Comment by TheRealPomax
7 years ago
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.