Honestly, chicken sex doesn’t look like a ton of fun to me, but at least it’s over with quick.
But it’s not just thoughts like this that keep me staring for minutes at a time at the egg aisle in the grocery store. It’s the confounding number of choices. Yes: there is a good half-aisle devoted to eggs in our local store. There’s an entire aisle devoted to pricey water in plastic bottles, for some reason, even though you can get the exact same stuff out of the tap, minus the marketing. But the sheer variety in the egg section is paralyzing. I never know what to buy.
Eggs have been in the news cycle of late because apparently Biden made them more expensive, and so now we have to have our government eviscerated by ignorant racists who can’t quite make ends meet on four hundred billion dollars. Which is nuts, because eggs still seem like a bargain to me. That’s a lot of work, pounding an egg or two out of your cloaca every morning. It’s slave labor, of course, so that keeps the price down right there.
I always wondered why hens lay egg after egg in the absence of a rooster, but it turns out they do it because that’s what the egg farmer wants. Not that any individual hen is being rewarded for generosity. Unless you count not being slaughtered for your meat a reward. No, farmers want eggs, and have selected enthusiastic egg-layers over stingier ones, and in due time have developed strains of egg-popping virtuosi in the poultry world.
And the reason that works is that chickens lay eggs all the time whether a sperm happens by or not. Like most birds, they stash any acquired semen in a little internal closet and have the eggs mostly whomped up before sending it by the closet for a contribution. The hen doesn’t know in advance if she’s laying fertilized eggs or not. And that works in Nature because there’s generally no shortage of avid roosters.
“Nature” is an archaic term for the chaotic conditions that prevailed before modern agriculture. Chickens, for instance, used to have to peck around all day for slugs and snails and such just to get enough calcium for their eggshells. Now chickens have it easier, with a ready supply of wheat middlings and calcium all ground up for them, and the warmth and social stimulation of being packed in solid with other chickens.
But I still struggle with the choices in the egg aisle. There’s quite a range of prices and descriptors and my inclination to pick up the cheapest ones is at odds with my suspicion that a good liberal should go for one of the other cartons, or, more accurately, with the fear of being judged in the checkout line. So let’s break it down:
- Cage-Free: The donor chickens are not kept in tiny cages but are allowed to roam freely in a hen house. As a bonus, they are prevented from tipping over by extreme density of other free-roaming chickens.
- Free-Range: Still in the hen house, but they have access to a dab of the outdoors if they get a notion.
- Pasture-Raised: These are from the archaic chickens. The poor things are outside trying to fend for themselves for the most part and just pop into a coop to sleep and lay eggs. These eggs are from Farmer Bob and you might be able to score them locally at a roadside stand but that’s about it.
- Vegetarian diet: This is some kind of monastic penance bullshit. Chickens aren’t vegetarians.
- All-Natural: Not made of rubber.
- Farm-fresh: The egg truck from the factory farm was not sidelined in a parking lot for weeks on its way to the store.
Hormone-free: Hormones in poultry were banned in the 1950s. This is ad copy. See “bottled water,” above. - Grade AA: Highest quality. May be used in soufflés, games, wall clocks, and remote controls.
The orange idiot’s “Shut up about egg prices!” at least shows that some of our complaints are reaching him.
Here in sunny NJ we have walls of eggs. Trying to figure out how that equates to aisle space, but maybe ten feet long by six feet high (not sure who is reaching those down).
I usually buy 30 egg flats at least once a week because a) I eat a lot of eggs and bake regularly and b) I hoard eggs, among other things. My usual 30 egg flats (store brand, eggshells so thin I can break them picking them up which begs the question how they survived the trip from the farm to the shelves) have been running around $20 a pop recently. I couldn’t find them about a month ago because some genius stacked them up on the top shelf. Before I located them I did notice flats of 24 for $8.98. Math isn’t my strong suit so I started to put the 24 flat back in favor of the usual 30 when it hit me. Cheaper eggs.
Been buying that brand ever since and so far the price remains $8.98 a flat. Their large aren’t quite as large as the store brand’s large, but still adequate.
Wait. Wait. Wait. How many eggs do you hoard? I could eat 30 hardboiled eggs a week but no other way. Hoard? Is this something we could see from the front door when we’re selling encyclopedias?
Like I said my habit is to buy 30 eggs at least once a week. If I have fewer than eighteen in the fridge I become concerned about running out. I bought 48 about two weeks ago and still have 36, but that’s because I still had eggs remaining from the last purchase.
No, you can’t see the eggs if you’re a salesperson stupid enough to come to my door. But the other hoarded items are quite visible. The little entrance hall has two closets which tend to be open, one full of coats and the other full of towels, linens and paper products. There’s a glass topped table with a base made from an old cast iron Singer sewing machine table. A Dimetrodon skull sits there along with a bunch of tools and odd bits and pieces that came home, including the giant jar containing the trifecta of pickled crocodilians (alligator, cayman, crocodile. I’m just missing a gharial to have a complete set). There are carpentry tools under the table and two giant metal pretzel cans full of extension cords. There’s an antique floor lamp surrounded by more tools (mostly picks, sledgehammers, axes and axe handles). And usually there are shoes, boots, cast off pants and coats. In the old days before my Sam died, things were neater. If they weren’t, she’d be making nests out of whatever was on the floor, which involved chewing, licking, ripping and generally rendering items of clothing unfit for human use. So I kept stuff off the floor and closeted. Sam was also a chick magnet. Now that she’s gone no human females come over to visit her. Trust me, they had no interest in me!
Dave always said Pootie was a chick magnet and that’s why he’d sometimes bring him to the bar to watch basketball games. He’d sit right up against the napkin dispenser.
I love eggs and used to eat a lot of them. About 1 1/2 years ago, I began to recognize signs that I was allergic to them, so eliminated them from my diet. So I have missed out on the consternation about egg prices. Why people cannot grasp that there is avian flu going around, affecting egg prices puzzles me.
As for water, maybe where you live you can get the same thing from the tap, but where I live awhile back the news carried the story that our water tested second only to Flint Michigan for impurity. So I buy and drink distilled water for my own safety unless and until the city hires someone who understands how to maintain water purity. My sister lives in the country and owns a distiller, which sits prominantly on her kitchen counter, constantly chugging away distilling her water.
Okay, you get a pass. That’s dreadful. Our water has almost no additives and comes directly downhill from a well-protected pair of large lakes on the mountain. BTW, according to someone on NPR yesterday, the avian flu did account for a bit of a blip, but was mostly used by the egg cartel to artificially balloon prices. Yes, egg cartel.
I think I’ve bought one bottle of bottled water my entire life (at an outside oldies concert in the mid 1990s). As for the incredible edible egg, I always look for the paper cartons vs Styrofoam (don’t know why) and I’d still like to know why we insist on washing them before sale, when the rest of the world doesn’t. We’re a bunch of lamebrains, of course.
I can imagine there are more pathogens on factory chicken eggs but I personally don’t eat the outside of the egg. So. I guess they don’t even need refrigeration if they’re collected from normal birds. Somebody can correct me. And YEAH you don’t buy them in Styrofoam! The standard egg carton is a beautiful container and 100% recyclable.
I’ve heard that people in Europe who raise chickens don’t refrigerate the eggs. Neither did they for a long time at my farm market. Until a health inspector showed up and had a shit fit about that. So now they keep them in a refrigerated case. But these eggs are so fresh that when I hard boil them, even after a week or so, they are still hard to peel. Supermarket eggs are refrigerated, not only for the potential pathogens on the outside of the egg, but because they are already old by the time they get to the grocery store.
About peeling fresh hard boiled eggs- add one-2 pinches of salt to the water you are boiling them in. Works every time.
Nothing works every time.
My nephew who raises chickens tells me that if you wash the eggs they need to be refrigerated. Grocery store eggs, obviously, have been washed.
That sounds familiar, yes.
My country egg supplier sold her flock so we will be hitting the marketplace. Our egg consumption will drop. Telling people not to talk about grocery prices or not complain about grocery prices is not a solution. Eggs were a budget friendly meal and many families added in some “breakfast for dinner” meals.
I prefer tap water and all my grandkids have refillable water bottles. I think covid, when they had to bring their own water bottles to school, has trained them not to grab the plastic bottled water.
I buy a carton of eggs and use a few and then six months later I throw them out. I really don’t eat eggs that aren’t at least hardboiled (and preferably deviled) except in baking, and since I started avoiding wheat I hardly bake anymore.
Fortunately, I live close to a farm market. The eggs are still only $4.50 a dozen. I used to eat eggs every day for breakfast, but since I’ve changed things up, I use fewer of them. I hard-boil some for snacks when I am hungry between meals. I have scrambled or poached eggs for breakfast a couple times a week. And i use them for making other foods, like pancakes, chocolate mousse, or whatever.
As for water, our water in Delaware is deplorable. A neighbor’s son once worked for the water department here, testing the water. At a BBQ his folk’s had, he once said to me, “Whatever you do… always use a water filter!” I already did, but I took his words to heart as to just how bad our water is here. I would never buy bottled water. All that plastic, plus it’s probably the same goddam water that comes out of your tap. I prefer getting and replacing a water filter every 2 months. Plus, I have a shower filter that gets replaced every 6 months. An air purifier in a central location of the house. I do what I can without being all anal about it all.
Maybe DuPont (and the rest) added some of their “better living through chemistry” to the water. I don’t remember it being that bad 60 years ago.
There’s no maybe about who the culprits are for Delaware’s toxic water. That would be DuPont.
They probably didn’t test it back then, or if they did, they didn’t release the info on it.
Well…maybe a LEETLE anal? Not saying that’s wrong. I’m sorry y’all don’t have nice water coming out of your tap. I did not care for the water where I grew up in Northern Virginia. Seems like a filter is the way to go in these circumstances.
I tend to buy the “pasture raised” eggs, but don’t know if I actually believe they have a pasture and a coop.
We have a well. When we bought this place in 1981 it had a hand dug well (that probably dated from 1912 when the house was built) which we continued to use for a little while, but then we had a *proper* well drilled. We had the water tested and it was fine. Haven’t had it retested since – but we’re now old enough to die and it doesn’t seem to have been doing us any harm.
I tend to use that “if it hasn’t killed me yet, it probably won’t” attitude toward a lot of things. Like not putting the toilet lid down when I flush. Or swapping out my pillow every…gee, I don’t know. I never swap out my pillow.
I swap out pillows when they flatten out. Maybe every five years or so. The latest pair came stuffed in a tiny tube that when it showed up on the doorstep I couldn’t believe could possibly hold anything other than infant sized pillows. But when released from their tube they expanded to an amazing degree. I’d been in the habit of sleeping with two pillows stacked under my head, but these new pillows are so large it’s only comfortable to sleep with one.
I like squishy feather pillows. I need to get the corner my nose is in squashed nearly flat and the rest bunched up around my head. Stomach sleeper.
My parents discovered I was allergic to feather stuffed pillows during a vacation trip. Been nothing but polyester fiber ever since.
Before I left Montana for the old haunts of Oregon, my mailman’s daughter raised chickens, and once or twice a week, with the mail, would give me a dozen of her chicken’s eggs..for 1$. Fresh eggs are a bit different than the ones at Safeway…the whites are firmer, and the taste is different.
I’m paying a bit more now, here…I tend to get the ones from, they say, local cluckers. For the most part they are good, nearly as good as the ones in Butte.
I’ve wondered about the color of the yolks…some of the best tasting ones have been the bright orange yolks, as the ones in Montana had.
When I lived in Germany, all the eggs, even the ones at the gas station mart, were like that. I wondered about that.
The ones I get from my local farm market have yolks that are almost orange. It has to do with what they feed the chickens. At the farm market, the chickens are fed vegetable scraps, and they have access to dirt, so they can nab bugs also. They also get feed, but it’s the scraps that give their yolks that orange color, and also make them taste much better.
Nobody here has a backyard chicken coop??
My community’s by-laws specifically forbids the keeping of poultry. Rats and birds of any kind seem to be an obligatory pairing. I had to stop putting out seed because the rats became quite brazen, venturing forth in the daylight. They were healthy, just felt safe I guess.
My brother (the rich pharma exec) had a flock of chickens when he lived in NJ (probably has had them at his other houses in other states, but I’ve never been there). They were in his (very large) backyard so I suppose qualify as backyard. I forget how many he had other than a lot. He was in charge of testing animal pharmaceuticals at his first job and brought home young chickens from the job.
They laid brown eggs and at least the last group were brown feathered. They lived in a fenced plot with a large coop which they shared with the rats.
My brother’s kids were in charge of maintaining the chickens, killing the rats and selling the eggs.
The chicken coop and yard were all new construction. The rats just got wind of new opportunities and arrived.
I found the eggs to be frustrating because they were hard to crack due to the tough inner membrane and impossible to cleanly shell when hard boiled, also because of the membrane.
I don’t recall that they tasted any better than store bought eggs or that their yolks were any differently colored, but it’s been nearly thirty years ago and I find the minor details harder to recall.
I live in close-in southeast Portland and we have a new multi-
unit development in the ‘hood which includes an occupied chicken coop. and more-or-less regular egg delivery. The neighbors all profit.
Where? Where? Where?
We raised chickens for several years, buying the babies through the mail (when I wanted to try some exotic breeds) or as Easter-dyed chicks from the local hardware store (not the chain, but an actual, local, hardware store). What astonished me was that brown eggs were far more prevalent than white! And yet, at the store, brown eggs are priced as though they’re scarce. That right there is bullshit.
Now that I’m vegan-adjacent (hubby cooks–he’s vegan–and I eat what’s served) the egg prices and selection are irrelevant to our lives, but chickens still hold a soft spot in my heart. They have personalities. They fall in love. They can be gender-confused (all three descriptions I witnessed). And yes, the yolks are a much deeper color when the chickens range free. Double yolks aren’t uncommon, either.
Chicken sex might be brief, but it can be brutal. More than once I had to bandage/wrap the sides of a poor hen that was gang-raped by our roosters. Their spurs had the capability of ripping open the sides of the hen as they did the dirty.
As a quilter, I’m still finding chicken-themed fabrics in my stash, gifted by friends who figured chicken fabrics would always be a welcomed gift!
I feel sorry for the chickens when they have a rooster that is abusive. Many times at the farm market, they have had to get rid of a rooster for how rough he was with the hens. I’ve seen hens that had to wear a quilted “saddle” on them because they were scraped up so badly. Fortunately, their current rooster is gentle enough that he can actually live in the same area with the hens.
Their eggs are also mostly brown, yet I, too, noticed that the prices for brown eggs were just a tad bit higher than for white eggs. I get the brown anyway, just because they look less like supermarket eggs than the white ones do. They also have hens called “Easter Eggers” that lay a pale blue egg. Every once in a while, one or two will appear in a random box of eggs. It is always very special to me when they do.
Yep, araucana. They lay eggs with shells that vary from blue to olive green. That’s one of the breeds I mail-ordered, just for the shell color of the eggs to come.
Okay, ask, and I shall receive! Backyard birds. Most people I know who have chickens don’t have any roosters. It’s not like you won’t get eggs.
“No, farmers want eggs, and have selected enthusiastic egg-layers over stingier ones, and in due time have developed strains of egg-popping virtuosi in the poultry world.”
That right there explains why vegans don’t eat eggs: the exploitation of the chicken, and the fact that the breeding has forever been changed as a result. Even free-range, home-raised chicken eggs no longer pass muster with vegan-hubby, because the genetic damage has already been done.
Sigh. I really like eggs.
Factory farming of livestock and livefluff is a good enough ethical reason to forgo the stuff. Not that I do. I imagine your husband would not eat unexploited chickens’ eggs either, believing it to not properly belong to the non-egg-layer.
Free Range = still in the hen house???
Not in my country. Here, free range is the same as what you call pasture raised but the limits on how many chickens you can have varies. To be fully free range an egg farmer must have no more than 10,000 hens at pasture per acre or per hectare, and the cheaper supermarket free range eggs come from those types of farmers. Other brands have varying numbers of hens, some claiming as few as 14 hens per hectare, or maybe that’s 1400, but certainly not in the 1000s and that’s reflected in the price and taste.
What you call “free range” is what we call barn raised, with the hens roaming around in the hen houses, “cage eggs” are the ones where the poor chickens are cooped in cages and unable to forage at all, and most people here are not supportive of that at all.
Yeah, these things have strict definitions, which I obviously looked up, but it’s not like anyone really calls them anything. We ign’r’nt.
I have some experience with homegrown eggs as someone who has kept a few hens, for eggs only, for more than 40 years. First, one of the reasons that backyard eggs have such deep orange yolks is that all of the commercial feeds, which even the chickens who roam the field eating bugs, worms, grass, and even fruit tree blossoms, usually get, include marigold petals. The natural dyers will know how strong a color comes from those. Second, wrt to brown eggs being more expensive, I think there are some issues related to this. One is that brown eggs come from larger chickens which require more food. Second, at least for someone who might want to have backyard eggs, is that different breeds of chickens lay widely varying amounts of eggs over their lifetimes, and you can look that up if you want chickens that lay for years. Interestingly enough, some of the smaller chickens lay the most eggs. The breed that has the most lifetime eggs is the Leghorn, the white ones that lay white eggs. Almost as prolific are the ones I have always kept called Americaunas, which lay greenish eggs. After the first year of laying, the daily egg count starts to subside, so the commercial growers have a fairly rapid rotation of new hens coming on-line every year. I did have one hen, Zippie, who lived to be 15 and was still laying sometimes up until her last year.
Now I’m thinking about Foghorn Leghorn. I say, I say, I say, boy…
Eggcellent comments.
yolk yolk yolk
We’ve had a backyard flock for nearly 20 years. No roosters, ever. Our current residents are about 5 years old and no longer laying, so we’re back to supermarket eggs. Our hens are just pets now. I don’t think we will replace this flock when they have passed; my spouse is ailing and hardly able to care for them.
The eggs we used to get were indeed superior to store-bought eggs. We didn’t wash them until we were ready to use them, in order to maintain the natural coating that preserves them at room temperature. The yolks were always much more orange. Fresh eggs blend up beautifully into everything. I bought a wire- hen-shaped basket to keep on the kitchen counter. Very kitsch. I love it.
I know that basket! One thing I especially like about backyard chickens is their conversation.
I updated my photo.