Things that creep me out about Australia

[pentapus]

1. Australian Grocery stores don't refrigerate their eggs.

It's like-- wow, that is a bunch of shelves next to the flour that are full of eggs! Clearly, this must be a credible practice because there they are, but --- all American ex-pats in a 200km radius have just contracted psychosomatic salmonella, is all I'm saying.

Uh, no, I have not been in Australia for -- 1, 2? -- 4 months now. But I bought eggs, just now! Chilled eggs.

Comments

[swordage]

I am told a hen can take up to 10 days to lay a batch of eggs. Then she sits on them and starts incubating them. I figure if an egg can last 10 days unrefrigerated and still become a little baby bird, it can last 10 days and still be edible. XD I can see how that would be alarming if you're not used to it, though! But luckily Nature usually knows what's going on and keeps things pretty fresh for a while.

[dubhartach]

Neither do UK stores. Though we do tend to keep eggs in the fridge ... well, my mum did.

[cobweb_diamond]

i'm pretty sure unrefridgerated eggs are OK! salmonella is in a lot of eggs, and refridgeration doesn't do anything about it -- just cooking them fully.

[anatsuno]

Neither does France.

[sqbr]

Random Australian says: Actually our local supermarket started refrigerating them some time in the last year. But it used to weird me out a little.

[copracat]

And yet we are a hot country! You can come to my local shop. They keep the eggs in the same section as meat. Nice and chill.

[ratcreature]

Stores in Germany don't chill their eggs either. Why would they? Fresh eggs don't need refrigeration. But I've been told that once you start cooling them (say put them in your own fridge), you should not keep them at room temperature again, so it makes sense for supermarkets not to start a cooling chain for eggs if it problematic to interrupt it, because then they'd need cooling throughout which costs effort and energy. Here the eggs come with two dates. One use-by date, and one date a couple of days earlier saying when you ought to start refrigeration which I don't think has much to do with bacteria as simply delaying the egg going bad. But they are sold long before that. People still don't die in scores of salmonella. (which is actually more surprising considering that bakeries sell sandwiches with raw minced pig meat, and these are kept in unrefrigerated displays more often than not from what I've seen)