american vs british eggs

I used to put my British eggs in the fridge, and some British viewers were very unhappy about it. They called me an idiot. From my Canadian point of view, I was doing the thing I’d always done, buying eggs and putting them straight into the refrigerator when I got home.

Back in Canada, I bought eggs from a refrigerated section. Here, I’d found them on ordinary supermarket shelves, usually near baking things, but my storage habit came with me. In my 2023 egg investigation, I wanted to know why the shop displays were different and why people had such strong feelings about my fridge.

Washing became the interesting part

My research took me into the difference between commercially washed eggs and eggs sold without that treatment. In the US system I was reading about, washing and sanitising happened before the eggs reached the customer. That sounded reasonable to me when the point was to reduce contamination. I even moved to the kitchen sink to make a washing joke, after cleaning my entire kitchen for about five seconds of filming.

The British system I was looking at took a different approach. Class A eggs weren’t washed before sale. That was the part of the comparison that surprised me, because the two approaches were trying to deal with the same problem, salmonella. I kept coming back to the question of why tackling the same bacteria could produce such different routines.

The shell’s protective outer layer was one of the details I’d learned about. That coating helps block bacteria from entering the egg, and washing can remove it. This was why washing and the need to keep the eggs refrigerated were connected in the explanation. Washing was more complicated than making an egg look clean.

For the American eggs I was discussing, that meant refrigeration through the journey to the shop, then refrigeration at home. I imagined how much infrastructure was involved in keeping that going through processing, transport and the supermarket. It made the chilled display I recognised from home seem like the end of a much longer chain.

My research wasn’t quite as neat as I’d hoped

I tried comparing salmonella figures as part of the investigation, but the British numbers were harder to find than I’d expected. One figure I came across didn’t seem right to me beside the American estimate. I wasn’t confident about that comparison.

I also read about vaccinating hens, which was another part of the subject I hadn’t gone into before. By then I’d said “salmonella” so many times that the word no longer felt real. I started wondering whether I could just call it the disease instead, because even saying its name was becoming difficult.

Eventually, I circled back to my tiny fridge and the habit that had started the whole thing. Some British people had told me they kept their British eggs in the fridge too.

A storage correction to the original video

Editor’s note, checked 2 October 2026. The video’s claim that British regulators recommend counter storage should not be used as current advice. The Food Standards Agency advises a cool, dry place, ideally the fridge. It also advises against washing eggs at home. The USDA explanation describes commercial washing and refrigerated storage in the US. APHA’s egg-quality guide, page 22 confirms that Class A eggs must not be washed before or after grading. These are processing and storage distinctions, rather than a blanket claim that an egg is illegal because it is American.

Watch the original Why American Eggs Are Illegal In Britain video.