(Most of) Europe doesn't wash their eggs, allowing them to be stored at room temperature, but as you said, the standard for physical contamination is lower.
The US washes our eggs, requiring refrigeration but greatly extending shelf life and greatly reducing physical contamination.
Advantages to both (Europe wins hands down if you need to whip egg whites to stiff peaks) but very interesting how the two regions addressed the safety issues around this.
Let's say I have unwashed eggs and washed eggs, and I put both in the refrigerator. Won't the unwashed ones last longer, because they haven't had the natural protective coating removed?
If you put European eggs in the fridge, it actually DIMINISHES shelf life because it can cause condensation that begins to erode the cuticle (the thing that allows the egg to be stored at room temp w/o bacterial penetration).
Like I said, there's advantages and trade offs to BOTH, otherwise the move would just be to do one and not the other (similar to how there are advantages to the Imperial measuring system that keeps it in place, but we're not going down that trail).
There is also condensation to consider and I think that putting the unwashed eggs in the fridge can be unsafe if the condensation can allow stuff from the poop to move around. But I'm no eggspert.
The US washes our eggs, requiring refrigeration but greatly extending shelf life and greatly reducing physical contamination.
Advantages to both (Europe wins hands down if you need to whip egg whites to stiff peaks) but very interesting how the two regions addressed the safety issues around this.