Saturday 18 October 2008

Is a double-yolked egg tainted food?

sf nothing else, the global tainted food scare just goes to show how some people in China, in an apparent rush to make money fast and easy, are not above board in closing an eye and compromising on people's health. I'm actually quite concerned about how greedy and unscrupulous many of us Chinese are, every where around the world, but nothing can surpass the Chinese traders, middlemen and businesses from China itself because they already have a bad reputation - all least 20 years of bad reputation - which contribute to the mess we're facing right now regarding dairy foodstuff, vegetable, sweets and even biscuits made from ingredients originating from China. Even non-China foodstuff need to be scrutinised carefully in case they use something imported from China. Even worse, there are stories that the Chinese have not learnt any lesson from this: click here to read how recalled dairy products have been openly resold to university students in China at discounted prices!

But China remains the main culprit in this mess. Adulterated milk laced with melamine. Vegetables grown with questionable growth inducers. Chinese traditional medicine with unknown ingredients...tested for mercury and lead content? Yes, some Chinese products may be cheap but at what cost to personal health?

At the market this morning, I suddenly realised that occasionally, we had been buying eggs with double yolks. In the past I hadn't been giving it much thought but today, it hit on me why the egg traders could sell such double-yolk eggs in huge quantities at the market. Okay, I can accept if the rare occasional double-yolk egg turns up in a batch of hundreds of eggs. It can happen, just like twins can occur in births. But when traders openly hawk such eggs by the trays, there must be an explanation. Without cracking open the egg shells, how can they tell that the eggs contain two yolks?

Not unless the hens have been specially bred to produce such eggs. But how can hens be induced to lay such eggs? Through some genetic problem that had been passed down from one generation of chicken to another? Or, more chillingly, were the chickens fed with some chemically-induced feed to make them lay such eggs? Where do chicken farmers buy their feed from? These are just my questions and unless some tests can be made on the eggs and their sources, I wouldn't want to say more than necessary.

But I'd like to share with you a video that I made this morning too. It's been uploaded to YouTube in the public domain. It's one of the eggs in my refrigerator. It looks like a very normal egg, one that you can pick up from the market. But when it's cracked open..... BTW, we've thrown away all the remaining eggs. Now that our suspicions are raised, it is better to be safe than sorry.

1 comment:

backyardchickens said...

Hey dummy, all you have to do is candle the egg to find out if it's a double yolk. Go in a dark room, hold a flashlight behind the egg, and Presto! you can see inside the egg. Double yolk eggs are perfectly common and normal, especially when a hen first starts laying. Actually, you should be GLAD someone's selling them, they're LESS likely to be crappy eggs. Try researching before you post stupid crap.