Don't shoot the messenger but attitude to hygiene standards are different shall we say in the US, compared to Europe. In the US it seems the level of husbandry in huge operations is such that cleaning is deemed essential.
IE chlorinated washes to clean chicken carcasses. I have no idea how battery farmed eggs could ever be contaminated but hey, I guess the authorities there just want to covertheir arses and have the eggs cleaned too? Mental because shells are porous.
In Europe, the BS merchants in Brussels will tell the world their farmers run their industrial scale farms at a hospital level of clean. Maybe they do in comparison, I don't know.
But I do know that the everyday person who tries an egg from a chicken living in humane circumstances from chicken owners like us can't believe how tasty the eggs are, and can see the difference in the look of the yolk, compared to the perfect industrial European egg.
So anything that dismantles the industrial farming of chickens, and BS rules, sign me up.
Eggs from a chicken house of 40,000 chickens are definitely different from a hundred or even a few thousand chickens out on pasture. But when I take an egg out of the coop and it has a chunk of poop on it, I need to get it off. If it not, I don’t. I’ve wondered how they get any poop off of eggs in Europe if they can’t wash them, even with a little plain warm water.
You can remove bits of dry matter with a sanding pad. Any more than that it's time to check the nest box design! I'll look up a demo of super efficient egg sorting and packing for you. Might make you rethink a few things!
My understanding is that it’s down to salmonella vaccination: the US doesn’t, so the flocks are full of it, so the eggs and meat need to be cleaned. Europe/UK does, so the eggs and meat don’t have much risk of contamination.
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