Why Americans Refrigerate Eggs

Being raised in the United States, I was startled during my first trip out of the country. I noticed that the eggs at the store were not refrigerated. How is this possible? I assume it had something to do with being uncivilized and poor, because, of course, people often assume that the ways of one’s own country are the only right ways.

As my travels increased, I noticed it again and again. I gradually came to realize that the United States is the outlier, apparently the only country in the world where eggs go from the chicken to the refrigerator both at the store and at home. People assume that they would otherwise spoil.

How, then, is it possible that people are not getting sick and dying from rotten eggs all over Europe, Latin America, and the Far East? People all over the world have eaten eggs without refrigeration. For that matter, refrigerators only became commonplace in American homes in the middle of the 20th century. How is this possible?

I once visited a recreated general store from the 1920s and it had a jar of pickled eggs. My assumption then was that this is how people managed to keep eggs past the laying. They soaked them in vinegar and that kept them fresh.

Well, all of this is bullocks. The United States is the only country in the world that requires the washing of eggs before they are sold. As a result, the outside membrane called the cuticle is washed away, leaving them vulnerable to outside bacteria and other sources of spoilage. That is why they must be refrigerated.

Once refrigerated, they cannot sit on the counter. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) explains: “After eggs are refrigerated, they need to stay that way. A cold egg left out at room temperature can sweat, facilitating the movement of bacteria into the egg and increasing the growth of bacteria. Refrigerated eggs should not be left out more than 2 hours.”

However, if you do not wash away the cuticle, they can sit happily on the counter for a very long time and be ready to eat anytime.

The USDA is perfectly correct on this point too: “It’s not necessary or recommended for consumers to wash eggs and may actually increase the risk of contamination because the wash water can be ‘sucked’ into the egg through the pores in the shell. When the chicken lays the egg, a protective coating is put on the outside by the hen.”

I wondered if the Americans did this because of our love of new technology, which is a feature of our culture dating back to the earliest days of the Republic. We have infinite confidence in progress based on our experiences with every growing standard of living. We like to use our gizmos and adapt our lives around them. We do this with digital things now, imposing scans and apps even when they are wholly unnecessary. Maybe the same thing happened with eggs?

That turns out not to be true in this case. The rule that you cannot sell eggs without first washing them, even on a farm, comes directly from the USDA. The USDA is perfectly clear: “Government regulations require that USDA-graded eggs be carefully washed and sanitized using only compounds meeting FDA regulations for processing foods.”

Again, the only country in the world where this is true!

Maybe this practice traces in the American obsession with cleanliness. We shower more than anyone else. We wash our hair incessantly. When it was announced that we all have to stay away from each other to get away from the bad new virus, most Americans readily complied. This comes down to the (faulty) view that all bad pathogens are external and the key to health is keeping them as far away as possible.

As it turns out, that is not the reason either, though many people never question the rule for this precise reason.

The actual reason was explained to me by a lady at one of the surviving local farms that raises its own vegetables and tends to livestock for meat. She also sells fresh eggs, but only from the refrigerator. Why are they refrigerated, I asked?

She explained with some anger that she is required by the USDA to wash them. This makes no sense, she said, because her eggs are not dirty. The chickens roam freely, they are happy and spaced out in their coops, and the eggs they lay are beautiful, clean, and ready to eat. She doesn’t like washing off the cuticle but she has to in any case.

As for her own personal chickens and eggs, she never washes them and leaves them on the counter. But she is not allowed to sell those. She can give them away to friends and family but not sell them to the general public.

I kept probing. What is the reason for this?

She put it plainly. It’s because of Big Agriculture and industrial methods of egg harvesting. They pack chickens in huge warehouses inches apart and in tight layers. The whole place is a gigantic mess because machines cannot stop the natural function of the digestive system. In essence, the place is filthy. As a result, washing the eggs is absolutely necessary in order to remove all the pathogenic muck.

The industry, then, lobbied the government over decades to make this a general rule, providing them with a level competitive playing field with small farmers who run much cleaner operations. This way everyone has to wash their eggs and all eggs for sale have to be put into the refrigerator immediately, because without the cuticle, they are vulnerable to infection.

Having explained all this, she ended with a final cry of fury: “My chickens are not dirty and neither are their eggs!”

What about the bird flu? She said she has never seen any evidence of this bird flu in her flock. She can easily imagine, however, that industrialized methods would make chickens vulnerable to every manner of infection. But why should small farmers be forced to take precautions against a danger that mainly affects heavily subsidized industrial farms? She quickly added that her farm gets no subsidies at all, and is barely surviving.

In effect, the USDA and the FDA have adopted rules on behalf of the biggest players in the industry while forgetting about the small farmers. I’m far from being an expert on this topic but everywhere I look I find agency-generated rules rather than legislation from Congress.

And so one wonders what happens now that the Supreme Court has clearly said that agencies cannot simply pass their own rules without a legislative mandate on the particulars. This momentous decision is called Loper Bright and it repudiates the previous rule of Chevron deference. One does wonder if finally small farmers have a fighting chance now.

Maybe in the future, Americans will have the right to raise and sell eggs without washing off the protective layer from the shells. Maybe in the future, we will stop being the one outlying country in the entire world that routinely refrigerates our chicken eggs? We shall see.