Why Selling American Eggs in the UK is ILLEGAL and vice versa

You may have wondered at least once: just how safe is the food I eat? Well, if you’re from the United States your question can be best answered by the United States Department of Agriculture (or USDA) and by the US Food & Drug Administration (or FDA). The FDA determines how food should be consumedto minimize health issues. But that doesn’t mean they’ll readily disclose the information to you on the product labels! This may be shocking to hear, but the FDA actually allows human hairs, insect fragments, mouse poop, and even corrosive rot in your food . Macaroni and cheese? More like macaroni and cheese and maggots, as long as you have no more than 225 insect fragments served with 225 grams of macaroni. Fancying some grilled salmon with a side of broccoli? You may also get 50 parasitic cysts per 100 pounds of fish and 60 mites, thrips, or aphids per 100 grams of broccoli. Not to mention the chocolate cake with hair on top. You would imagine that eggs on either side of the Atlantic are the same thing. And you would be right. You would also assume that the UK and the US could sell eggs to each other, but this time you would be wrong. Food regulation systems are widely different in the two countries, but we will touch on that later on. When it comes to eggs, specifically, the USDA graded American eggs as illegal if sold in the European Union – the UK included at the time. This is due to major differences in the processing of eggs between the two systems. The main difference lies in the way the two countries control the quality of the eggs. Both countries are concerned with providing consumers with healthy eggs, free from bacteria and pathogens. However, they take completely different approaches to achieve this goal.