US: Bipartisan bill introduced in house to help with egg supply
The bill mirrors the National Chicken Council’s (NCC) petition last month to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reverse or modify a 15-year old regulation that forces the broiler industry (chickens raised for meat) to discard perfectly nutritious and safe eggs.
Federal regulations require the refrigeration of eggs 36 hours after they are laid. But that rule does not distinguish between table eggs (which are raw products that need to be refrigerated), and breaker eggs (which are pasteurized for use in everyday grocery products like salad dressing, cake mix, and pasta).
This has forced the broiler industry to throw away nearly 400 million perfectly good eggs each year. The Lowering Egg Prices Act will fix this problem by granting regulatory discretion on the refrigeration requirement for broiler eggs, thus putting hundreds of millions of breaker eggs back on the market.
NCC lent its support to the bill. “I want to thank Rep. Riley for his leadership on this important issue, and thank Reps. Johnson, Harrigan and McDonald Rivet for lending their support to this commonsense effort", said NCC President Harrison Kircher. "With Easter right around the corner, coupled with ongoing high egg prices, we should be doing everything we can to help the egg supply, and this is low-hanging fruit".
Also, a bipartisan group of more than a dozen members of the House of Representatives wrote to Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Sara Brenner urging the agency to grant NCC’s petition.
"The rule requires the broiler industry to discard eggs that don’t meet certain refrigeration requirements", the letter says. "Those requirements make sense for table eggs, which are raw products, but the rule makes no sense for broiler eggs, which are pasteurized. The FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said as much in a 2020 joint risk assessment, which concluded that broiler eggs present an extremely low public risk due to the ‘extremely high pasteurization efficiency’ of the egg-breaking pasteurization process".
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