Next year it will be forty years since a bunch of scientists arbitrarily decided what the safe level of cholesterol was in the human body. In 1968, there was NO scientific basis for this diktat. All that was known, as I recount in my book Last Chance to Eat, The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World, was that too much cholesterol was linked to coronary disease. The safe level was set at 300 milligrams a day. In those days, the egg contained 278 milligrams of cholesterol. So a single egg used up all your approved daily intake of cholesterol. In fact, as was later shown, a food high in cholesterol had no actual impact on a human's cholesterol level -- it is the way the body processes foods that produces cholesterol.

Egg sales plummeted. International heart associations condemned the egg. People ate in fear of the egg. It wouldn't be until 1999 that a study sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health cleared the egg as safe to eat. But the damage was done. People remain scared of eggs.

In the meantime, the fear of the egg had been enhanced by the discovery that a bad bacteria, Salmonella E, had penetrated the the egg causing sickness. Word went out NEVER to eat a raw egg. Many great foods are made with raw eggs, steak tartare, chocolate mousse, meringues are cooked at too low a level to destroy bacteria etc.....The result is that eggs began to be pasteurized. Just as pasteurization diminishes the taste of milk so it diminishes the taste of eggs. Hollandaise sauce, one of the great mother sauces, tastes entirely different made from pasteurized eggs.

Buying LOCAL is now the only way to insure that you're getting vrai eggs because eggs do not have to be labelled pasteurized.