Pink egg whites found in Da Lat
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Consumers are worried after news that several duck eggs found in Da Lat have pink rather than white albumens. Some say the eggs could be fake ones smuggled from China.
Lo Thi Thanh recently bought more than 10 duck eggs at Hoang Lien shop on Dang Thai Than Street, Da Lat City. She later consumed five eggs, three of them having reddish pink albumens.
She said it was the second time she witnessed the unusual phenomenon.
The first time occurred three weeks ago when she bought five duck eggs at the same shop and discovered two of them were abnormal.
“Such eggs taste bitter after being boiled,” she said.
The supplier of duck eggs to the shop asserted that all of the eggs had been bought from the southwestern region and had been checked. That supplier also confirmed the eggs were not imported from China.
Feed expert Luong Huy Toan said it is technically able to enlarge yolk or the white of eggs.
A normal egg usually weighs 60-70 grams, with the yolk accounting 40-45 percent of the weight, he added.
Prof. Nguyen Dang Vang, deputy chairman of the National Assembly’s Committee for Science, Technology and Environment, advised that when consumers find such abnormal eggs, they should bring them to the local National Agro-Forestry and Fisheries Quality Assurance Sub-department (for uncooked eggs) or to local Sub-department for Food Safety and Hygiene (for cooked eggs) for examination and testing.
Reddened from hormone-stimulating feed?
Breeding experts said they have not recorded such unusual case so far.
However, they said the reddish pink color of the egg-white might result when ducks are fed with feed containing an excessive amount of follicle-stimulating hormone.
That kind of feed might have come from China, they said.
Such feed can speed up the forming of eggs in chickens, ducks and some other kinds of poultry as well as increasing the size of yolk and egg white.
Vegetarian egg
Meanwhile, Dr. Le Huy Ham, head of the Agricultural Genetics Institute, said the eggs might be a kind of “vegetarian egg” [fake egg] made in China and then imported to Vietnam where traders mix such eggs with normal ones.
China has recently opened classes to train how to make vegetarian eggs, which are cheaper than normal ones, to serve vegetarians, he explained.
However, Dr. Ham said if the eggs are real ones, it is necessary to inspect suppliers and breeding centers to determine whether the feed is mixed with a substance that can turn the egg white into red.
In Vietnam, due to the effects of the kind of feed used, the egg yolk of industrially bred chickens often looks less red than that of free-range chickens.
