On top of all the hoaxes about secret communists and attacks on Muslim scholars, rumors about fake food products being sold in Indonesian markets seem to pop up with surprising regularity. Back in 2015, a plastic rice scare gripped the country. Fast forward to today and it’s rumors about fake eggs that are freaking many people out.
Although fake egg rumors have been going around various parts of Indonesia recently, including Aceh and Sumbawa, a viral video showing allegedly artificial eggs being sold at the Pasar Jaya market in Johar Baru brought the panic to Jakarta.
In the video the man who cracks the eggs explains they must be fake because the whites aren’t sticky, the yolk can be easily separated from the whites and the shell looks plastic.
But as noted in the caption of this Facebook reshare explaining the hoax, as well as explanations from numerous government officials, all of the signs that the eggs are fake that the man points out in the video are simply signs of old eggs (over four weeks old) that shouldn’t be sold in the market anyways.
On top of that very simple explanation for the video, some officials also made the obvious argument that eggs are cheap while making fake eggs is not.
“What’s the point of faking eggs, because the cost would be huge and it would also be almost impossible to get away with,” Bambang Triyana, from the Jakarta Center for Quality Testing and Certification of Animal Products, told Tribunnews today.
But because such simple and logical explanations are obviously not enough for some people, officials tested eggs at the market in the video and others around Jakarta and, of course, found no fake eggs being sold.
“We want to tell the people of Jakarta to feel safe, there is no circulation of fake eggs for sure. Please, believe that these eggs are genuinely from chickens.That’s our statement, do not worry,” Sri Hartati, the head of food security at the Jakarta branch of the Department of Marine, Agriculture and Food Security (DKPKP), said on Saturday as quoted by Kumparan.
So now the only fake eggs that Indonesian actually need to potentially worry about are those expensive Kinder Joy candy eggs that some parents want banned from convenience store cashier areas.
