Blimey, not only but also; past present and a few future UKIP members have been roaring around the blogosphere in hysterical outrage following the Mail’s predictable anti-European blast that ‘the EU is planning to ban the sale of eggs by the dozen’.
They’re not as it happens, just asking that an approximation of the weight be printed on each carton. Pretty much the same hysteria we had over the ‘demise of the British pint’ – which was easily solved.
Even the leader of the Libertarian Party devoted column inches to the subject:
“This is utter idiocy: who gives a crap what weight the eggs are? I want six eggs, not the exact bloody weight.”
Only a man could write that, or to be fairer, only a person who did nothing more imaginative with an egg than fry it, could write that.
Any Baker, male or female would beg to differ. The reason eggs were graded by weight in the first place – and they are, they’re called large, medium and small for the benefit of the unimaginative egg fryers – is because it is the eggsact proportion of egg to fat, sugar and flour, which produces beautiful patisserie.
Classic Victoria Sponge, still the basis of English cake making, is best prepared with the aid of an old fashioned set of Kitchen scales. Weigh the Eggs on one side and weigh eggsactly the weight of your egg or eggs, in fat, sugar and flour. Too little egg and your cake won’t rise, too much and it will be stodgy.
Anybody faced with the task of making multiples of one small sponge; a semi commercial baker as I once was in my tea rooms, or catering staff, needs to have standardised eggs where they can be fairly sure of the weight. That is why they were graded by weight. Have been for years now. To save expensive mistakes by those who cook for a living.
They do ‘give a crap’. We wouldn’t want to censor that information from them would we?
Ms Raccoon lives in the Monbazillac area of South West France, renowned for its fine wines and gourmet food, so she frequently finds better things to do than sit in front of a computer all morning. She is liable to take off traveling at a moment's notice. Consequently this blog only gets updated these days when it is raining - and it doesn't rain very often round here...
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Legal whizz, curtain importer, political commentator extraordinaire and now semi-commercial baker – is there anything you can’t do?
You don’t even have the full list of ‘previous occupations’ yet, Macheath – its the sort of list you end up with when you are actually qualfiied to do nothing at all, and take a stab at everything that passes ‘on the off chance’. ‘Anything but the dole’ was my motto.
As an unimaginative egg consumer, I just buy six eggs. Never made a bad yorkie pud yet, mind.
Very unimaginative, Dick. I just go out into the garden and pick some up. Foraging beats shopping any day of the week.
Anyway (commenting in general), if people gave a crap about the weight/size of the egg it would already have such information on the box, without the need for any kind of ‘directive’, which is the official word for authoritarian meddling I believe. And they do give a crap, because eggs have always had this information. I guess whatever the Devil was doing in his Kitchen all that time, it wasn’t cooking.
Likewise, the ‘hysteria’ over the pint may have been easily solved, but why should such a thing have to be solved at all? And we are authorised – yes, very kindly authorised – to also have the amount in pints as well as the regulation litres on a pint of milk. For now.
So, good call on pointing out the incorrect facts behind today’s hysteria (which incidentally the BBC failed to do, despite reporting the story some time after you), but I still think the outrage is justified.
Ciaran,
“if people gave a crap about the weight/size of the egg it would already have such information on the box”
With respect, people gave a crap about how old the egg was, but it took a directive to get that information published…….
Meanwhile some of us were still floating them in a bowl of water to try to figure it out…..
Well I sometimes have to water-test mine, I don’t see why anyone else should get away with it.
More seriously though, if people were so bothered by that before the directive then surely someone would have started date-stamping their eggs of their own accord, and those known-age eggs would have sold like hot cakes?
Ciaran,
But they did! Eggs bought from the farm gate always sold like hot cakes – but what about the poor blighters who couldn’t get to the farm gate? They had to buy the eggs, take them home, water test them, and find out the hard way that they had just bought three month old eggs? Yes, you can argue that the man who sold them those eggs would soon go out of business, and that is true in a fixed community, but we don’t have fixed communities any more. We have supermarkets in big towns with mobile populations who must be responsible for their produce, and don’t have time to water test 3 million eggs before they sell them. Date stamping has always seemed eminently reasonable to me, and a good example of the sort of area where the govenment can help with legislation. It doesn’t mean that you have to eat fresh eggs – you can eat them 100 years old if you like, but that the information should be available to you so that it is your choice. To me government should be about protecting your right to free choice, whether by defending the country or protecting you from physical harm if you are unable to do so yourself, I am not an anarchist!
This is intriguing: my little list includes HGV mechanic, zookeeper and nightclub bouncer… anything but the dole.
What other mixes have we got out there folks?
HGV Mechanic, Graphic Designer, Computer Technician and – drumroll….. now on the dole.
Caratacus,
I’ll just add for now, Florida swamp land salesperson, morphed into Whisky salesperson, Garage owner morphed into warranty manager at Fiat, ooh lets throw in pine furniture retailer, hotelier, tailors assistant, quick throwback to nurses uniform model, huh! nude model come to that, getting bored now, think of some more tomorrow, we have got 50 odd years to get through here, lots of wolves to keep from doors……
And for those of you unsure how the net weight of an egg is calculated without breaking it the eggshell weighs about 12% of the whole hen’s egg. Here’s a useful page that gives the weight of eggs by size. So long as the egg size is marked on the box, there is no need, in the UK, for weight to be marked as well. Will DEFRA rule that no action is needed to implement this regulation here? Probably not, since the EU demands homogenisation as a test of loyalty.
My knowledge of the British eggs and poultry industry arose a result of an extended essay for my geog A-Level nearly thirty years ago.
An egg is a shell’s way of reproducing itself!
I read down to Annex VIII of the proposals and reckon that section 2 is the no need to do anything get out as egg boxes are already labelled with a nominal quantity in the UK. Definitely worth
When I first started in food retail eggs were sold in numerical sizes. Size 1 being the largest and size 5 being the smallest.
If memory serves me right!
If the method already exists for ascertaining the correct amount of egg to flour/lard/sugar (as it does, and is clearly explained by the post), why do I need permission from some faceless moron in Brussels to continue doing what I’ve always done?
Am I supposed to be grateful?
A little hint – I’m not.
PS The phrase ‘the thin end of the wedge’ springs to mind. Once this sort of crap takes root, ‘mission creep’ sets in and the bansturbators go into overdrive. Please refer to ‘the metric matyrs’.
English Viking,
“why do I need permission from some faceless moron in Brussels to continue doing what I
Anna, thanks for the hat tip. I agree, the state is needed to prevent food adulteration and fake medicines etc. But the EU superstate duplicates many national government functions that were done more sensibly with parliamentary legislation or treaties. It’s the old question of subsidiarity. If English people want their egg boxes marked with the number and size of eggs but Greeks don’t mind then why should 26 other countries interfere with their wishes? I just won’t buy Greek eggs.
No, I doubt that there would be outrage if the manufacturers chose whether to show weights on their packets or not, but that is not the point. The outrage comes from foreign powers attempting to inflict mindless regulation on people who have managed to bake a cake quite nicely without it for the last thousand years or so. It comes from the sure-fire knowledge that once the regulation becomes law, ‘officers’ will be required to enforce it, fines will be imposed on those who infringe the rules, people will go to prison or lose their businesses. This has already happened over the metrication of weights and measures, and the banning of selling of goods ‘by the bowl’, etc. When I suggested a look at the ‘metric matyrs’, I meant it.
If it is such a great idea, the market would have already done it. Those that want to, fine. Those that don’t, fine. The customer will decide.
I am old enough to remember loose weight goods wrapped in brown paper. I also remember telling the shop assistant (remember those?), who was usually also the shop owner (remember those?) how much sugar I wanted to buy, and he/she would weigh it in the scales for me, only pouring what I had ordered once I had agreed that the correct weight was in the scales.
France may be European, and you may enjoy living in a European socialist state. England is not European, it is not a socialist state and I want to keep it that way.
The ‘honest agenda’ of which you speak is, to my mind, crystal clear. Europe as one nation, with one currency, one law, one language, one government, etc. It will come about because people are so numbed to the important things, by things just like this, that they just cannot be bothered to think anymore.
BTW I’m not hysterical, I just disagree.
Potato Picker, Potato Grader,Broccoli Picker, Gardener, House Cleaner, Caretaker and Chicken Shed Clearer.
And that’s just in France. But I have had some fun. A howl a minute actually.
Couldn’t speak a word of French in the beginning.
Eleanor,
Keep going, Thaddeus is working up to admitting he was once a lap dancer…….
I’m so glad I read that after I’d had dinner Anna.
I would think that the production line for sugar just pours kilos/half kilos into the bags and seals them therefore the weight would just be the same nominal one on the packaging.
Forgive my ignorance, but since the maths is complicated, would the weight of each 6/12 eggs be different each time and therefore require weighing each separate carton with some form of additional machine?
If not and the size number is comparable to the weight then I would think that the labeling would just need converting. Or since the end of your post states that they are already graded what’s the point.
Do many commercial places nip to the supermarket for 6 eggs or get them direct from a supplier?
DK
Same job for 32 years
Now is all the above relative to just hen’s eggs, or does it include ducks eggs, swan’s eggs, dogs eggs, etc? And to say the shell weighs “about” 12% of the total weight is simply not good enough. We need to be precise here. This is serious. This is the EU. Herman van Rumpy-Pumpy is depending on us.
Actually, now I come to think of it, I hate bloody eggs, and couldn’t give a flying ****.
I normally agree with and am entertained by your thoughts but I disagree on this matter. I don’t think you have thought it through Anna.
I have to agree there is nothing wrong with putting the weight on eggs, and it may help some people. That’s not the issue.
The main issue is the serious ongoing problem with EU rules when imposed and made mandatory in the UK. We know from bitter experience that some idiot of a jobsworth will almost certainly create an absurd nonsense of it.
For example: How will this rule affect a smallholder or private chicken owner who sells a few sometimes unboxed eggs at the farm (or garden) gate? Sadly you can be sure one such jobswort exists somewhere who will be on the case of correct labelling as soon as such a rule becomes law – and I’m not joking. We will end up where every egg sold needs scales certified by weights and meaures and has to be printed with its weight! Hence my opposition to mandatory rules from Brussels.
Interestingly (or not) Eggs are sold in dozens in French supermarkets round here (Normandie) – always struck me as odd that.
The real scandal is that the overpaid buffoons of the Euro-parliament are wasting their time on all this instead of discussing something important.
Just looked at the pack of 6 eggs I bought a couple
of days ago here in Costa Blanca. They are Category A, corn fed,
size XL, weight at least 73 grammes. Seems like perfectly
good information to me. I think the British public should worry
a bit more about important stuff, like the state of the Nation.
Apart from the good point about Trading Standards
Pericles,
Grrr.
The egg has already been weighed. By the producer. In order to grade it. This is a matter of whether I am allowed to know the answer he arrived at. Roughly, for there is a 6 per cent margin for error either way. So it would be perfectly acceptable to put approx weight 375gm on a box of six eggs. In three years time. When they get round to printing the next batch of labels.
So the cost involved is the cost of printing 8 letters and three digits on a label that has to be printed anyway.
It is easier enough to weigh one egg, or even six. It’s not so easy to weigh 100 when you are making 50 cakes….my comment on the need to know the weight was in response to DKs fatuous assumption that one never needed to know the weight of an egg. That it was irrelevant. It is not.
My objection to the whole tenor of the coverage of this piece is that a perfectly reasonable request for a piece of information that the manufacturers already hold to be passed over to the consumer has been hijacked by those who agenda is turning back history to before the UK joined the EU. That is fine, that is their right, I respect that right. But say so. ‘We don’t like foreigners’. ‘We don’t want foreigners taking any part in making our laws’. ‘We ignore the democratic rights of our people to vote for representation to the European Parliament’. Be upfront about your agenda. Dont’ turn a proposal to pass on information into the end of the world with Johnny Foreigner ruining the great British Breakfast……
I find the whole thing ludicrous. We have mass voting in the British election from Nigeria and Bangladesh. We have a parliament full of people who were not born in this country, and neither look nor sound as though they were. To mention this is considered to be ‘BNP country’. Yet although British politiicians voted to join the EU, although the devilish ‘Brussells’ contains British politicians as well as those from other EU countries, the fact that EU headquarters happens to be in Brussels rather than London, means that UKIP are screaming ‘bloody foreigners’ interferring in our law……..and all over 8 cyphers on an egg box………Jeeze
Everybody wants to take life back to a certain point at which it suited them. The BNP would like everone post viking to leave. UKIP want to return to pre EU. The Scots want to go back to somewhere in the 17th centruy. The Welsh want Offa’s Dyke filled in. The Argentinians want the Faulklands back. Spain wants Gibralter back……..So many old grudges, does anybody ever look forward any longer?
So what it boils down to is this : the grading system
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