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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
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.
I always like those eggs for poaching, because they stay together better and taste better.
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.
Most people I know who live in the country eat hot dogs and kraft mac and cheese they bought from Walmart
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.
Wasn't that long ago, but damned if they ain't making it harder to do. Every cheap plot of land I've looked at has such stringent use restrictions it's basically having an invasive landlord with more steps. Homesteading is dead, at least in places i'd consider it.
Not to romanticize it too much. It sucked so bad my partner's mom responded to a trip idea with "what? Fuck no! We lived in a tent for a year, why the fuck would I want to go camping?"
We still are never allowed to 'just go live in the woods' lol
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
Sounds a bit like feudalism.
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.
Dude That would be amazing
This is just being a serf.
Lmao, relax Thoreau
I grew up in the country, while all of that did happen.. it wasn’t like every meal was that. Eggs depended on how many eggs the dozen or so chickens laid recently, most chickens don’t lay industrial quantities.. tomatoes only in mid/late summer when the garden is fruiting. deer only after deer season, even with my dad and I tagging out each year that isn’t enough deer for every meal to be deer meat (venison lol we don’t call it that). We mushroom hunted (foraging lol) every once in a while but again, wild pecker-heads aren’t prevalent enough for any population to eat regularly
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.
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.
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).
That may be true. I roped a dietician friend of mine in on this and he confirmed my suspicion. The nutrient differences you’re noting, he claimed, are not going to be significant enough sources to matter. But those minor differences exist if people care about them.
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.
Huh, I'd swear most store eggs I get have yokes closer the the right one in colour
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
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.
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.
I see. Maybe I was thinking of Europe when I heard salmonella had been reduced so much.
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!
I wish it was gluten free, looks 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.
Oh interesting. Thank you for the explanation.
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.
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.
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.
What do you think is worse, taking really good care of animals you are exploiting and possibly going to eat, or taking really shitty care of that same animal?
Nothing like eating eggs that smell of fish because they chickens are fed lots of fish meal in their enclosures. Yuk.
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!