Officers scramble for plastic eggs, chicken out at last

Officials conducted checks across Chennai on Tuesday.

CHENNAI: Their instructions were unlike anything they had heard: shake the egg, tap it, smell it, hold it against the light, and, if suspicious, crack it.

As videos of plastic eggsbeing sold in Kerala continue to do the rounds even after scientists in the neighbouring state dismissed them as rumours, food safety officialshere have received a dozen calls from the public claiming the eggs they bought were artificial.

To allay their fears, food safety officers fanned out in bustling markets in Anna Nagar, Mylapore, T Nagar and Velachery on Monday and Tuesday to 'test' if the eggs sold by retailers were real. Some were cracked in the shops. Around seven were brought to the government labs for testing. Two were given by residents who had alerted officials. They had carefully saved the shells lined on the inside with, what they claimed, was a thin plastic wrapper.

"They said it burnt like plastic and smelt like it too," said R Kathiravan, designated officer of Tamil Nadu Food Safety and Drug Administration, Chennai. He said it was just the shell membrane. "There's a lot of alarm after these videos started doing the rounds. People have started paying a lot more attention to an egg's anatomy," he said. The other eggs officials pocketed were found to be rotten and not plastic.

Lying between the eggshell and egg white are two transparent protein membranes - inner and outer membrane - that protect the egg against bacterial invasion. Veterinarians say these strong layers are made partly of keratin, a protein that's also in human hair.

In October, reports on 'Chinese fake eggs' had surfaced in Kerala after a regional TV news channel 'exposed' the fake eggs being sold in markets in Idukki district. What followed was a series of videos showing consumers claiming the eggs they bought were hard to crack and the omelettes they made using these were hard and rubbery. Food safety officials collected samples from across the state, only to find they were all real. Similar videos surfaced in West Bengal too, sending officials there on a wild goose chase.