For your consideration, what some Dr. Mercola has to say:
It may sound incredible, but many conventional egg operations contain as many as half a million chickens. Each cage will hold four or five birds, each with room to roam an area no larger than a letter-sized sheet of paper.
Subsequently, these cage-raised chickens have to be given routine doses of antibiotics and other drugs, all of which have serious health implications for you the consumer.
[…]
Regardless of where you get your eggs from, there are several guidelines to ensure that you’re buying and consuming fresh, high-quality eggs:
- Always check the freshness of the egg right before you consume the yolk. If you are at all uncertain about the freshness of an egg, don’t eat it. This is one of the best safeguards against salmonella infection.
- If there is a crack in the shell, don’t eat it. You can easily check for this by immersing the egg in a pan of cool, salted water. If the egg emits a tiny stream of bubbles, don’t consume it as the shell is porous/contains a hole.
- If you are getting your eggs fresh from a farmer it is best to not refrigerate them. This is the way most of the world stores their eggs; they do not refrigerate them. It’s important to remember that to be able to properly judge the freshness of an egg, its contents need to be at room temperature. Eggs that are stored in the fridge and opened immediately after taking them out will seem fresher than they actually are. At the very least, eggs should be kept outside the fridge for at least an hour prior to checking them for freshness or opening them.
- To check for freshness, first roll the egg across a flat surface. Only consume it if it rolls wobbly.
- Next, open the egg. If the egg white is watery instead of gel-like, don’t consume the egg. If the egg yolk is not convex and firm, don’t consume the egg. If the egg yolk easily bursts, don’t consume the egg.
- After opening the egg you can put it up to your nose and smell it. If it smells foul you will certainly not want to consume it.
There you are. And if you want some additional egg-citement, eat them raw. 😯