's and 70's, I had never had a farm fresh egg, nor local hand-made bacon.

So you can imagine my delight when, exactly 40 years ago today on our honeymoon, we stayed with some friends of my parents on the Maine coast (Brooklin, in Penobscot Bay, on a little inlet called Herrick's Bay -- just visited there again last week) and they provided fresh local eggs and bacon for our breakfasts. It was truly ambrosial!

(Of course, being in the first days of our honeymoon, in a romantic little converted boathouse out over the water might also have had something to do with it.)

But I can attest that fresh eggs are night and day compared to store bought.

(Of course, we're spoiled now, getting our eggs from friends who raise free-range chickens, so fresh eggs are just table stakes.)

I'd think you'd only get table steaks if your friends also had cows.

On a serious note, it's kind of wild how horrible modern chickens are. Great twitter thread I saw yesterday: https://twitter.com/MrSollozzo/status/1515324097223225345

When I moved to Germany five years ago, I was stunned at how intensely orange the yolks were compared to the USA. But now I've noticed the color has significantly mellowed out.

Glad to know that this does not correlate with a decrease in quality.

Feeding the chickens dyes can make the yolk any color you want, they used to do it as a demo for chicken feed sales by making the yolks all different colors.

I live in South Africa and the yolks of the eggs my wife and I buy are absolutely not nearly white. It may differ by supermarket though, I generally shop at Woolworths which markets itself as having the best quality food, while also charging extra as a result.

Otherwise, perhaps it's only something which tends to occur with chickens grown by people for themselves in rural areas?

We get a lot of eggs from our neighbors and other local egg producers who put a lot of effort into raising healthy chickens. In addition to a deep-colored yolk I like to see how tall the yolk sits in the pan. For freshness, you might see thin, white ropes trailing from the yolk called chalazae.

Very interesting. I alternate between purchasing organic eggs and a variety called the Omega-3 egg; the former having a very bright yellow yolk and latter a deeper orange.

Was always curious if one is ”better” than the other. Interestingly, the omega variety tastes much better.

Taste can be highly subjective and suggestible. There is a german saying: Das Auge isst mit. (literally: the eye eats with you) which kind of makes you aware that a lot of things end up determining taste [0] beside the direct experience of consistency and composition. Applying to colors: one can use different colors in placebo pills to suggest very different effects [1].

In case of direct intervention, different diets given to hens can significantly modify the fat composition and content [2]. Fat being a major constituent of direct taste experience by "enhancing" (solution medium for phytochemicals etc.) and determining consistentcy. There are basically no carbs in eggs so in this case this can be left out.

Taste:

PUFAs (Omega-3s, Omega-6s, Omega-9s ...) are chemically speaking highly unstable (multiple double bonds) under normal conditions, all by themselves they oxidize completely very quickly* to avoid this you can shield them for a while with antioxidants (e.g. phytochemicals) and encase them with more stable fat (SFA (no double bonds), MUFA (one double bond)). PUFAs with their significantly lower melting point contribute to the perceived creaminess at even very cool temperatures: e.g. irish butter (high Omega-3 content) vs "normal"/cheap/highly industrialized butter (low).

[*consequently becoming "rancid" in taste. A lot of people are actually so used to that taste in highly processed/fast food (oxidized fats through excessive heat) that they consider it "very tasty". Analogous to the "burned" coffee taste/smell a lot of older folks (habit, childhood memories) still enjoy.]

Health:

In the typical modern western diet (because of massive inclusion of industrial cheap plant sources) the ratio of Omega 3's/6's is way off like 20:1 and more in favor of 6's. Analogous to Vitamin A (Carotenoids/Retinol) the plant form of Omega 3 (ALA) is inefficiently converted[3] by humans (young women probably because of different needs (pregnancy) can utilize it a bit better than men) to a bioactive form, adding to the disbalance. We evolved to get a significant amount of Omega 3's from animal and marine (rivers/sea) sources (ultimately the primary bioreactors for easily convertible EPA/DHA being (marine) algea and phytoplankton).

Maybe what hens get to eat could be seen as something very minor to consider. I actually would like it on the label (as an ingredients list for the sophisticated "bioreactor" maybe incl. the conditions like hours outside to produce Vitamin D, antibiotics given ...) that's why I'm more inclined if I am able to buy regionally to see for myself. In talks with farmers a lot of them - if they bother to engage in a conversation - are actually very knowledgeable and aware about this, as a city dweller just informing myself from books/studies I'm constantly impressed about their virtuosity.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski#Anecdotes

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2359128/

[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-00343-1

[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid#Conversio...

I wasn't aware that the red/orange leaves of autmns had their color due to caroten !

This was my main takeaway :)

This reminds me of something I saw on TV once where a farmer was feeding his chickens lots of spicy red peppers. Made the yolk a deep red and apparently spicy as well.

You can feed chickens red pepper flakes and their yolk will become darker and more orange in hue. Has no effect on taste, it's just for looks.

Quality of the food and treatment of the animal? Generally home grown chickens are more colored than supermarket

As long as the egg doesn't float when i put it in water, I'm good.

Similar answer to the question "why is salmon pink/orange?".

Just another example of how Organic (clean food) propaganda isn't based in science. I can't tell you how often I hear cooks swear by their redish, darkwe yolk eggs for having some kind of magic properties. Interesting article, good read.

Not disagreeing that there's plenty of propaganda and bad science out there, but I'm not sure why you chose to single out "organic propaganda". The article talks about the industry artificially adding substances to the yolk, which afaik is precisely what organic food people are against. Also, carotenoids may not be magic, but it's important to consume them.

> I can't tell you how often I hear cooks swear by their redish, darkwe yolk eggs for having some kind of magic properties.

To complicate matters, psychology can play a significant role in the material result when making things. It's like the placebo effect but for the engineer, the cook, the mechanic, the designer etc.

Obviously cooking is about more than the ingredients, they are important, but timing and intuition play a big role, the latter can be undermined if they start without believing in the ingredients... this applies to programming just as much as cooking.

I’d probably use the term “marketing” rather than “propaganda”.

chitin from bugs.

Not too long ago in China, consumers preferred duck eggs with red tinted yolks. Market vendors would crack off the top half of an egg and display its yolk, and consumers thought the redder the better.

So, of course, farmers started feeding a carcinogenic dye called Sudan Red directly to the ducks.

* http://www.china.org.cn/english/health/189567.htm

Chinese markets strike me as absolutely brutal.

I mean, there is always some theft, fraud etc. in any market (one of the oldest written records of humanity is a customer complaint about bad copper sold by a certain Mesopotamian merchant called Ea-nasir in 1750 BC), but stuff like poisoning your customers with Sudan Red, or adding melamine to yoghurt, or frying food on gutter oil seems to always be reported from China.

A lot of this was common in the US and Europe a hundred years ago, but laws and changing culture have stopped it. Just look at snake oil, or the many other “remedies”. See, eg, “ Down and Out in Paris and London” by Orwell, where among many other things he talks about how the restaurant kitchens in early 1900s Paris were extremely gross and dangerous, but because the front of the restaurants were clean, the customers seemed happy.

“A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, 'This toast is to be eaten—I must make it eatable'? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything.”

China is at an interesting point because they’ve developed economically so much in the last fifty years. Their culture and law enforcement hasn’t caught up yet while the internet has, so this is shared with us.

> how the restaurant kitchens in early 1900s Paris were extremely gross and dangerous, but because the front of the restaurants were clean, the customers seemed happy.

I heard a lot of restaurants in China these days, including takeout outlets, make live video feeds of their kitchens available online so that customers can be assured that the kitchens are hygienic. Of course that doesn’t tell you about the quality of source materials.

Well, a video feed of _a_ kitchen, at least.

I've ordered from such a place in Munich. The novelty factor made it entertaining to watch and at some point I could identify my order being prepared. Not sure how many people you could deceive before you start to get called out, if the feed was of a different kitchen

I’m not sure much has changed in regard to the anecdote you shared. Kitchens are under a lot of pressure to get food out quickly and finish all of an order at the same time.

I worked at a restaurant in the 90s as my very first job, and one day someone dropped a steak on the floor after it was done. I said oh dear, I’ll get another from the fridge. The cooks told me no, just wash it off and serve it, reasoning “If we bring out every else’s meal and they guy who ordered the steak has to wait 10 minutes, he’ll be mad”. My guess was that he would be angrier to know that he was served a steak that had been dropped on our filthy floor and given the choice, would probably prefer to wait for a different one.

Your anecdote sparked an old thought for me.

In your story, the customer would perceive the service as inferior if their food was late. A cook, knowing that the service isn't really inferior (there was just one little snag), justifies a little action to put appearances back closer to reality.

That last sentence is a study for me. I see it in everybody including myself. Somehow we convince ourselves that our ideal is the normal and the actual reality is an aberation. Then we rationalize little efforts to hide the aberation.

It can be hard to acknowledge the truth about ourselves and accept the consequences. But it is very hard to improve otherwise.

(At the same time we need to be careful of imposing overly severe consequences for mistakes.)

My last boss worked at a sandwich shop in college (Pasadena, CA). One shift he knocked over a 5 gallon bucket of olives, which spilled all over the floor.

He was mortified, but the owner seemed unperturbed. He handed him a broom and a dustpan and told him to get them all back in the bucket.

That reminds me of a story I heard from a friend in the Midwest who worked at a factory assembling frozen Italian dinners. He said that part of his job was to sweep up spilled grated cheese from the floor so they could use it in dinners.

And yet none of those examples compare to consciously using known poisons as a replacement for or additive to real food. That’s cynical brutality on another level.

How about preserving milk with formaldehyde?

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squ... https://allthatsinteresting.com/poison-squad-harvey-wiley

One of the tricks here is that "known" poisons are the same as "agreed-upon" poisons -- or that the definition of "poison" isn't as clear as you might assume.

If one compares the US/Canada and EU restrictions of additives with the assumption that the latter are founded, you'd come to the conclusion that the only thing North America must have more of than cynical brutality is cancer. However, while I'm not going to say they're right, there are typically plenty of folks in HN comment sections happy to say that many of the EU's food restrictions are ascientific pandering.

Everyone has some intuitive threshold about what they'd consider reasonable and what they wouldn't, but they don't always align. Acrylamide from roasting coffee? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-judge-rules-... Nitrates and nitrites are indisputably poisonous as hell, so are cured meats out of bounds? https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34615621

> formaldehyde

As a metabolic intermediate, formaldehyde is present at low levels in most living organisms. Formaldehyde can be found naturally in food up to the levels of 300 to 400 mg/kg, including fruits and vegetables (e.g. pear, apple, green onion), meats, fish, crustacean and dried mushroom, etc.

Ingestion of a small amount of formaldehyde is unlikely to cause any acute effect. The main health concern of formaldehyde is its cancer causing potential. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) considered that there was sufficient evidence for carcinogenicity in humans upon occupational exposure via inhalation. On the other hand, WHO in 2005 when setting its Drinking Water Guidelines considered that there was no definitive evidence for carcinogenicity upon ingestion.

Well, sure. Here's the thing: with anything, the dose makes the poison -- and "low levels" and "small amount" are pretty important phrases in those claims, right? (https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/MMG/MMGDetails.aspx?mmgid=216&toxid...) People aren't talking about the amounts in apples when they're referring to e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Indonesia_food_scare

Agree.

But selecting formaldehyde for your scary example mostly just sounds scary because of it’s relation with embalming fluid. As you say, anything can be poisonous: the LD50 of many substances is surprisingly high https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples

From https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/19th-century-f...

  In 1896, desperately concerned about diseases linked to pathogens in milk, he even endorsed formaldehyde as a good preservative. The recommended dose of two drops of formalin (a mix of 40 percent formaldehyde and 60 percent water) could preserve a pint of milk for several days. It was a tiny amount, Hurty said, and he thought it might make the product safer.

  But the amounts were often far from tiny. Thanks to Hurty, Indiana passed the Pure Food Law in 1899 but the state provided no money for enforcement or testing. So dairymen began increasing the dose of formaldehyde, seeking to keep their product “fresh” for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up with new formaldehyde mixtures with innocuous names such as Iceline or Preservaline. (The latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh for up to 10 days.) And as the dairy industry increased the amount of preservatives, the milk became more and more toxic.

  Hurty was alarmed enough that by 1899, he was urging that formaldehyde use be stopped, citing “increasing knowledge” that the compound could be dangerous even in small doses, especially to children. But the industry did not heed the warning.

  In the summer of 1900, The Indianapolis News reported on the deaths of three infants in the city’s orphanage due to formaldehyde poisoning. A further investigation indicated that at least 30 children had died two years prior due to use of the preservative, and in 1901, Hurty himself referenced the deaths of more than 400 children due to a combination of formaldehyde, dirt, and bacteria in milk.

  Following that outbreak, the state began prosecuting dairymen for using formaldehyde and, at least briefly, reduced the practice. But it wasn’t until Harvey Wiley and his allies helped secure the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 that the compound was at last banned from the food supply.

The article also talks about pasteurization being discovered in the 1850’s, but would not become standard procedure in the United States until the 1930s.

Can one really say that it's "mostly" its "relation with embalming fluid" that makes it scary... in a comment containing the line "at least 30 children had died two years prior due to use of the preservative"?

Also I want to be careful not to allow lethality to be seen as coextensive with poisonousness. Non-acute effect is kind of the name of the game with additive-type doses. The bulk of the misery caused by "lead poisoning" has nothing to do with people who hit an LD50-type threshold.

But we are missing the counterfactual of how many lives were saved due to the antibiotic effects of safe amounts of formaldehyde (previously mentioned two drops of formalin). Pasteurisation dropped infant deaths by 2/3rds, so it is quite possible that overall the addition of formaldehyde saved many lives (hard to tell without more study of whatever facts are available).

  Nonetheless, the pasteurization movement was gaining steam. In 1909 Chicago became the first American city to enforce a compulsory milk pasteurization law, despite strong opposition at the state level. After vehement back-and-forth editorials, prolonged political maneuvering, and a typhoid epidemic blamed on raw milk, New York’s commissioner of health followed suit in 1914 with the enforcement of a previously adopted ordinance. Seven years later the city’s infant mortality rate dropped to 71 deaths per every 1,000 births—less than one-third of the rate in 1891.

Disclaimer: I am an armchair scientist, so I know nothing about the subject beyond my few searches. I am just trying to follow up on a “fact” that seems to be very biased. Even in modern times with strict standards and far far better systems of protection and antibiotic interventions, raw milk causes problems:

  Raw milk and raw milk products can be contaminated with bacteria that cause serious illness, hospitalization or even death. From 1998 through 2011, 148 outbreaks due to consumption of raw milk or raw milk products were reported to CDC. These resulted in 2,384 illnesses, 284 hospitalizations and 2 deaths. Most of the illnesses were caused by E. coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella or Listeria. A substantial proportion of the raw milk-associated disease burden falls on children; among the 104 outbreaks from 1998-2011 with information on the patients' ages available, 82% involved at least one person younger than 20 years old.

I would like to read this paywalled paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30234385/

This used to be common in parts of Europe as well. There is a book called From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats, from the food journalist Bee Wilson [1], which tells (among many other things) a lot of stories about arsenic poisonings in 19th century London, caused by the usage of certain red dyes in food. The saying that certain regulations are written in blood comes from these kinds of stories.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2507738.Swindled

Yes there was an extract in NYT comparting the issues with baby formula in 2008 China with 1850s New York

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/opinion/30wilson.html

China has moved from the 3rd world to the developed world in just 30 years. Their laws and social development have yet to catch up with their economic development. Most of the people in any kind of power position are in their 50s-60s ie those that grew up in a very harsh world. It will take another 20~30 years for it to change.

> ... but stuff like poisoning your customers with Sudan Red

I obviously am not in favor of using potentially carcinogenic dyes in foodstuffs, but in the case of the minute quantities of Sudan dies that would find their way into the eggs, I think "poisoning your customers" is a touch strong. Poisoning your ducks, maybe.

Sudan dies are listed under Directive 67/548/EEC [1] as a Category III carcinogen. The description of that designation is:

  Substances which cause concern for man owing to possible carcinogenic effects but in respect of which available information is not adequate for making a satisfactory assessment. There is some evidence from appropriate animal studies, but this is insufficient to place the substance in Category II. [2, p.19]

My understanding is the studies on Sudan dies showed potential carcinogenic activity in mice but not in rats. [3]

When the Germans did a risk assessment on imports of certain spices from India with Sudan dies they said:

  The assessment that the risk of cancer is probably very low in the case of occasional consumption of foods with a low level does not, however, mean that there is no risk at all. [3]

Again, probably still shouldn't eat, but I think a little perspective is healthy here too. You're not gonna die from having a couple of red eggs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_67/548/EEC

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/environment/archives/dansub/pdfs/annex6...

[3] https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/dyes_sudan_I_IV.pdf

Same goes with India as well. I have always wondered about this, may be it is the trade-off between getting caught and the sheer desperation to make money that tilts the moral compass to act in unethical ways.

Interestingly the Germans also found some Sudan dies in spices imported from India. [1]

[1] https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/dyes_sudan_I_IV.pdf

>> and the sheer desperation to make money that tilts the moral compass

A very western sentiment. We often deride the quest for profits, demonizing people who put profit ahead of something more noble like safety. But in places like China "profit" is life. China has seen starvation in living memory. In countries without social safety nets a failed business likely means utter destitution, very often leading to physical violence. The people who run restaurants, and certainly the people who work in them, are not chasing profits because they want to drive nice cars. They are chasing profits because they too want to keep eating.

But doesn't getting caught poisoning customers result in destitution too?

I guess it was quite a long time ago now but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_diethylene_glycol_wine_sc...

Wild. I was a kid in 1985, so not interested in wine yet, though Austria is right next door.

There were several recent affairs in Europe with adulteration of suspect booze in the black (or gray) market with methylalcohol. That would fit right in.

Well that might be a concerted effort to keep your attention turned away from all the similarly nasty things happening in your own country. In my country I think about older examples like the Swill Milk Scandal of the 1850s but more recent efforts like “ag-gag laws” that make it a crime to document the brutal conditions inside slaughterhouses and food processing facilities. This isn’t just a “China” problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal

Not just Chinese markets, but Chinese products today, such as the cat food and melamine issue, and baby formula. Consumable Chinese products should have a warning label

The fake Chinese eggs were the high point for me

Just read about those [1]. I was struck that the ingredients were similar to what’s in Gaviscon:

- Sodium alginate

- Calcium carbonate

[1]: https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/fake-chinese-eggs-are-...

You’ve got to admire the ingenuity

Turmeric has had similar issues, with some individuals adding industrial lead chromate to improve the colors (and add to the weight, as it is sold by weight) https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/28/turmeric-...

And if it was sold by volume they'd just be using some other type of filler. Outside of rigorous regulation it's hard to figure out how to fix this sort of thing. But then you end can also end up with massive factory farms or meat processing plants etc that can min/max the penalties against the profits, not to mention corrupt inspections.

  > Not too long ago in China...

And still happening in Europe and the United States today.

Canthaxanthin is very commonly added to farmed Salmon, to change its natural colour from grey to pink. Known to cause eye diseases in humans, it is also linked to several types of cancer in humans, but not proven as a carcinogen.

And though Europe has banned the Azo food colourings, they are still perfectly legal to add to food in the US. And though their effects are mostly on children, it is specifically childrens' foods and snacks to which these bright colours are added.

> Europe has banned the Azo food colourings

Europe has indeed banned some Azo food colorings, however canthaxanthin is not one of them, as far as I am aware. The EU has evaluated the safety of it on multiple occasions and found it safe to consume at the levels used in the food supply.

> Known to cause eye diseases in humans

Extremely excessive intake of tanning pills containing canthaxanthin was shown to cause accumulation of deposits in the retinas of a small number of individuals. Once the intake of pills was stopped, the condition completely cleared up in all individuals effected.

>Known to cause eye diseases in humans

... when taken in massive doses as a skin-tanning supplement. As far as I know, there's no evidence whatsoever of side-effects in humans when eaten in the quantities typical to those involved in produce like salmon/eggs.

That’s a perfect example of Goodhart's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

wasn't the social credit system supposed to fix this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System (i mean it looks like a 'big brother' system, but it was introduced with the objective of fixing abuses like this)

Do corporations and other juridical persons also get a social credit score? This abuse was committed by a corp, not some farmer.

One of the "nice" things about China's one-party and nakedly authoritarian nature is that the corporate veil doesn't really exist: if the Chinese government one day decides that the CEO of a company deserves to have their social credit measured against some set of civic outcomes produced by their company, then there's nothing stopping them from doing so.

Eggcellent, what a cracking article!

To save people a pointless click:

In the end, your egg depends on what the chicken eats, and the chicken depends on what the farmer feeds it. So, don’t worry too much about the colour – just enjoy your egg!

I found that conclusion weirdly dismissive, given how detailed the carotenes and their effect and regional preferences were described. It doesn't do the article justice to summarize it like that.

The other points are that:

- color preference varies by country

- in mass production, the yolk color can be tweaked by the producer with food additives (e.g. https://www.dsm.com/anh/en_NA/products/carotenoids/carophyll...)

>> 4. I will vote you down if you 'tl;dr and summarise' any article; We're all grown-ups, and we all know how to read thanks.

Isn’t your comment against your own policy?

We all know how to read, but do we all know how to click?

Cognitive dissonance. Believed i didn't have it, i was wrong

did you just research someone’s profile in an attempt to nit pick something they said?

There’s definitely a problem online these days, when people take 5 pages to state 2 sentences worth of points, and it’s not the TLDR people…

did you just waste a min of your time by stating the obvious and trying to add some fuel to fire?

article and discussion is about Eggs! you are free to click and comment on something else if you find it pointless.

> did you just waste a min of your time by stating the obvious and trying to add some fuel to fire?

How is correcting or calling out someone’s sketch behavior wasting time?

> article and discussion is about Eggs! you are free to click and comment on something else if you find it pointless.

Yes and I found it interesting. What gave you the idea that I don’t? Perhaps maybe I don’t talk much on this site and read more articles and comments than you think?

And as far as adding more fuel to the fire, what exactly are you doing?

You get an up-vote for that. Well done!

I felt the whole article was pointless fluff, and just had to call it out. I feel no guilt.

That's Eggstreme @Jaruzel. Humankind would still be living in caves without your public service.

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