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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny that if you tried to sell US eggs in the UK, they'd be illegal, and the UK eggs would be illegal in the US.

But Japan has the best eggs and you can eat them raw or half-cooked without any fear of salmonella.

UK eggs are safe to eat raw.

The advice warning people to cook them was from the 80s and was rescinded a couple of years ago, thanks in large part to he improvement in conditions and husbandry that the other posts in here are talking about. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41568998

I would also stress that the UK's production is now well over 50% free-range and organic. These concepts are still pretty alien to Japan. If you're only familiar with caged eggs, I would really suggest you get out there and try some other breeds on organic farms.

I cant speak for US eggs, but UK eggs have been safe for decades [1].

This study [2] found salmonella in 13% of Japanese eggs, (although doesn't seem to be supported by [3]).

So I think you need to support your assertion.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-41568998

[2] https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijmicro/2013/463095/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3622169/

There are plenty of countries where you can eat the eggs raw. You just need eggs laid by chickens in a normal environment, rather than from the insanely messed up industrial chicken industry that some western countries have opted for.

You got this mixed up. The reason why you can eat Japanese eggs raw is because they're almost exclusively battery eggs.

Nearly. The reason you can eat them raw is that the vaccinate them. This is orthogonal to whether you battery farm them.

How does industrial chicken rearing change the quality of the eggs such that it's no longer edible raw?

I'm assuming it's because the eggs end up quite dirty, therefore they must be washed, which removes the protective membrane. And perhaps the chickens are more prone to acquiring salmonella.

They feed the chickens concentrates and keep them in locked up in "batteries". Some of them die there and they're not removed immediately. There are plenty of horrid videos on Youtube.

Compare that to a soil growing chickens that scrape around for worms and eat grass, corn, wheat and leftovers from the kitchen. In fact that's the best part: you can feed them most most vegetable leftovers as long as they're fresh. Only the younger ones need to be fed some concentrates until they grow up because they're quite vulnerable to diseases carried by other birds, especially pigeons.

"Some of them die there and they're not removed immediately"

In the US I don't believe you have to remove the dead chickens before introducing a new generation of chickens to the shed.

So salmonella only occurs on factory farms? That’s a nonsense to suggest that. Backyard chickens seem to transmit salmonella at higher rates than factory chickens.

No, but antibiotic resistant Salmonella occurs mostly where chickens are given antibiotics mixed in their daily meals. That's standard pratcice in farms.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/02/561584723/bi...

I didn't say factory farms, but that seems very difficult for some people to understand. I said insanely messed up industrial chicken industry. The kind where you just leave your dead chickens to rot next to your live chickens, where you don't give a shit about disease and contaminants "because we'll clean the eggs later", where you don't maintain a minimal sanitary level because "that just costs money", etc.

You can run a chicken battery with perfectly healthy chickens, plenty of light, hen retirement once their production drops below profitable instead of making them "lay until they drop dead", etc.

I'll bite: why does Japan have the best eggs?

It's all about how they're farmed. Japanese take health and sanitation of chickens very seriously and they constantly do tests. Much more often than you'd see at US farms. US farmers depend on anti-bacterial washings of eggs and antibiotics in chicken feed as the primary defense against salmonella and other bacteria.

Since dishes made with raw eggs are so popular in Japan, they take all these precautions to the max. When I travel to Japan, I have zero worries when I crack a raw egg on top of my ramen, for example. Also, their omelettes are a lot runnier and taste different. I would never do that with US eggs. Also, their yolks are also much more orange/red in color. US eggs are mainly yellow in color.

You can read more here: http://jlec-pr.jp/egg

In Japan you only get 4 for the price of a dozen, and I didn't really notice a difference.

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