My Life in France was a fascinating book. At one point she describes dangling raw chickens out of her apartment window for three days before roasting. I guess we’d call that “dry aging” now but it repulses every fiber of my food safety being.
However, it did not stunt her growth or shorten her lifespan.
A lot of American food-safety guidance is needed because we sterilized away the food's natural defenses. Go to most parts of the world and you'll find meat and eggs left safely on the counter for hours, or even consumed raw. We can't do that in America, because we've bleached and washed the good stuff away.
Eggs are the usual example. US regulations require eggs to washed, removing a protective coating, which is why Americans refrigerate eggs. Many other developed nations forbid washing eggs with solutions that would remove the same protective coating, so eggs are frequently not refrigerated there because they don’t really need to be. The motivation in the US was avoiding salmonella, but other places have avoided that by improving cleanliness practices of the farms rather than washing their eggs.
Kind of different, but recent requirements to label foods containing sesame as an allergen led to more foods having sesame intentionally added, since it’s cheaper to add it intentionally and then label it than to prove the production facility and ingredients are 100% sesame free. It’s not removing some natural defense from a food, but that’s a regulation intended to help people with allergens stay safer which inadvertently decreased their options (and maybe made it more likely they’d buy something containing sesame by mistake if it was a product they’d been safe with before but had recently added sesame).
So I very much agree with you that the food regulations of the FDA and similar institutions in other countries are largely a blessing and huge boon to human welfare. It’s great to be confident my bread isn’t 50% sawdust and there probably isn’t melamine in my milk and stuff. But like any big regulatory environment mistakes have been made, and also sometimes regulations that made sense at one time outlive their usefulness.
Having eating restrictions / allergies, or even being handicapped, is a nightmare in the global south. I don't think it's a problem to restrict options out of an abundance of caution.
Well-intentioned change, unintentional bad outcome for those affected.
(And the regulators/legislators intention had been to benefit those allergic, so it's not just an unfortunate side-effect, it totally backfired.)
The egg thing is oft repeated, but not actually true. The coating is not magic, it's just oil, and America does wash the eggs, and then applies some oil. I have not refrigerated my eggs in the US in decades with no problems at all.
> The motivation in the US was avoiding salmonella, but other places have avoided that by improving cleanliness practices of the farms rather than washing their eggs.
This isn't true either. Other places avoid salmonella by immunizing their chickens. It's not required in the US (mainly because since the US refrigerates its eggs, immunization doesn't help much), but more and more farms are immunizing chickens, eventually the reason for refrigerating eggs will vanish - but I'm sure they'll still require it. (The circular relationship between these two things is not lost on me.)
Farmers in the UK value cleanliness not because of Salmonella but because dirty farms make for dirty eggs as seen by the consumer, since they aren't allowed to clean them.
> The coating is not magic, it's just oil
To say it is "just oil" is to say that breast milk is "just formula."
Yes, the cuticle has oil in it and is an oily substance, but it's a complex mixture of proteins, lipids,some of which are oily. The starkest difference of course being that mineral oil, the usual post-wash coating, would not allow the egg to remain viable, irrespective of whether it had been sanitized. It is less permable to gases than the natural cuticle, and less effective at preventing bacterial growth. As you have discovered, less effective does not mean not at all effective, and I store both my unwashed and store-bought eggs on the counter as well, but even discounting supply chain timings, the natural eggs keep longer.
Why do they need to add the sesame? can't they just say "might contain sesame" without having to explicitly add it?
That doesn’t ring true to me.
My wife is more like you in the respect that she will not let me air dry chicken in our house. Even though she knows it is delicious, and even if I just keep (e.g.) chicken thighs uncovered in a refrigerator in accordance with a recipe, she won't eat the finished product because of that visceral response.
I can sometimes exploit when she is away for work to air dry my chicken, then cook them before she can see that they've been air dried. She loves it so long as she does not know how it was prepared, and still loves it after she is told, but weirdly (to me, anyway) will not eat it if she knows it was air dried.
Brillat-Savarin: “the peak is reached when the pheasant begins to decompose; its aroma develops, and mixes with an oil which in order to form must undergo a certain amount of fermentation, just as the oil in coffee can only be drawn out by roasting it.”
That said, you hang pheasants prior to plucking and gutting, so they are still sealed; feels odder hanging a plucked bird like a chicken. I'm not sure if the former is in fact safer?