There is also much confusion about how food actually goes bad. There are some foods that absolutely should be avoided after a specific amount of time. But most will go bad somewhat randomly, mostly after but often before their sell/best by dates. Sometimes a jug of milk will be bad before it even arrives at a store. Sometimes mold will appear on fresh bread very suddenly. Food is more complicated than fixed dates.
I was buying eggs recently when I, as my mother taught me, opened the case and checked to see if any had cracked. The person beside me said "I hope you are buying those" as if me touching them somehow made them unsellable. People need to learn more about food.
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).
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.
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.
To be fair, we’ve recently been through a period when infection by physical contact was at least initially widely viewed as a thing even if elbow pumps and obsessive hand washing turned out to probably not be much of a deal. But there was certainly a year so there when if you touched something in a supermarket and put it back you were inviting lots of stink eye.
I think as a general rule, biology loathes blunt instruments. That's not to say these things aren't more useful than just guessing, but as this legislation (or rather the underlying issue that led to its passing) shows is that a lot of this stuff is very poorly understood.
I was buying eggs recently when I, as my mother taught me, opened the case and checked to see if any had cracked. The person beside me said "I hope you are buying those" as if me touching them somehow made them unsellable. People need to learn more about food.