Speaking to my sister in California last week, I was utterly gobsmacked to learn that 500 million hen’s eggs recalled due to a salmonella outbreak in the US last week came from two farms.
Two farms. 500 million eggs. Gob. Smacked. When my mind recovered, the questions foremost in it were: how did it get that way, and why? I don’t know if the US system is like the Australian system, where one massive “farm” is actually more of a distribution deal, with many smaller producers farming eggs under contract for the main “farm”, but everything I’ve read about the US recall points directly at two “farms”, with no information to suggest these are anything other than very very large farms.
Scritch scratch
Expert solutions to this man-made natural disaster range from the commonsense (simply throwing out suspect eggs, ie those that are cracked or older than a month) to the unrealistic (never eating even a slightly runny egg, meringue or real mayonnaise ever again) to the cure-possibly-worse-than-disease (substituting “pasteurized liquid egg product” for real, fresh eggs).
While we ponder the wisdom of solutions which address symptoms, not disease, let’s look at the situation in Australia. Recent stats show we have more than 400 specialist egg producers with about 13 million chooks providing around 2.3 billion eggs annually (with most bought by Australians and a few exported to Singapore, the US and the Philippines). Most eggs produced here are cage eggs, but signs are pointing towards people favouring smaller farms over bigger, and I am glad that our shopping dollars can work against the industrialisation of fresh food production, which I am very much against.
I prefer to buy our eggs (no more than two days old) from one of the farmers at my local weekend market (59c per egg for 58 gram eggs). But if that’s not an option, major Australian grocery chain offer choices ranging from cage eggs (25c each, 58 gram eggs) to RSPCA-certified barn eggs (43c each, 50 gram eggs) through to free-range certified organic eggs (61c each, 55 gram eggs). I usually go for the free-range which are grown within half an hour’s drive of my home, but sometimes the ones that have travelled a bit are OK too. (I loved this article on the country’s biggest free-range egg farmer. We should all be so fond of our jobs.)
While I’m grateful that we have these options, believe me, I’m not smug in the belief that they are either perfect or unassailable. Last month, the Australian Egg Corporation was in the media for its plans to change the definition of “free range” to include hens farmed at much greater density and to allow de-beaking of chooks, which is presumably to help giant producers to remain competitive. But if people continue to push their shopping dollars towards free range, low-density farmed eggs–and even in the tightest budget, top-quality fresh organic eggs are still going to be a very cheap family meal–hopefully our options will remain open. So, yeah, if you want Dora the Explorer eggs, you can get em. But you can also get straight-up fresh eggs from the person who looks after the chickens.
And to give thanks for the latter, here’s my recipe for excellent homemade mayonnaise, made this week with nice fresh eggs from the Barossa Valley. Eat in good health and enjoy.
