What’s a long egg? 

Anyone who saw either Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Jamie Oliver’s programmes about chicken over the last week or so is unlikely to have been unmoved.

Hugh’s Chicken Run saw the West Country foodie building his own intensive farm to showcase the conditions faced by the meat industry’s ’standard’ chickens while Jamie’s Fowl Dinners featured chicks being suffocated in front of a studio audience.

Pretty disturbing stuff. But beyond the fundamental questions of humane treatment, health issues and economic pressures, one question remained: what on earth is a long egg?

This particular item was produced as part of Jamie Oliver’s demonstration of processed egg products used by the food industry. It’s a long, cylindrical white tube, which slices just like a conventional egg. Only you can go on slicing for a lot longer.

He moved on without going into detail about how this is made, so we’ve had a scratch around to find the remarkable hen that lays this thing.

It appears to be the product of the Sanovo 6-32, a machine invented in the 1970s by a company whose vision is “to become the overall and actively preferred global supplier for the egg processing industry”.

They don’t make it clear how this eggy tube comes into being, but it seems likely that lots of eggs whites are mixed up and set in a mould, with lots of eggs yolks poured into the middle and then hard-boiled.

The point of this demonstration was that, whether we choose boxes of eggs that are free range, many of the eggs we end up eating (in, say, sandwiches, quiches or mayonnaise) may not be quite how we’d like to imagine them - and that most still come from caged hens.

The publicity from all this had been predicted to hit supermarket sales. But yesterday it was reported that sales of all chickens - not just the free-range ones - have actually risen since the celebrity chef campaigning began.

A long (egg) way to go it seems.

To make a pledge to buy free-range, sign up to Chicken Out.

IMAGE courtesy of Channel 4 & flickr user kevinzim