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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

in Europe it's forbidden to sell washed eggs, so you're literally buying eggs covered in chicken shit, it's an interesting regulatory divergence.

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If you’re buying eggs covered in excrement, that’s on you. That’s what the law is for: for the seller and producer not being able to hide the awful conditions in which the eggs were produced. If you want clean eggs, buy clean eggs, which will then necessarily have been produced in a clean environment, more healthy for the chickens, and also with less risk of contaminated eggs.

Exactly this. I have chickens and when I collect the eggs they are usually completely clean. Only if I start to slack on cleaning the coop or one of the chickens gets sick do the eggs get dirty.

I can imagine most eggs sold in the United States would be horrifying if not washed.

The size of the nestbox can be a factor as well. If the nestbox is too large for the breed of chicken you keep, it encourages them to hang out inside it, and they walk on the eggs and get them dirty.

If a nestbox is the right size, it will only be used for laying eggs (and occasional brooding).

Hmm that is definitely possible. They do tend to track poop in from the main part of the coop to the boxes.

But if I keep the coop clean it’s not really a problem.

> That’s what the law is for: for the seller and producer not being able to hide the awful conditions in which the eggs were produced.

AFAIK, those laws are about eggs getting silently contaminated because their shells became porous during the wash.

But that one is a really nice side-effect.

As it turns out, the eggs covered in chicken excrement are those that haven't been power washed, so the actual edible part of the egg is safer...

Per NPR, washing eggs was the historical norm until the 1960s or 1970s...(https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...)

What changed is that the USDA discovered how to wash eggs properly and so mandated the method by which eggs must be washed, while Europe went the complete opposite direction and decided to outlaw washing eggs (prior to sale) but encouraged/mandated that chickens get vaccinated for salmonella (which is not required in the U.S.).

My understanding is that unwashed eggs preserve a protective layer that inhibits bacterial growth, which is why washed eggs in the US must be refrigerated instead. I think they are both valid methods.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...

Yes it’s one of those weird American things. Like being extremely worried about chicken meat because the conditions chicken are raised in are so awful you can’t trust it’s not contaminated.

I find it endlessly amusing that Americans are both extremely worried about food safety and apparently completely unable to pass reasonable food safety law.

It's largely a generational thing. Most baby boomers are afraid to eat eat even slightly pink beef. Arguments that millions of Americans eat hamburgers with the middle of the paddy still oozing blood and virtually nobody is harmed by it fall on deaf ears. Old dogs, new tricks, etc.

Unwashed eggs can also be refrigerated, and they last an absurdly long time that way — much, much longer than either refrigerated washed eggs or unrefrigerated unwashed eggs.

Once you refrigerate unwashed eggs, though, they need to stay refrigerated thereafter.

Here in Norway, farmers have been lamenting the EU rules of requiring a rather short "best before" limit of 28 days while our eggs are safe a lot longer[1], typically 4 months but can last over a year[2].

So they changed it to "best before <date> but not bad after" and have been regularly running campaigns reminding people.

[1]: https://www.prior.no/artikkel/datomerking-av-egg

[2]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/eggene-varer-_nesten_-evig-1.759...

I've lived in Bulgaria, Ireland, and Poland, and I've never seen dirty eggs in the stores. Are you sure about that?

I have never ever seen this in any European country.

I see this regularly in the Netherlands, sometimes even with a feather attached.

I’ve seen feathers but not poo except maybe on the rarest of instances.

Educate yourself on chicken anatomy and physiology https://www.getstronganimals.com/post/chicken-anatomy-101

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