Why do people get so worked up about eating a fertilized egg?

[joebryant]

I started reading about eggs and chickens three years ago. Before that, I had just presumed that ALL eggs had been fertilized by a rooster, especially after watching the roosters at my grandmother's farm in Kentucky. I thought the white spots on the two sides of the yolk were rooster semen, and I ALWAYS took a spoon and removed it if I were cooking the egg. Then I read that those were two broken cord strands that held/kept the yolk in the center of the egg until the egg was cracked.
I was telling a lifelong friend about it, and he said that he and his brothers thought and did the same thing. I've talked to other people too, well educated people, who thought the same thing.
Then SpeckledHen posted her pictures of the fertilized/not fertilized eggs being nothing more than a tiny white spot (the hen's ovum) on the yolk and one of it's having changed to a donut shape if a rooster's sperm cell had entered the ovum. Talk about feeling like a dumbass, when I saw that...

 

[A.T. Hagan]

Quote:
I once unwittingly started a long, argumentative thread in a cooking newsgroup some years ago when I asked what made kosher salt kosher. Reading your post about whether fertile eggs were kosher led me to Google about it and I found this:

http://www.oukosher.org/index.php/common/article/eggs_and_blood_spots/

The good rabbi is confused about hen biology, but indeed fertile eggs that have not yet begun to develop are kosher.

 

[PortageGirl]

A.T. Hagan :

Quote:
I once unwittingly started a long, argumentative thread in a cooking newsgroup some years ago when I asked what made kosher salt kosher. Reading your post about whether fertile eggs were kosher led me to Google about it and I found this:

http://www.oukosher.org/index.php/common/article/eggs_and_blood_spots/

The good rabbi is confused about hen biology, but indeed fertile eggs that have not yet begun to develop are kosher.

OK, perhaps we should discuss this in another thread but I'm dying to know, what conclusions did they come up with about the salt? I was told by a practicing Jew (though not a Rabbi. Do most people know that the literal translation of Rabbi is 'teacher'?) that it wasn't that the salt itself was kosher, because all salt is kosher, but that it was the shape/size of the salt crystals which made it suitable for salting meat to draw blood out of the meat. Since as much of the blood as possible should be drawn out of any meat, this is done to some extent even on what many wouldn't question is already kosher, like a beef cut from the shoulder etc. Salted then rinsed etc. While any salt will work, kosher salt works better, and my friend told me that it would be more properly called, "Koshering" salt instead of kosher salt. (oh and he also told me that the expression Kosher Jew, is more properly called 'a Jew who keeps Kosher' though most people don't get all tied up in the details if things are said with good intent. Mistakes are just mistakes, not insults.

Back to the fertilized egg question, I've re-read the whole thread and laughed out loud when I read the question about why eating a single cell from a rooster, is any worse than eating an entire ovum. That's perfect! It's NOT as if there's a tablespoon of actual 'rooster sperm' or whatever people have called it in there, which part do we cut away to get that bad boy cell outta there?​

 

[BlacksheepCardigans]

It's actually not even a cell. It was just half a cell. It got to the egg several days ago and fused with the half a cell that was sitting on the yolk. There's nothing left of the sperm except its DNA - and I mean literally nothing - by the time the egg arrives. So there's literally no way you could say you're eating a sperm; it stopped being a sperm days ago and every bit of it that we think of as sperm-like (the coating and the tail and so on) are long gone.

 

[A.T. Hagan]

Quote:
That's basically it. The salt is used to kasher the meat to make it kosher. It's usually a larger grained salt without additives (but not always).

Where the argument came in that ran for weeks was over who got to decide what is and is not kosher and the various organizations that certify these things. I had no idea there were multiple organizations and they do not always agree and rec.foods attracted people from all over back in the day. Oy vey! I bailed after the first couple dozen posts but it raged on long afterwards.

There, that shouldn't have drifted the thread much.

 

[jasonm11]

Quote:
They are called "coockoo"

 

[spartacus_63]

They are called "coockoo"

X 2...i'm just sayin...

 

[M To The Maxx]

Quote:
X 2...i'm just sayin...

lol