Hey everybody quintessential to the idea of homesteading is getting to have fresh eggs
every single day, but if you're going to the grocery store for your eggs, are they really
as fresh as you think they are? A few days ago, Lisa Steele, author of Fresh
Eggs Daily, posted this picture to let her readers know about just how long an egg can
actually sit on the shelves of grocery stores before somebody buys them. Well, behind this
wall is one of our local supermarkets and we want to independently verify whether or
not eggs really do sit on a shelf for 30-45 days before you get to take them home.
So just to make sure that we're all on the same page, today is Wednesday, January 20, 2016.
If you're out shopping for eggs, even though you want to have chickens at the house, then you're probably looking for things that interest
you. You're looking for words like cage free and organic. The one shocking thing that we
found, if you look at the code on the side of this container, you're looking for 2 possibilities,
either a date or a Julian code. On this container we happen to have both. The Julian code says
344. That means that the eggs were put into the package on day 344 out of a calendar year.
It also says best by January 23, so we know that that is the date that the store expects
for these eggs to come off the shelf. These eggs have been in a package for 41 days.
But we didn't stop there. We went to 3 separate supermarket chains to see if it was the same
situation everywhere we went and sure enough it was. We kept finding eggs that were 20,
30 days inside of their packaging. These are the eggs that you're buying that are labeled
as being farm fresh. Fresh eggs for you to take home to your family. Do you think that
eggs that have been in a package for 20 days are fresh eggs? I certainly don't.
So here we are at a very major supermarket. The kind of place that has to restock every
single night. These were the freshest eggs that we found on any of our journies and they
were packaged on Julian date 11, so here on the 20th these eggs are the freshest we found
and they're still over a week old, 9 days since these have been packaged.
Now don't get us wrong, nobodies breaking the law here. The regulations say that once
the eggs are inside the carton they have 30 days to be sold on the shelf, or if they're
labeled with a use by date, 45 days to be placed and left on the shelf. So nobody's
breaking the rules, but it's very misleading to say that those eggs are fresh eggs.
If the best a grocery store is going to get you is an egg that's been in its package for
already a week then maybe you need to rethink about where you're getting your eggs from.
I guarantee you that if you find a local egg producer, a little family farm that's selling eggs,
buying a dozen eggs from them is gonna mean the world to them. If you're in a place where
you can have your own chickens, then why not, instead of having eggs that are 45 days old,
have an egg that's only been there for 45 minutes or maybe even less and go out there
and harvest your own eggs and provide for your family. One thing we have not touched
on is that the regulations only stipulate how long it has to be for the egg since it
gets in the package to when it reaches the consumer. There's no regulations that we can
find that say anything about the time it takes to go from the chicken itself to reaching
the package. How long does it take for commercial growers to clean and sort and then package
these eggs? We don't know, but we found it interesting that amid all of the regulations,
that seemed to be completely unmentioned. If ya'll like the video, I'd like to invite
you to come over the JandJ Acres on YouTube and subscribe. We won't just talk about chickens
and ducks, but everything homesteading, from training horses to growing a garden and everything
in between. So please, hit that subscribe button and we'll see you next time.