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Monday 15 December 2014

Egg

LAYING EGGS

According to research published in 2008, male dinosaurs were sometimes responsible for sitting on eggs until they hatched.

The average hen lays between 250 and 270 eggs a year but some lay more than 300.

It takes a hen 24 to 26 hours to lay one egg.

Hens turn their eggs 50 times a day to stop the yolk sticking to the shell.

The brown or white colour of an eggshell is purely dependent on the breed of the hen.

A chicken with red earlobes will produce brown eggs, and a chicken with white earlobes will produce white eggs.

Most chickens lay eggs blunt end first, while most ducks lay their eggs pointed end first.

A group of eggs, such as those found in a bird's nest, is known as a "clutch."

The shell is about 12 percent of the weight of an entire egg.

Animals that lay eggs don't have belly buttons.

The volume of one ostrich egg is roughly equivalent to 24 chicken eggs.

HUMAN USE

Worldwide, around 1.2 trillion eggs are produced for eating every year.


The average person on Earth consumes 173 eggs a year.

The average Briton eats 172 eggs each year. 40 per cent are classified as free range.

Americans eat a lot of eggs. They consumed an average of 278 per person in 2022, according to the US Department of Agriculture. 

US eggs would be illegal in a British supermarket because they are washed. British eggs are illegal in US markets because they’re unwashed. Eggs are not washed in the UK because the process removes a protective membrane that makes them require refrigeration.

Forty per cent of the world’s eggs are consumed in China.

Hong Kong consumed the most eggs per capita at 20.4 kg per ‘000 population as of 2016.

McDonald's purchases over 2 billion eggs per year which equates to 4 percent of eggs produced in the United States.

US eggs would be illegal in a British supermarket because they are washed. British eggs are illegal in US markets because they’re unwashed.

Eggs contain the highest quality food protein known.

One ostrich egg has 200 grams of protein, the same amount as four T-bone steaks.

It takes about 50 minutes to soft-boil an ostrich egg and an hour and a half to hard-boil one.


To tell if an egg is fresh or not you put it into a container of water. A stale egg will float to the top and a fresh egg will sink to the bottom.

Eggs age more in one day at room temperature than one week in the refrigerator.

All parts of an egg are edible, including the shell, which has a high calcium content.

Crushed-up egg shells sprinkled around plants help keep snails and slugs away

The fear of eggs is known as ovophobia. The director Alfred Hitchcock suffered from the condition.,

The hobby of collecting eggcups is called pocillovy.

EGG HISTORY

The egg ovens of ancient Egypt were ovens for hatching eggs by incubation using artificial heat. Typically brick structures, often created from mud they date back to the 4th century BC. They were capable of hatching out thousands of eggs in 2-3 weeks. Two hundred of them are still in use today, the techniques involved passed down orally for more than two thousand years.

The verb 'egg' (i.e. egged on, to incite into action) has been in the English language longer than the noun 'egg'.

In 1290, King Edward I of England spent 18 pence for 450 eggs to be gold-leafed and colored as Easter gifts.

In 1563 Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta invented a method of writing secret messages inside eggs. Ink transferred from the shell to the boiled egg inside. The message could only be revealed when cracked and peeled.

For years members of the French court and other dignitaries considered it a privilege merely to stand by and watch Louis XIV (1638-1715) devour his food. Entire families of Parisians crowded round every Sunday to admire the dexterity of their king, who could knock the small end of an egg in a single stroke. Despite being forbidden during Lent for centuries due to their richness boiled eggs became during his reign a favorite breakfast meal in France.

Fortnum & Mason claim to have made the first Scotch egg in 1738.

Jane Austen included the first literary mention of soft boiled eggs in her book Emma when the heroine’s father, Mr Woodhouse, announced that “an egg boiled soft is not unwholesome.”

According to the Oxford Dictionary the earliest known reference to “scrambled eggs” dates back only to 1864 but “poached eggs” was seen in 1450.



By the mid 19th century, chicken meat and eggs had become mass-production commodities in Britain. Previously eggs were only laid in the summer and were uniformly white in color. The arrival of Asian breeds of hens which produced large brown eggs twelfth months in the year revolutionized British attitudes to poultry.

Queen Victoria had her boiled egg for breakfast served in a gold-plated eggcup with a gold spoon.

An increase in food-poisoning cases due to Salmonella bacteria in the late 1980s led to government investigations in both the United States and Britain, and advice that eggs should be thoroughly cooked before being eaten.

RECORDS

The smallest bird egg known to man is that of the hummingbird and is the size of a pea.

The largest eggs ever laid were those of the elephant bird, a now-extinct bird that lived on the island of Madagascar. Elephant bird eggs were the equivalent of seven ostrich eggs, 183 chicken eggs, and 12,000 hummingbird eggs. They could measure up to 40cm, could hold up to 11 liters of liquid, and weigh up to 8kg.

The Kiwi has the largest egg of any bird relative to its mother's body size—kiwi eggs take up about a quarter of the mother's body.

The largest egg on record weighed 5 lb 11.36 oz (2.589 kg) and was laid by an ostrich at a farm owned by Kerstin and Gunnar Sahlin in Borlänge, Sweden, on May 17, 2008.

http://www.nairaland.com/1849778/2014-worlds-records-pics

The largest chicken egg recorded weighed nearly 12oz,, measuring 12 1/4" around.

The most eggs found in one chicken egg is nine.

In the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman wins a bet that he can eat 50 hard boiled eggs in an hour. In real life, the record is held by American competitive eater Joey Chestnut. In the first-ever World Hard Boiled Egg-Eating Championship in 2013, Chestnut ate 141 hard-boiled eggs in eight minutes.

The record for the longest throw of a fresh egg, without breaking it, is 323 ft, set in Texas in 1978.

The world record for the fastest time to shell one (unpricked) boiled egg is 2.66 seconds, achieved by Italian Silvio Sabba in 2012.

In 2013, Joey Chestnut set a world record by eating 141 hard-boiled eggs in eight minutes.

FUN EGG FACTS

Nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme does it say that Humpty Dumpty is an egg.

Eggs are shaped the way they're shaped because when a nest is jostled, the egg will roll in a circle rather than out of the nest.


USA law requires that eggs sold in supermarkets must be washed. And EU law requires that eggs sold in supermarkets must NOT be washed. Both do it to prevent salmonella.

Sources Daily Express, Food For Thought by Ed Pearce

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