The Japanese government is talking the term egg whites to a whole new level.
The Japan Times is reporting that the country is feeding hens with Japanese rice in a bid to boost rice production and lessen dependency on foreign corn imports.
The paper notes that demand for rice is dropping at a rate of about 80,000 tons per year. To ensure the survivability of the country's rice fields, the government is promoting the use of rice as feed for livestock. It wants to allocate at least 1.1 million tons of rice for animal feeding by the year 2025, says the article, a considerable increase from the 110,000 tons currently being used now.
According to the report, the color of a chicken's egg yolk is affected by the food it ingests. So the side effect of all these rice-fed birds is an uptick in what the paper calls 'Kometsuya' eggs, whose name is combination of the Japanese words kome (rice) and tsuya (luster). Don't expect to see a fully monochrome egg though. The yolks of Kometsuya eggs are just 'close to white' according to the report.
Takeuchi Poultry farm in Hokkaido, a leading producer of Kometsuya, feeds its hens with feed composed of 68 percent Japanese rice. When it began cultivating Kometsuya eggs in 2011, it used about 80 tons of rice. That number has since ballooned to 170 tons in its 5th year on the market.
This isn't the first time Japan has experimented with eggs. Earlier this year, reports surfaced around the web of citrusy-yuzu infused eggs being developed. Rocketnews24 shared the story of these 'Yuzutama' (short hand ofr Yuzu Tamago) eggs. Similar to Kometsuya, Yuzutama eggs are made by mixing in the skin of the yuzu fruit into the feed.
