TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Fearing best-before dates: More than 700 million eggs a year wasted in UK
A third of all food produced in the world was wasted.
Change Size
Eggs in a carton box and a broken egg with yolk in background (Shutterstock/Krasula)
H
ouseholds in the United Kingdom dispose of 720 million eggs every year needlessly because of the best-before date, according to The Guardian. The finding was revealed on Tuesday by a consumer research conducted by the company behind Too Good To Go, a food waste app.
One reason why the eggs were thrown away was because the best before date had passed. On the other hand, eggs are generally still safe to eat for many days past the printed best before date.
The Guardian cites that eggs may last as long as 28 days after the chickens laid them, as required by European Union legislation.
Furthermore, the research finds that only 23 percent of Britons are aware of the water test to determine the eggs’ freshness.
Fresh eggs sink to the bottom of cold water and lie flat on their sides. Meanwhile, those that float at the surface are no longer fresh. If you find an egg that stands on one end at the bottom, you still can eat it although it is not that fresh anymore. The science behind this is the older the egg, the bigger the air sac inside, hence the floating.
“If you´ve been throwing your eggs in the bin based on the dates on the box, you´ve probably been wasting perfectly good food,” Jamie Crummie, co-founder of Too Good To Go, told The Guardian.
He went on to say that food waste was a huge problem, and that a third of all food produced in the world was wasted.
Too Good To Go ended up challenging the Britons to do water bowl test on eggs, thus cutting down unnecessary food waste.
Read also: New data in eternal debate over eggs, heart health
Apart from having longer shelf-life than suggested by the best-before date, eggs could also be useful to reduce food waste. A spokesperson from the British Egg Information Service told The Guardian eggs were versatile and they could be quickly made into nutritious meals with leftovers.
“They [eggs] can make a big difference to the amount of food people end up throwing away,” said the spokesperson. (sop/mut)
