The tide has turned. The days are no longer getting shorter. In four days, the day will be a minute longer, and next Monday, the day will be three minutes longer. Bit by bit, the sun is returning.

Fitting for a momentous day like today, there was a pullet egg among the eggs today. A young hen has started laying eggs. It’s always a pleasant surprise to find these small, precious eggs.

Still on my hunt for fresh eggs in supermarkets, I checked the eggs at the nearest Safeway. The freshest were packed 7 days ago, so they are probably 9 to 10 days old. The least fresh were packed 37 days ago, supposedly “Farm Fresh Egg-land’s Best”! Five week old eggs don’t sound very “Farm Fresh” to me. I guess they were fresh on the farm when they were first laid.

The way to tell when the eggs were packed, is by the 3 digit packing date usually found on the side of the carton. You’ll see them on the photo above. They range from 319 to 349 on the Safeway eggs I photographed today. The 4 digit numbers before or after the pack date are the numbers of the packing plant number. For example:

• Plant 1951 on the Egg-land’s Best eggs is Rainbow Farms in Denair, California.
• Plant 1104 is Egg Innovations in Warsaw, Indiana.
• Plant 1143 is National Food Corporation in Stanwood, Washington.
• Plant 1260 is Skylane Farms in Woodburn, Oregon.
• Plant 1452B is Briarwood Farms in Rochester, Washington.

You’ll often find the same packing plant number of different brands of eggs. For example, in the Safeway eggs, you’ll see that many of the eggs come from Briarwood Farms, even though they’ll have very different labels on them. It can be that different farms use the same egg packing plant, or the identical eggs get packed under different labels. Looking at the plant information, you can get an idea of how far your eggs have traveled.

Today marks the end of darkness. Starting tomorrow the days lengthen and the nights shorten. For me, tomorrow seems like the beginning of a new year.

On this, the darkest day of the year, some of the chickens are on the roost for the night before 4 p.m., like the mother and chick below. The chick is too large to fit between its mothers feet, so it snuggles as close to her as possible. In a few more weeks, it will have the confidence to roost on its own.

These are solstice eggs, the last of the old season. It won’t be long before the lengthening days brings new life to the hens and they start laying eggs by the basketful.

Speaking of eggs, I wrote a letter to Gabrielle Johnston, Public Affairs Specialist at USDA-FSIS, asking about the USDA-FSIS statement “many eggs reach stores only a few days after the hen lays them”. I had a pleasant phone conversation with her on Friday, and she is looking into how that statement got placed on their website. I’m looking forward to her response, and will let you know what she says.

This is what I emailed her today:

Dear Gabrielle,

I hope you had a pleasant weekend. It’s nice to reach the winter solstice and have days getting longer again.

Back to the claim on the USDA website that “many eggs reach stores only a few days after the hen lays them”, I did a little research recently and this is what I found:

On December 12, I looked at the eggs at Haggens, a supermarket chain in this area, and found eggs packed from 6 to 39 days ago. The average on all the egg cartons was 25 days. When you add in the 2 to 3 days minimum it takes eggs to be trucked from the farm to the egg processing plants, the typical egg at Haggens was laid 28 days, or 4 weeks ago.

Here are the results of stores I checked on December 21:

Bellingham Food Co-Op: 4 days to 25 days, an average of 20.3 days

Trader Joes in Bellingham, WA: 8 days to 12 days, an average of 10.7 days

Fred Meyer in Bellingham, WA: 5 days to 17 days, an average of 11.1 days

Those are the packing dates, so a typical egg in those stores is 2 to 3 weeks old at the least. The USDA allows eggs to be packed up to 21 days after being laid, so on the outset the eggs could be up 5 to 6 weeks old, not likely, but not impossible.

I called several Whole Foods stores in Seattle and asked their grocers if they had any eggs that were just a few days old. They said no. They told me that even though they get a few eggs from Pacific Northwest egg producers, the bulk of their eggs come from Wisconsin and Texas. Based on that, it sounds to me like their eggs are easily 2 to 3 weeks old. The next time I am in the Seattle area, I will check their eggs.

So, I’m baffled as to how the USDA decided to put on their website that “many eggs reach stores only a few days after the hen lays them”.

I hope you were able to find out how this statement was posted on your website. Maybe some one at the USDA can provide a list of supermarkets that sell these mythical 2 to 3 day old eggs. According to the USDA, there supposedly are many of them on store shelves. I’ll keep looking. If I find any, I’ll let you know.

Sincerely,