Did they tell you it is the same for cows in Japan?
Okay but there actually is a pretty significant difference between eggs at the store vs buying them from someone who has chickens.
There was actually an egg shortage a while ago, but lots of people who were raising chickens couldn’t sell their eggs because, and I quote, “they were too rich in flavor and texture, so people didn’t like them”.
It was hilarious and sad that high quality eggs was just something no one ever tasted before, so they couldn’t suddenly get used to the flavor.
It’d be like if you drank skim milk your whole life only to find out regular “whole” milk is actually supposed to be creamy lol
Nothing like eating eggs that smell of fish because they chickens are fed lots of fish meal in their enclosures. Yuk.
I got this from a classic boomer dad of a girlfriend, about chicken meat. He said free range chicken was “more gamy” and he preferred uh…. Chickens raised in tiny cages who can’t move around, apparently. Ok psycho.
He should see what they do to calves to get veal. 😢
That’s the thing, he had amazing powers of ignorance and apathy. Sure he’d prefer the most abusive methods of making foie gras too.
It’s sadly all too common for the conservatives I know to downright brag about how little regard they have for animals.
I was a vegetarian for 7 years. I had some odd problems with food that I couldn’t figure out, that’s how it started, then I decided eating meat was just kind of weird. I got all sorts of shit about this over the years from people who apparently were offended or threatened by it. One friend’s wife told me one day “Ooohh so you do that because [withering mocking tone] you care so much about all the little animals?” Like… there would be something wrong with that if I did??
Yep, that sounds pretty on-brand for the types I was thinking of.
They react so poorly to the mere existence of people who they see as other/weird that just your choice of diet not only annoys them but somehow personally insults them.
I mean how many things could we list that drive conservatives to “they are attacking/destroying our way of life!” just by existing or seeking equality. The paranoia and persecution complexes just follow from there.
It’s what they eat that affects the eggs themselves, and what type of chicken. Plus we treat our eggs which is why they are such a salmonella risk and have to be refrigerated.
From what i understand just a diet more rich in beta carotene will produce a richer looking yolk. Seems like the chicken’s lifestyle would have other effects, too. And yeah, in the US eggs come throughly washed, which removes a layer on the outside that would otherwise keep them fresh at room temp. I think the salmonella thing is more related to the sanitary conditions of the farm - I.e. whether the chickens are infected with salmonella. Farms have cleaned up in that respect over the past couple decades and it’s much less prevalent than it was at one time.
Salmonella is 50x less prevalent in the EU because they vaccinate their chickens against it. The reason they vaccinate is because they do not wash the eggs.
Barnevelder
Eyy, that’s near my home town! Barneveld (the town) is basically Chicken/Egg central, as we have companies that build the machines that wash and package our eggs. We also have Haantje Pik which is a sticky cinnamon-bun-like pastry. It’s delicious!
You mean you don’t treat them?
No exactly like they said. In the US eggs are (chlorine?) washed, removing the protective natural coating and making them more shelf unstable.
The stress adds to the meat.
He wanted less flavor, not more.
The stress takes away from the meat.
I thinks that’s the goal the guy wanted.
There’s a market down the street from me. They bring in Amish eggs every week and I always buy them there. The yolks are so bright and the eggs are delicious. Costs maybe 1.5x what regular eggs cost but they’re so worth it
Pretty cool that the price premium is only that! That’s more or less what you pay for regular free-range eggs, isn’t it?
Especially since the price of those shitty grocery store eggs have gone up but my Amish eggs haven’t. I never tried farm eggs till I moved to this area where the market is but I don’t think I can ever go back
This happened to me. My mother raises hens so when there were big egg shortages, we got some from her. The yolks were so rich that their color was practically orange and they would stain anything they got on. I’ve never had eggs so delicious and flavorful, plus anything I baked with them came out so rich and delicious. They really were almost overpowering and a little disconcerting to get used to. I’m amazed how bad even the best store bought eggs are now.
This was my exact experience as well! One benefit of a relatively small town is a lot of people have free range hens and you can get some really tasty eggs
Find pasture-raised eggs at your grocery store. Added bugs to the diet helps with the rich yolks.
In the country they dine on fresh eggs from the hen-house, fresh tomatoes from the garden, fresh venison and foraged mushrooms. The food they eat is usually better tasting and better quality than the food billionaires eat.
Lmao, relax Thoreau
Most people I know who live in the country eat hot dogs and kraft mac and cheese they bought from Walmart
do you think i could get a billionaire to buy me a lil cottage on their property where i could grow chickens and share them with him
Dude That would be amazing
This is just being a serf.
You’d be surprised but this is indeed a thing. Caretakers of billionaire houses are in such situations if there is a trust factor and feeling of family between them. It’s not about the eggs specifically of course, but these kind of things exist.
Sounds a bit like feudalism.
I’m from the country and while your words are nice they’re not factual in the least.
My partner grew up in the mountains, and that’s very much how they ate. Home-grown, canned and cooked basically everything above flour. The kids got taught what they could wild forage themselves, and what to bring back to ask about.
Now, they were so cash poor as to have to rub two pennies together to make three, but that’s a whole different point of conversation
Yeah that’s how my mom grew up 70 years ago in Appalachia, those days are long gone.
The other comment about hotdogs and mac & cheese is much more accurate to the 21st century IME.
I always like those eggs for poaching, because they stay together better and taste better.
I have experienced this. The yolks are so dang orange. What’s crazy, is we got a to of cicadas awhile ago and the chickens LOVE eating them. The eggs were way to rich for me.
Ohh now I wanna try!
Just because it came out of someone’s back yard, doesn’t mean it’s high quality. So many chickens get table scraps and little else. Not everyone is suited to keeping pets, let alone livestock.
– But it generally does in developed countries as the majority of people going through the effort of keeping chickens in that environment are into keeping chickens. You might get some shitty setups, but the norm is decent quality feed and far less stress than large scale commercial setups.
It’s more of a hobby than a “get rich” scheme.
That’s cool, but neither of us have any data, and I’m telling you my experience has witnessed the norm is shitty setups feeding table scraps to half starved hens.
100%. If you break a store egg and a farm egg next to each other, especially in the spring when the chickens start having access to insects again, the farm egg is almost cartoonishly orange next to the store egg.
What’s really weird is that eggs are remarkably similar even when raised on entirely different diets or conditions. While farm raised eggs and organic or free range eggs are slightly better, the difference is much more minimal than I think most people think.
I went on a whole deep dive with that topic a while back and the result of that research was pretty much just that eggs themselves are pretty good for you but it matters a lot less which eggs you buy and more than you eat more of them.
All research points to your conclusion, and the downvoters and further comments don’t know shit. The feed affects the color almost entirely with extremely minor differences in everything else.
In depth comparison. I still buy pasture raised meat & eggs for my family for ethical reasons. You’re right though, it’s mostly appearance as for the actual product.
Bullshit.
Color, consistency, flavor, fragility in the shell, fragility of the yolk, length of time to begin getting weird, length of time to spoil.
Pasture raised hens lay better eggs, hands down.
We’ll bake with sad eggs, but fried or poached? Has to be the good eggs.
I highly recommend learning about chicken husbandry before you make this claim. There are decades of research across numerous countries talking about chicken feed and egg quality. Some farmers know by egg flavor alone if their chickens need supplements and which ones. Chickens can get really weird diseases if they aren’t taken care of properly and this absolutely affects their eggs. I think what you’re noticing is that the eggs you buy as a consumer are about the same for you personally, but that doesn’t mean you can then turn around and claim that “eggs are remarkably similar even when raised on entirely different diets or conditions” and be actually correct.
I don’t understand the point of your comment because I’m not making a claim about animal husbandry necessarily. I think there are plenty of reasons why someone would want non-factory farmed eggs. All I was highlighting was that the difference in actual nutrition is fairly minimal in the studies I looked at and that was surprising to me. Like for how much people talk up farm raised eggs and how different the taste is and everything, I’ve always assumed that raising your own chickens results in drastically different nutritional qualities and I couldn’t find anything backing that up.
It’s still an egg.
And are the nutritional studies you’ve read paying attention to vitamins and micronutrients? Or just calories and fats and protein contents?
I think at the time I was particularly focused on proteins and cholesterol for dieting reasons so I was less concerned with micronutrient content. That being said, the lack of differences between those things in eggs led me to dig a little deeper.
Specifically I wanted to know about eggs eaten in Japan since they take eggs pretty seriously over there and I had watched a mini documentary on it. And if I recall right, what I found was that yes there may be some minor differences in vitamin content or flavor, but they are just minor differences. I guess what surprised me was that I did expect large changes in the health of a caged egg and a carefully managed Japanese egg, but that didn’t turn up in my research. I’m not an expert though, but am scientifically literate.
So to bring it full circle, I know a dietician and I consulted them about it and they did confirm that yes, vitamin content may change though he said the levels of those vitamins and difference between the eggs would be a wash. He said there isn’t any nutritional reason that he knows of to recommend one egg over another.
This is backed up by what the conclusion I came to.The thing I feel most certain about is: In the grocery store, all eggs are the same. And that’s largely true. Now the difference between grocery store and local farm directly is more substantial, but only in cases with high quality food.
I do want to say I’m obviously not an expert, my dietician friend does not specialize in this so that’s the disclaimer, and both he and myself don’t have time to dive deep and if someone wants to present counter research on this, we’d love to be wrong about it.
Do you have sources for your claim that factory farmed eggs are nutritionally the same as cage free eggs?
No, it’s been awhile since I read up on it. But looking at your sources I come to a similar conclusion. There are differences but they’re minor differences.
Agree to disagree they are minor, especially at scale (eating more of them as you suggest).
I had a farmer I got eggs from for years and years. I was so lucky. 50 cents a dozen from 2003-2017. I eat a lot of eggs too. My family goes through two 30 packs a week.
He told me about a month before he stopped. “I done got old, can’t do it anymore. I keep falling and if I break my hip they might as well take me out back and give me a mercy bullet.”
I asked everyone under the sun. No one I found after that was consistent. I thought I found someone a few times, they disappeared after a few months. I gave up and started buying my eggs from the store.
All things must pass. Damn though, that one hurt to lose.
During my quest to find a new source for eggs though, I found someone with duck eggs. I figured, “Ahh, an egg is an egg, right?” Wrong. Duck eggs are not very tasty. They’re fine as an additive to a cake or something, but no way will I ever eat them again. Gah.
Duck eggs are delicious. Taste is often subjective.
Have you ever thought of raising your own chickens?
Not OP, but I’d absolutely love to, but I don’t want to be the only one caring for them. I can have up to 6 according to city ordinances, which is plenty to keep us fed with as many eggs as we care to eat. However, they do require a non-trivial amount of work and they’re a little stinky, so I’m hesitant to do it, especially since I have three young children and a long-ish commute. But my kids probably old enough to help out (they help w/ our cats), so we’ll see.
I bought some eggs from some neighbors and they were absolutely delicious. I also miss duck eggs, and looking up caring for them, it honestly doesn’t seem worth the hassle. But if someone offered, I’d totally buy a bunch of duck eggs and eat them all the time.
Man oh man, have I? Yessir.
I was about to close on a loan for a small farm. I had space for horses, chickens, cows, whatever I wanted. I was so excited, it was all I could think about. I had the deal of a lifetime on the table. The man who took care of me as a kid and raised me to understand technology, who bought me entire mountains of classic computers from school auctions and was there to guide me into DOS and then Linux, he was the neighbor. He was going to co-sign on the loan for me. All I had to do was move the fence a little bit for him and give him a piece of contested land that I had no interest in.
I took the kids, had them pick out their rooms. We were all very excited. We were dreaming of our lives there. The neighbors on either side were lifelong friends. It was a dream, seriously.
Right before closing on the loan I caught their mom with another man. My whole world turned upside down and I was scared to make a move.
The next three years were complete and total hell, my kids were traumatized. Everything just went downhill.
4 years after our split, she was dead from breast cancer, lung cancer, brain cancer, bone cancer.
Life is beautiful, but it can be ugly.
Part of me wonders if she lost it because she had cancer and we didn’t know it. Everything she did was so far from anything I ever dreamed could happen that I can’t help but wonder.
Still though. I’m in the best relationship I’ve ever been in, I have more children now and life goes on, just like it has for anyone who has ever had a hard time.
I’ll get there again eventually. I’m sure I will. If I don’t, I’ll be happy with what I have. No room for chickens. That’s fine with me.
Sorry for the book.
That was a fucking wild read.
Thanks for sharing, and sorry for all the pain. I hope you get to have all good things in your life.
Bro you don’t need a farm to raise chickens. You can do it in a yard if you want. You can also see about buying stock in a farm or in a food share.
I’m sorry man. Life can really be an arse sometimes. I hope you’ll manage to finally live that dream. Your attitude is in the right place for sure.
Not quite the same, as we were only together a short time and kids were not involved, but I had a gf who went super loony with “shadow people” and ideas that aliens were after us. She had a serious stroke about a year after we split up and I wonder whether her mental break while we were together was somehow related.
Wait, would that result in yellower chicken?
Joke aside, healthier chicken?
I don’t know, to be honest. I think they taste better, but I know it could be purely psychological… They’re my chickens, after all. I do think the shells are sturdier (not sure if it’s thickness or composition) when they have more bugs to eat. I don’t know about any claims regarding nutritional differences, but the eggs themselves do have some noticeable and measurable differences.
We buy free-range eggs but battery iPhones…
Free range isnt that free
Our chickens walked once.
You should try ‘free under capitalism’.
What, are they all battery farmed in the great People’s Republic of China?
I’ve spent a decent bit of time there on a few work trips. Never saw differentiation of eggs in supermarkets (or restaurants). Eggs be eggs.
A huge number of folks are just coming into non-poverty since the turn of the century so it would seem entirely plausible to me that chicken comfort wouldn’t be a thing there just like it wasn’t in the west until comparatively recently and still isn’t for a huge part of the population.
Apart from that it’s really very different culturally. They just view things through an entirely different (and interesting) lens.
Eggs be eggs.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A Chinese buddy of mine sent me this a few years ago. Apparently counterfeit eggs are an actual problem in some parts of China. I cannot possibly fathom how this is cheaper than an actual egg, but apparently it’s a thing and can make people sick if they eat them.
I have actually heard about that. Google “gutter oil” if you want some nightmares. They are working on food safety hard though.
Eeewwww
I know, right?!?
The first section looks a lot like alginate spherification. It’s a fun demo to make a fake egg with it but it would be very obvious it isn’t an egg when you cooked it. It wouldn’t set or act like an egg at all when heated. I’d also be very curious to see how they make the shell if it really is a fake egg.
For the second section, those are previously frozen eggs. Freezing them turns the yolk rubbery but doesn’t do much to the white.
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I mean, it’s still a largely rural country, I imagine in the majority of the country (geographically) people or their neighbors raise the chickens that lay the eggs they eat
it’s still a largely rural country
No it’s not.
I mean, it’s still a largely rural country
Not so. Wikipedia has a decent article but here’s the crux of it:
By the end of 2023, China had an urbanization rate of 66.2% and is expected to reach 75-80% by 2035
The cities are massive and really densely populated. Shenzhen and Guangzhou are about 90 minutes apart by car if memory serves and account for about 35M people. Hong Kong is an hour south of Shenzhen by train and that’s another ~8M.
More than a third of the country by population, especially when that population is in the billions, is still pretty large. Not majority rural obviously, but still a large percentage.
But I was speaking geographically. Isn’t half the country almost completely empty? Or am I confusing something I read somewhere?
Yeah Western China is basically empty. It’s very mountainous and the land is not fertile.
That still means there are about 500 million people living in rural areas of China.
So more rural Chinese than total Americans.
I don’t know but one can make guesses based on this.
Ironically, you cannot choose how comfortable the human’s life is for most products.
Where do you get your human eggs?
Buried in the sand like turtles, where do you get yours?
There are certifications out there like FairTrade and others that try to make labor less slave-like in the world. Guess you could call that a way of making human life more comfortable
Fair trade basically means the middle men were cut out of the process, increasing profits.
The people growing coffee for Starbucks are still impoverished.
You kind of can depending on where it was made
If you put the eggs up your butt at the grocery store, you can choose how uncomfortable everyone will be.
Thanks for the laugh, needed it this morning
Username checks out
Egg
Hard as shit to find, but looking for products from worker cooperatives can help you to find free range human goods
In France the « bio » label (https://www.bioagricert.org/en/certification/organic-production/ab-france.html) does bot only take into account ecological properties of the product but also many metrics relative to the social quality of the company and well being of its employees.
Kinda true when you think about it
At least here in the UK, unless you directly see where that egg was laid, assume it was horrific.
not to mention male chick culling
Better than keeping them around under atrocious conditions because their meat has a low value. Like they did in Germany once killing the males was illegal: Just deport to Poland.
Now all the people that got their law are crying again, because it is far more cruel now. I mean what did they expect?
even if we completely disregard the possibility of not producing so many eggs (reduced consumption of meat and eggs to start with) tech is moving forward. There are more and more reliable ways of determining if the chick will be male by physical and spectroscopic assays so you can determine the gender within a week of hatching and at least dispose of the egg (nervous system systems to develop after this period).
That is future tech, not today tech.
not really, it seems to have evolved enough to be considered a serious probability and large scale trials
I went to an egg farm in wales this summer and it was pretty nice. Lots of chickens but they go out to roam every day. Eggs were delicious and bright orange yolks.
ah yes one of the display farms where faeries live and everyone is singing
Dunno where you live, but those things exist in great quantity. You just have to pay a lot more. And if there are no eggs available, there are no eggs available. Simple as that. We actually shop there more to pet the chickens than to buy their period 😁
So… keep in mind I stumbled on this.
Free-range eggs in grocery stores are painted/dyed.
Whatever the grocers are advertising regarding chicken conditions have been a lie… It’s just there to make sure they keep selling it and for more. Unsure how to legitimately check which ones aren’t simply marketing make-up
When I worked for a guy who kept chickens in the back yard, the eggs came out in every shade from dark brown to white, and some had freckles. I don’t know how they get them to be just two uniform colours (brown/white) in the grocery store, but I assume the white ones must be bleached. Some are naturally brown, others may be dyed.
But I agree that we should be suspicious whenever marketing is involved.
They ought to force them to put photos of where the eggs came from on the packaging, like with cigarettes. Photos of the actual plant/range/etc. Might make people consider not picking the cheapest option.
Peter Singer is ‘the godfather of animal rights’ or whatever and he has a metric for ethical chicken farming, like a certain number of chickens raised per acre, free range.
It’s way fewer chickens than currently raised but I think that’s an interesting way to think about it…if we didn’t have demand for eating chicken, many of these chickens wouldn’t exist. Is that better than living a close-enough approximation of your wild life? Kind of a hard question.
If we did not raise chicken, we would have more wilderness supporting other animals.
I’ve always fallen on the side of no, it’s not better. If we compare actions taken toward them vs non-existence, almost anything could be justified.
We (rightfully) wouldn’t accept that logic for ourselves if a similar question came up.
It’s not that any life is better than nothing, it’s that a good-enough life is better than nothing, and there has to be some level at which it can be said a chicken had a good-enough life.
Obviously he doesn’t think factory farm chicken lives are worth living, but he thinks there is a possible chicken life that is.
We actually do make this calculation for humans. A lot of countries traditionally get abortions if a fetus has down syndrome, that is a decision saying that life is not worth living. The US doesn’t do that as much but there are conversations around euthanasia, that’s the same idea but for humans. There is a level of a good-enough life and we weigh life and death decisions around that.
I think the real argument against this is just that the whole idea doesn’t track and killing any animal for sustenance when you don’t have to is just wrong at the core. THAT is where I disagree, but I can’t math my way into changing your mind on it because I’m accounting for the quality of life for potential future beings, and you’re just not. I don’t think there’s a “right” way to account for that inherently.
Where I’m from, there was a huge egg shortage for a while because ~5 years ago the government passed new laws to try and make things marginally less horrible for chickens. The entire industry decided that they were going to do… basically nothing, then the rules came into force and there was lots of winging from industry people that 5 years want enough time, and how hard it was not being able to sell all this product that they kept producing for some reason
there was lots of winging
heh
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That wasn’t honest incompetence. That was a failed, organized attempt to force a repeal.
Smells like too big to fail fuckery
Smells like too big to fail… cluckery…(⌐■_■)
Oh totally. There was an election and a change of government to one that is typically more business friendly, so I guess the hope was they’d roll back the rules but they were actually pretty popular with the public in general
Sounds familiar, living in the Netherlands where farmers had years and subsidies to reduce reliance on livestock for the environment, then protested when the rules came into force and they hadn’t used the time or subsidies to prepare.
This is New Zealand, but yeah, basically the same deal
I thought so…
Reminds me of one time I discussed egg ethics and the number system in europe with my fellow german student flatmate.
Our other flatmate was a syrien refugie and when he came in and we translated the subject he laughed - a whole lot. When he was able to speak after that epic laughter he just said “in syria its people in cages and you fight about chicken.”
Reality had been checked
Plenty of people in cages in the US - I think we have the highest or one of the highest incarceration rates in the world? So that’s cool but not a situation unique to Syria or something.
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This site, fwiw, has the US at #1 per capita.
This one has the same info you supplied. Who knows, I guess. Either way, there really should be more political talk about this. What gets me is how uneven sentencing is - not just from state to state or judge to judge, but based on types of crime. A sex predator, for instance, should be way past someone selling small amounts of crack or whatever.deleted by creator
We obviously need to re-think something. Prisons are not effective for rehabilitation and barely effective for threats of punishment. There are also way too many people who are threats released while people who aren’t really are incacerated… like, someone who has been stealing cars, mugging people, attacking people at bus stops should be held vs. someone who say, did some financial fraud. It’s all over the place though.
Yeah, it’s good that we think about solving these types of problems, but I think it’s healthy to be reminded that it’s a privilege to be in a position to spend mental energy on it.
Totally. I think it also shows that empathy is to some degree a subject to choice, which in turn is connected to one’s scope of action
I just go by price. And sometimes I just really want jumbo eggs.
Sometimes, while having breakfast, you relish in the fact that a chicken struggled to push something jumbo out of its anus.
Chickens have a cloaca, silly.
The more expensive eggs taste better and only cost a quarter more. Would you pay 50¢ to make your breakfast taste better? You should.
It is pretty fuckin creepy that it’s become a standard in all grocery stores that ‘cheap torture’ is an option at all and it’s only because of capitalism flexing that it could the choice to not be evil and we should be grateful for it with more $$
