As the largest egg recall in American history continues to unravel (find out if you have a dozen of those bad boys here), there should be plenty of holier-than-thou backyard chicken fetishists who feel quite smug, believing their precious hens are laying disease-free eggs.
Considering I get my eggs through the Eastside Egg Co-op, operating out of Zenger farm, I count myself as one of those smug, holier-than-thou types. How could those lovely hens I put to bed every Sunday possibly be harboring disease? How could those sweet chickens, looking sidelong at me as I serenade them with ukulele covers of Akon, possibly harm me in any way?
Speaking with Dr. Emilio DeBess, State Veterinarian with the Oregon Department of Health, I suddenly realize I’ve been re-enacting that Russian roulette scene from The Deerhunter every time I make breakfast; except, instead of putting a gun to my head, I’m baking eggs. (“Go ahead Nikki! Go ahead. It’s gonna be alright. I’ll do THREE eggs! Three!”)
“All chickens have salmonella,” Dr. DeBess explains. “The question is how you take care of yourself.”
Much the same way humans have Staphylococcus aureus as part of our normal skin flora, always present on our bodies, DeBess points out that all chickens have salmonella, as well as campylobacter. “It doesn’t affect them because it’s a common organism on their skin,” says DeBess.
It’s well known that a person can get salmonella by handling raw chicken, or from the outside of unwashed eggs (which, if you didn’t know, share passage in the poop chute). But even those cute, harmless, baby chicks can also be a vector for spreading salmonella. “Throughout the United States, every time chicks are available, there are always a group of people who get salmonella,” says DeBess.
These common routes of salmonella infection via chicken are very preventable through proper chicken/egg handling, and hand washing. But the current recall is concerned with salmonella found not on the outside, but on the inside of the egg. Making proper hand washing, or egg washing, completely ineffective.
Salmonella can get inside an egg through several different pathways. Sometimes it stems from a genetic predilection to harboring salmonella in the ovaries, a hereditary trait usually tested out of the industrial egg system by the USDA. It can also be caused by unclean living conditions. Other times it can occur through chickens eating feed infected by salmonella, often passed to the feed through rodent dung. The current recall, DeBess says, appears linked to the latter.
On the surface it would seem that backyard chicken keepers would be safe, having much more control over their feed and the cleanliness of their coops. But can they be sure their chickens come from a line that is not predisposed to having salmonella in their ovaries? They can if they know the line is USDA tested and certified, or trusts that their heritage breeder knows this information.
But if the danger of salmonella in backyard chickens is clear and present, then why haven’t we heard of a scourge of salmonella cases from backyard, or “off the grid” farm-fresh eggs.
“The only way you hear about these recalls, is to hear people are getting sick and track it back to the source,” explains DeBess. “You can’t triangulate with backyard chickens.”
DeBess suggests the only way to be sure you’ll not be infected with salmonella from your eggs is to wash your hands, as well as your eggs, and cook them until both the whites and yolks are hard.
As far as favorite raw egg foods like Hollandaise sauce?
“You can use pasteurized liquid eggs if you want Hollandaise sauce,” says DeBess. “I guess a lot of it is how much of a risk you want to take. It’s such a personal decision. It’s difficult to tell people what to do. These are the choices that we make.”
Want to defer the risk altogether? Find a vegan and ask them to show you how to cook sauces entirely without eggs. I’m sure they’d be glad to help.
In the end, realizing the small chicken flock providing my eggs does not completely free me from the risk of salmonella, I still feel the amount of knowledge I have about their feed and care outweighs the danger of factory farmed eggs. Though I will admit, a good amount of my “holier-than-thou” smugness has been erased by the good Dr. DeBess.
This salmonella scare seems kinda over-the-top. Cook your eggs, no salmonella. Hasn’t this been a rule since forever?
@MrPDX
Not for many world cultures who’ve created a great deal of traditional recipes using raw eggs (that we still enjoy today).
I’ve seen many menus recently that have raw egg warnings on them.
@PAC, true but it’s been known that you take a risk with uncooked eggs. That’s why you’re not supposed to eat raw cookie dough, but you do it anyway because it tastes good. Don’t want e-coli in your hamburger? Cook it well done. It’s a trade-off between what we want to eat and what’s the safest for us to eat. What I’m not getting is why salmonella is the crisis of the week…eggs having salmonella is not news. Lots of eggs having salmonella is not news. The knowledge that cooking eggs makes them safer to eat has been around a long time, and in many world cultures. Rather than recalling a half-billion eggs, why not just say “cook your eggs if you want to be sure they’re safe to eat”?
For many months I ate a raw egg drink every day as part of a specific healing diet (inherited intestinal issues). I ate maybe hundreds of raw eggs? I never had a problem, but I bought local farm or organic eggs or they came from friends’ chickens. I don’t think the risk is all that great when not using industrial-farm eggs.
The problem is non local mass food. It you buy a burger from a local butcher it was probably one cow. Eggs from old style small farm less than 100 chickens. Salad from farmer’s market maybe five acres. Now mass factory food blends 10,000 pounds of burger to make meat chubs, 70% of battery layers are in sheds containing 20,000 to 100,000 birds, and bag salads batches appear to be around 30,000 bags each from the recall data.
Crap why didn’t I look up the recall data before I ate that salad tonight Fresh Express has another 3,000 bad cases. It is only listeria, e.coli and salmonella I needed to loose weight that was why I was eating salad in the first place.
The problem is non local mass food. It you buy a burger from a local butcher it was probably one cow. Eggs from old style small farm less than 100 chickens. Salad from farmer’s market maybe five acres. Now mass factory food blends 10,000 pounds of burger to make meat chubs, 70% of battery layers are in sheds containing 20,000 to 100,000 birds, and bag salads batches appear to be around 30,000 bags each from the recall data.
Crap why didn’t I look up the recall data before I ate that salad tonight Fresh Express has another 3,000 bad cases. It is only listeria, e.coli and salmonella I needed to loose weight that was why I was eating salad in the first place.
@MrPDX
I see your point. I think the reason it’s news is because the salmonella is actually inside the egg, rather than on the egg, which is rare. So people who thought they were safe cooking eggs over-easy, or medium, might have thought they were safe. In fact, that runny yolk was putting them at risk.
The risk of salmonella from runny yolks is somewhat rare considering that most chickens predisposed to harboring salmonella in their ovaries (which is then transferred to the inside of the egg) are tested out of the system by the USDA.
Unfortunately, in this case, it looks like tainted food supply may have been the culprit.
MMMMMMM I LOVE SALMON.
I love how people seem to read this post and get the wrong takeaway from it. You are MORE at danger with your backyard or organic eggs. Why? Because there is less testing and regulation, etc.
However, industrial farming, when it does have a problem, puts MORE people at risk. This is a classic case of the benefits and problems of centralization. Each system has their advantages and disadvantages, the main one being whether the responsibility should be more on the individual or on the bureaucracy and whether problems when they occur will be more isolated and prevalent or rare and system-wide.