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Why are some egg yolks so orange?

foodunfolded.com

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Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese markets strike me as absolutely brutal. I mean, there is always some theft, fraud etc. in any market (one of the oldest written records of humanity is a customer complaint about bad copper sold by a certain Mesopotamian merchant called Ea-nasir in 1750 BC), but stuff like poisoning your customers with Sudan Red, or adding melamine to yoghurt, or frying food on gutter oil seems to always be reported from China…

Same goes with India as well. I have always wondered about this, may be it is the trade-off between getting caught and the sheer desperation to make money that tilts the moral compass to act in unethical ways.

>> and the sheer desperation to make money that tilts the moral compass

A very western sentiment. We often deride the quest for profits, demonizing people who put profit ahead of something more noble like safety. But in places like China "profit" is life. China has seen starvation in living memory. In countries without social safety nets a failed business likely means utter destitution, very often leading to physical violence. The people who run restaurants, and certainly the people who work in them, are not chasing profits because they want to drive nice cars. They are chasing profits because they too want to keep eating.

Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#133
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some french tv channel did a quick game test, asking a bunch of students to sip colored soda and guess the flavour. Green was mint, Red was strawberry, Yellow was citrus, they were all strawberry. Surprising "reality".

I’ve always wondered if part of the reason the “clear” craze for sodas died off is that you didn’t have the right signals to tell you what it tastes like.

What about canned soda? If drinking from a can it's pretty hard to see what color the soda is, without making a point of checking.

I wonder if the can color is then the signal?

Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#134

Why do all the images in this article have wrong/fake EXIF? (Well, not all; it looks like that they copied the EXIF of the first image (which has the matching EXIF Image description of "Egg yolk in wooden spoon on eggs. Close up.", together with all the other camera/lens info) to all the other images for some reason. Nothing serious, but weird practice nevertheless.)

My guess is the intern who saved the photos wanted to make them the same dimensions copy and pasted all subsequent photos onto/from the first photo exporting from that; that's why the captions are the same for the rest of the photos.

Edit: and also notice the file names as in-article-eggyolks#.jpg which confirms my theory somebody saving over the original photo.

Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese markets strike me as absolutely brutal. I mean, there is always some theft, fraud etc. in any market (one of the oldest written records of humanity is a customer complaint about bad copper sold by a certain Mesopotamian merchant called Ea-nasir in 1750 BC), but stuff like poisoning your customers with Sudan Red, or adding melamine to yoghurt, or frying food on gutter oil seems to always be reported from China…

A lot of this was common in the US and Europe a hundred years ago, but laws and changing culture have stopped it. Just look at snake oil, or the many other “remedies”. See, eg, “ Down and Out in Paris and London” by Orwell, where among many other things he talks about how the restaurant kitchens in early 1900s Paris were extremely gross and dangerous, but because the front of the restaurants were clean, the customers…

And yet none of those examples compare to consciously using known poisons as a replacement for or additive to real food. That’s cynical brutality on another level.

Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same goes with India as well. I have always wondered about this, may be it is the trade-off between getting caught and the sheer desperation to make money that tilts the moral compass to act in unethical ways.

>> and the sheer desperation to make money that tilts the moral compass A very western sentiment. We often deride the quest for profits, demonizing people who put profit ahead of something more noble like safety. But in places like China "profit" is life. China has seen starvation in living memory. In countries without social safety nets a failed business likely means utter destitution, very often leading to physical…

But doesn't getting caught poisoning customers result in destitution too?

Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#137
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese markets strike me as absolutely brutal. I mean, there is always some theft, fraud etc. in any market (one of the oldest written records of humanity is a customer complaint about bad copper sold by a certain Mesopotamian merchant called Ea-nasir in 1750 BC), but stuff like poisoning your customers with Sudan Red, or adding melamine to yoghurt, or frying food on gutter oil seems to always be reported from China…

This used to be common in parts of Europe as well. There is a book called From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats , from the food journalist Bee Wilson [1], which tells (among many other things) a lot of stories about arsenic poisonings in 19th century London, caused by the usage of certain red dyes in food. The saying that certain regulations are written in blood comes from these…

Yes there was an extract in NYT comparting the issues with baby formula in 2008 China with 1850s New York

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/opinion/30wilson.html

Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#138
post #72

Color is very important for food. My favorite story is the one [1] with wine tasting, where the same white wine was tasted twice by the same people, in one case with tasteless red color added. The taste was reported to be completely different. While it might be contributed to wine tasting being total BS, my favorite part of this study was that its author became a wine maker :-). [1] https://www.realclearscience.com/b…

The color of food and drink certainly has suggestive power, but the popular conception of what that wine study shows, i.e. that wine tasting is complete junk, is itself complete junk. A reddit comment summarizes it best: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4q6485/til_a...

I never said wine tasting was junk, but there is plenty of baloney in the reddit post. The worst part is the claim the author is not a scientist, merely an academic doing a study. Was his white coat missing? He did not attend Science University?

I also posted that the author is a wine maker, so it's clear he doesn't view the wine world as junk. My take away from it is that there's a lot going on in our head based on the input from the senses, that things are not black and white, and that it's difficult to rate things objectively because of it. And that this is completely fine, since we are humans and not machines, and if you can taste black currants in a wine and this makes you happy, knock yourself out.

Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#139
We get a lot of eggs from our neighbors and other local egg producers who put a lot of effort into raising healthy chickens. In addition to a deep-colored yolk I like to see how tall the yolk sits in the pan. For freshness, you might see thin, white ropes trailing from the yolk called chalazae.

Re: Why are some egg yolks so orange?

#140
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wasn't the social credit system supposed to fix this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System (i mean it looks like a 'big brother' system, but it was introduced with the objective of fixing abuses like this)

Do corporations and other juridical persons also get a social credit score? This abuse was committed by a corp, not some farmer.

One of the "nice" things about China's one-party and nakedly authoritarian nature is that the corporate veil doesn't really exist: if the Chinese government one day decides that the CEO of a company deserves to have their social credit measured against some set of civic outcomes produced by their company, then there's nothing stopping them from doing so.
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