Steve Perillo

Dedicated to Russell Jones who also wondered why few of us know these basic questions of our everyday lives . . .

I have an hour to kill in my hotel room in Bogota, Columbia and decided to Google the question about our breakfast chicken eggs being fertilized or not.

It’s slightly complicated.

Apparently, we’ve been eating BOTH fertilized and un-fertilzed eggs our whole lives. The factory production is usually 100% unfertilized. Small farmers often sell unfertilized eggs.

The debate as to which is more nutritious has yet to be resolved.

So what’s the difference between the 2 eggs? Hens lay an egg about every 25 hours whether she had sex or not. Just like human women do each month.

But if the hen DOES have sex (if you call that 2 second fluid transfer sex) the next eggs can very well come out fertilized.

Now if you steal the poor hen’s eggs the day she lays them, and cool it down, the fertilized and unfertilized eggs will look and act the same to us . . . we stick them in the fridge and eat them both with the same whites and the yellow yoke.

Sometimes you can detect a fertilized egg because of a dark spot or a streak of blood . . . and we’ve all seen that and wondered, “Uh-oh, has this egg gone bad?”  But it’s FINE to eat!

BOTTOM LINE . . . The hen produces eggs every day, no matter what. And she’ll sit on them for the full term regardless. But once the egg temperature drops below 99, it’s going to be an omelette in either case!