Many people envision healthy nutritious eggs to be those raised organically or naturally with free-range pastured hens, but have you ever thought about what happens after the eggs are collected?
Recently some alert members spotted an article on this very topic and were concerned by what they read.
Eggs need to be porous, allowing air to pass through to the inside of the egg so that it can breathe, yet at the same time the egg is protected from bacterial invasion by a natural waxy coating called the bloom.
Commercial industry practice is to wash eggs thoroughly. On the surface this appears to be a positive thing, but as they say, the devil is in the details. Unfortunately, this washing removes the bloom, opening the egg to infection. To compensate for this, commercial industry practice is to replace the bloom with a mineral oil coating. More unfortunately, mineral oil is a petroleum-based product that can penetrate the porous egg shell. The International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS) states, “exposure to mineral oils should be kept to a minimum.”
Valley Natural Foods offers organic eggs from two providers: Organic Valley and Schultz Organic. According to Organic Valley, their “shell eggs are never washed or sanitized with chlorine, and they are never oiled.” Instead, the eggs are “washed with a soap approved for organic use. The eggs spend less than one minute in the wash process. After being washed, the eggs travel through a rinse section, and into an air dry section.”
If you’d like to go one step further, consider this from Larry Schultz: “Our eggs typically reach the store before they are over a week old. We do not use any oils, chlorines, lye, peracetic acids, or sodium carbonates. Our eggs come to the store as clean and natural as we can with nothing applied.”
So if you like healthy fresh petrochemical-free organic eggs, stop by our dairy department for the best eggs nature can provide!
