Food channel --red spots on eggs?

[Dixiedoodle]

Has anyone seen the show "Food Detective"?? Today, one of the questions was "What are those red spots in my eggs?" They had 100 eggs in flats set out.. They said it happened about once in every 100 eggs..They cracked (a lot of them) until they found one...They stated it was a small drop of blood and could be caused by stress in the chicken- such a being moved, or bothered by predators, in it's envoriment --such as exterme weather contiditions. And that it is ok to eat the egg. IF you would like you could use a knife and spoon and remove the spot and eat the egg as normal... They said many people thought it was caused by being fertile but it was NOT . Stating that it happens in battery hens (where there are NO roosters at all).. It was interesting......

 

[Uppity Peon]

Interesting.

I always knew it was best for the chickens to remain calm for egg production, but had no idea where the blood spots came from.

 

[Indiana hens]

BLOOD! YUCK! I wouldn't eat it raw. But if cooked I found they taste like an egg.

 

[redhen]

i saw it the other night. Pretty interesting!

 

[Southernbelle]

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[cmom]

They are blood spots or meat spots. You can eat them or take them out if you want.

 

[2DogsFarm]

Being a chickenless City Girl until recently I got my information from John Steinbeck.

In The Red Pony he wrote a line where the Dad tells his son not to be so picky about the red spot because:
"It's just a sign the rooster leaves"

So until now I always thought it meant a fertile egg.
Live & Learn, right?

 

[silkiechicken]

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Yeah... and it's often genetic too, which means birds who have them alot are often never bred.

 

[For-The-Love-Of-Chickens]

We used to raise chickens when I was a kid, and my parents told me that the red spot is how you knew the egg was fertile. It only happened once in awhile, but we always had a LOT of chicks around. Two and two didn't exactly equal four, but as a kid you trust your parents! It wasn't until we got our own chickens and I did tons of research here that we found out how to tell a fertile egg. My mom however, still does not believe me. We give her eggs and she swears our rooster is bad. (Even though we know NOW that he is perfectly fine and almost all of the eggs are in fact fertile.)

 

[Uppity Peon]

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Hehe. I would want to get a couple dozen and tell her to crack half of them and predict the hatch rate, and then hatch the rest.

But I'm evil that way.