Not fresh is an understatement in many parts of the world. In the U.K., it’s up to 60 days - and in the U.S., it’s common for eggs in grocery stores to have been laid 6 months previously.
By law in the US farmers have up to 30 days to package eggs and then the eggs have to be sold within another 30 days, so the oldest eggs on the grocery shelf can be is 60 days. Most eggs are packaged and in a store for sale shortly after being laid.
EU legislation is that best before dates are at most 28 days from date of lay. Has the UK changed its law after Brexit? Not to my knowledge.
Red Lion stamped eggs still advertise the 28 day best before date. “For Lion eggs this must be shown on the shell (although this is not a legal requirement). Eggs have to be collected from farms at least twice a week and in practice most Lion eggs are delivered to the supermarket within 48 hours of being laid.”
Do you have a citation for this? I find this to be surprising given that I have heard the exact opposite: That efficient supply chains lead to eggs too fresh to easily deshell when hard boiled.
When I had my own hens I would deliberately age the eggs I intended to hard boil.
I'm similarly skeptical. Both the demand and supply for eggs are probably quite predictable (save for the occasional bird flu outbreak), so why would the industry create big egg buffers/stockpiles?
I get nauseous eating most store bought eggs, and it took me years and a couple of Reddit threads to realise this was the reason, as opposed to an allergy or whatever. Buying fresh I never have a problem.
I got whanging deadly headaches whenever i ate store / commercial eggs; I got chickens and discovered that its not actually the eggs thats the problem for me:
If i feed my chickens non-medicated feed, I'm able to enjoy their eggs. If i get them the feed with amoxicillin in it, headaches.
The wild thing is amoxicillin itself never seemed to have any bad side effect on me, I've done several courses of it over the years without trouble.
I assume the chicken metabolizes some of it (or some other ingredient) into something that triggers that reaction in me. My family aren't affected by it, including my daughter. Its apparently not common.
I dunno how likely that is; the egg shouldn't have more than trace amounts of any contaminants in the chicken; the egg is filtered a step further than the meat is.
I found that salt enhanced the headache potential a lot, but with "clean" eggs it doesn't matter. but after this long i dont put salt on 'em anyhow.
Also, I grew up on a farm and ate a lot of eggs as a kid, those chickens weren't fed anything but some corn and were otherwise free range, so perhaps its a trained sensitivity?
Wow, 6 months?! Why? Supply is pretty continuous, can keep them pretty much anywhere (even if there was just one county in one state suitable for rearing hens.. you could post them to any other faster than that?), what introduces such delay?
Price stability requires a stockpile - there are egg warehouses dotted around the US, and they exist pretty much solely to ensure a regular supply and therefore predictable price of a very fundamental foodstuff.
