The Egg Project
Bombarded by sound, zapped with radiation or lasers, prodded with carbon dioxide or jolted with oxygen--the egg of tomorrow may be tested as no egg has ever been.
They’ve been fried and scrambled, poached and boiled, even whipped, but now eggs, among the most basic of foods, are out on the cutting edge.
Whether to reduce cholesterol or eradicate salmonella, scientists are in search of the golden egg--the modern-day technology that will get people to buy and eat eggs with the gusto they did 25 years ago.
Most of this scientific wizardry is still in the laboratory. With the exception of a state-of-the-art extraction process that cuts a yolk’s cholesterol by 80%, the technologies being tested are several years from being applied to eggs going to market. In fact, some may never leave the nest.
Perhaps the most incredible marriage of high tech and the edible egg comes from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was developed.
Almost literally turning swords into plowshares--or in this case arms-control technology into food science--researchers think they have devised a way to detect salmonella bacteria in an egg without cracking it open.
The egg project began as a “Saturday afternoon kind of thing,” says Roger Johnston, technical staff member of Los Alamos’s chemical and laser science division, after a friend from the Food and Drug Administration wondered if there was a way to examine eggs “non-invasively.”
Johnston thought of a Los Alamos colleague, Dipen Sinha, who had developed a method to detect what was in artillery shells. “If empty, you dispose of them one way; if full of chemicals, another; and no one is keen on opening and discovering what’s in them,” Johnston explains.
“I didn’t know if artillery shells and egg shells had anything in common, but I said ‘Let’s see.’ ” Together, the two scientists discovered that eggs respond differently to sound if they are infected with salmonella. If it’s a good egg, a high G-sharp note starts it “vibrating like crazy.” But when infected with salmonella, the egg vibrates at an even higher frequency, Johnston explains.
The Los Alamos acoustical resonance test detected salmonella in 25% of the eggs artificially infected with salmonella. “I don’t know if this will work in the real world, but it certainly warrants further investigation,” says Johnston, who hopes a commercial laboratory will develop an inexpensive, portable and quick procedure to test eggs for salmonella as they roll down the packaging line.
Cathy McCharen, director of the Egg Nutrition Board, is skeptical. For one thing, she says, salmonella that occurs naturally in eggs has been found in far smaller doses--”fewer than 10 bacteria cells”--than the salmonella levels of artificially infected eggs. Typically artificially infected eggs have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of salmonella bacteria, McCharen says.
Additionally, she says, experts have estimated that even in areas where salmonella is high, it occurs in only one of every 10,000 eggs--an awfully small percentage to warrant spending a lot of money for high-tech detection. More cost effective may be low-tech methods to control the spread of the bacteria in the chicken flocks.
Cost may also be an issue with the low- and no-cholesterol eggs being developed. Marcus Karel, a food-science professor at Rutgers, asks, “How much is it worth to you to eat a $3 low-cholesterol egg? There are less expensive egg substitutes. Or, you don’t have to eat eggs at all.”
Yet, these concerns are not stopping scientists from using new and often unappetizing technology to create a more appetizing egg. (Annual consumption has dropped from a high of 320.5 eggs per person in 1967 to 187 eggs per person in 1990, perhaps because fewer people are eating breakfast at home, but certainly because of concerns about cholesterol and salmonella.)
Closest to commercialization is a low-cholesterol extraction process that is being built in a pilot plant by one of the nation’s larger egg processors, Minneapolis-based Michael Foods Inc.
Michael Foods soon hopes to test-market Simply Eggs, which will be sold in cartons in liquid form like the egg substitutes sold in the dairy case of the supermarket.
Simply Eggs, which contains 80% less cholesterol than regular eggs, will be made of eggs only, unlike the substitutes, which are made of egg whites and a variety of additives.
To reduce cholesterol, Michael Foods mixes egg yolks with a highly processed starch substance, beta cyclodextrin (BCD), that absorbs cholesterol from the yolk. The starch-yolk mixture is then placed in a centrifuge that rapidly spins the mixture to separate the starch and attached cholesterol from the rest of the yolk.
The remaining yolk is then mixed with egg whites, and both are pasteurized to create a low-cholesterol, salmonella-free liquid egg.
