What you see: A beige clump in your egg.
What it is: A tumor, yeek.
Eat or toss: We can’t imagine anyone wanting to eat it. We also can’t, however, identify any particular risks associated with eating this egg.
What is the mass inside this just-cracked egg?
Thanks to Katelyn D., a Florida resident, for sending in what is perhaps one of the wildest images we’ve ever assessed here at EatOrToss. So, what on Earth happened in this egg and is it possibly a fertilized embryo or a malformed bonus egg? Over to Deana R. Jones, director of the U.S. National Poultry Research Center, for an explanation:
“OK, so don’t freak out,” she told me. “This was a tumor that was in the bird that ended up entering into the reproductive tract, and therefore it was laid into the egg.”
Yikes!
But, she said, there aren’t any known risks to eating this egg. Rather, it’s just majorly icky.
“Some extra bit of tissue formed and then it fell off,” she said, explaining that that would have happened somewhere along the chicken’s internal egg-making pathway. Perhaps, she said, the tumor fell off a follicle and landed in the egg as the chicken was forming it.
“This is a physiological process, a biological process, and things don’t always work great,” she said.
And, in case you’re worried about the chicken, she said this doesn’t necessarily mean that the chicken is sick.
“Some extra bit of tissue formed, and then it fell off,” she said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s cancerous,” she said.
Jones said that while this isn’t a common occurrence, it’s hard to say how often it happens. Personally, I’ve never encountered an egg like this, and I hope you never do, either!
