Jason Fitzpatrick
If you’re an American reading this, you keep your eggs in your fridge along with other perishables. If you’re not an American, there’s a good chance your eggs are not in your fridge. Here’s why.
Encountering the practices in other cultures often yields surprising things, and more than a few Americans traveling abroad have been shocked to see their hosts leaving eggs out on the counter or in a cupboard like it was no big deal. Their foreign hosts weren’t some weird brand of salmonella-deniers, however, as it’s perfectly safe to not refrigerate eggs—at least ones that haven’t been given the American-style egg treatment.
In this video from Today I Found Out, host Simon Whistler takes us on a trip through the parallel universes of egg production in America and Europe, highlighting how different processes result in an egg with a different shelf life.
Perhaps the most fascinating take away from the video is that, despite wildly different ways of preparing and storing eggs, the rates of salmonella infection aren’t different between the two populations.
