I’m sure you’ve read or heard something in the news about the humongous egg recall that took place last week. The latest numbers I’ve heard are that about 500 million eggs were recalled for fear they might be tainted with salmonella. (I don’t know that I’ve ever had salmonella, but I’ve heard it is incredibly awful.) That’s an incredible number of eggs. Us egg lovers are saddened by such a waste.
As always, I believe, the best solution to this and other potential food borne illness crises is to be sensible consumers. But first, take a minute to put that 500 million egg recall into some perspective.
Is it REALLY such a huge number of eggs to be recalled, given the enormous number of eggs Americans alone eat in a given year? Care to take a guess how many eggs we gobble down in a year?
Nope. You’re not even close, would be my guess about your guess.
According to information from the Commodities Research Bureau (CRB), Americans alone consumed 6.530 BILLION eggs in 2007, the latest year for which I could find a count. The CRB suggested that was a 10-year high and reflected increased egg consumption as more people were turning toward low-carb diets.
Now that’s a lot of eggs, boiled, fried, poached, scrambled, or however you like them. (My personal favorite is fried over-easy, but I’ve learned to appreciate my wife’s favorite cooking method, scrambled.) So at least that might help us put all this egg business in a little better perspective before we conclude that the sky may be falling.
The fact of the matter is, our food system is NOT and never has been completely safe. When we “buy organic” or just shop at a nearby mom-and-pop supplier rather than buying food that’s been shipped across the country or around the world — there’s still no guarantee that mom and pop or the local suppliers are offering better protected, safer food products. Little does not always mean better than big.
We can, however, expect regulatory agencies over our food and drug supplies to do their jobs. No one knows, yet, how the egg crisis developed. There’s no clear indication that regulators dropped any balls (or cracked any eggs?) on this one. Nevertheless, given the enormity of our nation’s food supply chain and the limited number of federal, state, and local regulators — we don’t always get the quality of service we expect.
Maybe the answer lies in more and better food regulations, at least partially. But above all, the answer lies with us, good old American consumers. We need to learn how to handle and how to prepare food in the safest possible ways — or be prepared to take the consequences of our negligence.
You really like those sunny-side-up eggs, do you? Then be warned that uncooked or undercooked eggs ALWAYS carry a risk of salmonella or other bacterial/viral infections. That’s because bacteria are every where, and many of them tend to thrive in the human digestive track. Not all of those happy little bacterial residents of our digestive tracks are nice guys, either.
You really like breaking a raw egg into the blender with other goodies for that special “power shake” concoction you’ve created? Well, for those same reasons, you’re doing so at your own risk.
Sure, trust the food producers, suppliers, regulators, your local grocery, and all the rest — but prepare all your food carefully and wisely. The life you save COULD be your own!