According to one circulating Facebook post, those eggs at your local grocery store could be as many as 45 days old by the time you take them home.
Lisa Steele, who runs the Facebook page Fresh Eggs Daily, recently wrote a post explaining how grocery store-bought eggs may have been sitting in their cartons for as long as a month before customers take them home.
“Every date I saw on them was between 352-355, meaning that those eggs were put in that carton on the 352nd-355th day of last year,” Steele wrote on January 19. “Add to that the 19 days so far this year, and these eggs have all been in the carton for about a month (and could have been laid up to 30 days prior to that) and check out the sell by dates — these eggs can still sit on the shelf for a few more weeks.”
So far, the post has been shared by over 36,000 people and liked nearly 18,000 times. Many of the comments are from people in shock that their grocery store eggs can be so old while others are extolling the virtues of farm fresh eggs (which — while often fresher — can still carry risks like salmonella).
The most interesting tidbit from the Facebook post is how customers can decode the stamps on their egg cartons. The three number code you see is actually the day the eggs were packaged. For example, “032” would refer to February 1 because it’s the 32nd day of 2016.
Here’s a handy chart to help you decode the egg packaging, via the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
And despite the Fresh Eggs Daily Facebook page suggesting eggs are packaged up to 30 days after being laid, most eggs move from the egg farm to grocery stores within just a few days, including the time it takes to collect, wash, cradle, grade, weigh, and package each egg.
Another fact for customers to be aware of is that those “expiration,” “best by,” and “not to be sold after” dates are actually not required by federal law, though they may be required by your state’s food regulations. But the USDA does have strict guidelines that eggs are to be kept at temperatures not exceeding 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
The expiration dates — if they are included — also can’t be more than 30 days after packaging and “best by” and “use by” dates cannot exceed 45 days after packaging.
And while you may be balking that those eggs have sat out for up to 45 days, eggs can last even longer than that. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) says you can still store fresh eggs in their cartons for four to five weeks beyond the day they were packaged. That means an egg packaged on January 22 will most likely be good until February 26, provided they are kept refrigerated.
If you’re in doubt whether or not to eat your eggs, there are a few easy tests you can do. The first is called the float test: Simply take a large container of cool water and gently add in your eggs. If your eggs float, that means they’re old and may not be good to eat. If they almost float, they’re old, but still edible. And if they sink to the bottom and stay there, those eggs are fresh.
If you do have floating eggs, that still doesn’t mean that your eggs have gone bad. The USDA suggests cracking open the eggs and doing a smell test. If the eggs look and smell normal, they’re still safe to eat.
For more on how long eggs and dishes made with eggs will last, visit the USDA website.
(h/t Delish)
