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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
I told my American colleagues that in Denmark we get 3 consecutive weeks off during the summer, and the company is not allowed to contact us. We also get an additional 2 weeks off we can use whenever we want. Oh, and + 5 days (in hours). Again that we can use whenever.
If it's like the system in Sweden, it's actually ~$400 straight up benefit, and ~$800 in a very favourable (optional) loan with very low interest that is paid back over 25 years.
It's better than the system in Sweden. You can get an optional loan on top of the base benefit (with a very cheap interest rate) of up to $520 every month.
Then I don't want to tell you about our sick days, and they can be many! Oh, and you cannot get fired if you're on sick leave, vacation or any other form of leave (parental etc). I feel really lucky living here!
And I literally can't leave the office for ten minutes to go buy lunch downstairs. Gotta bring my lunch and eat it at my desk while fielding internal and external questions.
Not how comfortable their life is, how much you buy their industry's marketing spin about the option for a chicken to stand in a pool of chicken shit, hormones and antibiotics or to be forcibly laying in it for the entirety of its life.
conventional - absolutely horrific - stuck in cage
"cage free" - regular horrific - able to walk around, but they're packed wall-to-wall
"free range" - substandard - can go outside and walk around, but still usually overcrowded
The best option is to raise them yourself. But almost nobody does that, so I guess you pick how much you want to spend for the chicken to have a better life.
“Go outside” for free-range is also a tiny little pen that chickens don’t really know how to use.
There’s another option: Pasture-raised, certified humane. They have >100SF of outdoor space per bird, shelter, and eat a mix of insects and supplemental feed.
Aldi sells them for about 75% more than conventional eggs.
This is obviously something you saw on Reddit and didn't bother fact checking.
If you buy from any producer of chicken, there is no such thing as cage free. All the chickens get transported to the slaughterhouse in cages. That being said, conventional chickens are not stuck in cages. Maybe some mom and pop shops do this? Not the major producers, the sheer amount of cages needed would be profit prohibitive. They're raised in a chicken house but they are packed in side by side.
USDA defines free range as 2sqft per chicken. A chicken is give or take 30x smaller than a human so equivalent is if you grew up with a 60sqft personal bubble. Pasture raised is 108aqft per chicken, but the thing to remember is chickens are a family pack animal, so even if they have all the space in the world they won't use it. They'll stay near their home.
Also the species of chicken has a significant impact on quality of life and taste. I don't know if there is any actual data but modern broilers cannot live long just due to their genetic breed. They're a generic breed that grows super fast and has health issues as they age.
Chickens don't live a great live in any production arena, but the worst is the transport and the slaughter which doesn't change regardless of their free range designation. If it's really something that bothers you, the only real solution is just to stop eating chicken products.
Broilers aren’t kept in cages generally, but if you don’t keep layers in cages then it’s a lot more labor to collect the eggs and make sure they don’t just eat them or break them. So the lowest quality eggs will come from chickens that live in cages stacked several rows high, with an incline in the bottom of each cage, so that when they lay the egg will roll onto a sort of conveyer belt that moves the eggs over to be packaged.
Source: my rural ass high school had ag classes and we went to some of these places. I guess it’s possible this has changed in the past 20ish years, but from what I know it hasn’t changed that much. If you didn’t grow up down wind of some of these places, consider yourself lucky.
All the chickens get transported to the slaughterhouse in cages
Ok, but that's not what cage-free means, cage-free means they don't live in a cage. How they're transported was never part of it. I'm guessing "free range" chickens are transported in cages as well, because that's a lot easier.
equivalent is if you grew up with a 60sqft personal bubble
That doesn't make sense, humans stand upright, chickens are more long. I'm guessing the size comparison you're talking about is total size, not size on the horizontal plane. A chicken is something like a foot long and a half foot wide, or something like 1.5sq ft. That meas there's half their body length in space not filled by another chicken in a 2sq ft area. That's not a lot of room.
chickens are a family pack animal, so even if they have all the space in the world they won’t use it
Chickens are foragers, so yes, they'll absolutely use the space provided. I have friends who raise chickens, and live in an area where raising chickens is common, so I know what chickens do. If I ever forget, I can walk down the street and watch chickens for a half hour and see what they do. They don't clump together, they spread out to forage for bugs and whatnot, and they only pack together when they go back to the coop to sleep, or if they are in danger (there is safety in numbers).
But yes, chickens are quite dumb.
modern broilers cannot live long just due to their genetic breed
Well yeah, they're genetically selected to have maximum meat because that's the most efficient way to farm chickens.
Likewise for egg-laying chickens, they're selected for volume and consistency of egg output. Some breeds make brown eggs, some make white eggs, and those are sold to different markets (usually brown eggs are sold at a premium here because people think they're better in some way; they aren't).
The two types of chickens (eggs and meat) are generally not the same, and my understanding is that egg-laying chickens are discarded rather than sold once they stop laying. I could be wrong (maybe they're used for chicken nuggets and other processed chicken products), but they're definitely not used for the cuts sold at stores because their meat is too tough.
If it’s really something that bothers you
It's really not, I'm merely pointing out what the terms mean. I buy whatever is cheapest at Costco (currently cage-free is the lowest tier), and if I cared about the welfare of the chickens, I'd raise my own (and their eggs taste better anyway).
Yeah sure it's €4 to €5 per 10 eggs instead of €2.50 but there's a big difference in quality. You get watery whites, tasteless yolks and paper thin shells with the cheapest eggs. Same for chickens, the Label Rouge ones are really small at 1.5 kg in comparison to faster growing ones.
As fucked as the poultry industry is, that's not really a thing for a couple reasons. First is the FDA banned that practice, so in the USA at least you're not going to find any poultry products where hormones or steroids are used -- "hormone/steroid free!" is marketing BS stating they're not doing something illegal.
Second: we've selectively bred chickens (broilers) that grow so freakishly fast and big you don't need to give them hormones or steroids -- their bodies naturally produce excessive amounts. These are chickens that need their food supply controlled because they will literally eat themselves to death if allowed to. They grow so large and quickly it's common they develop leg issues leaving them immobile, and most will "naturally" start to die of heart attacks if they aren't killed after 8 weeks.
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
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.
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.
No, my wife’s childhood friend runs a small farm with her husband and kid.
It’s a farm.
There are sheep and chickens. A dog to help with the sheep.
They aren’t rich. The chickens are not abused as far as I could tell. They are egg laying chickens. At some point they don’t lay eggs well and then they get sold. There is no retirement plan for old hens.
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 seems to develop after this period).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean its nothing but a marketing spin all chickens suffer harshly in the egg industry. Even a true CCP devotee wouldn't be surprised and would probably expect meaningless marketing differences to get a leg up on competition.
In the US, maybe. In Europe there are many restrictions regarding living conditions as well, meaning “organic” is usually the best option if you prioritize animal welfare.
Ah, I should have specified the pasture-raised standards:
R 1: Pasture area
a. Must consist mainly of living vegetation. Coarse grit must be available to aid
digestion of vegetation.
c. The minimum outdoor space requirement is 2.5 acres (1 hectare)/1000 birds (~109SF).
g. Birds must be outdoors 12 months per year, every day for a minimum of 6 hours per
day. In an emergency, the hens may be confined in fixed or mobile housing 24 hours
per day for no more than 14 consecutive days.
Free-range are only required to have 2SF and don't have a mandatory outside time.
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 $$
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
As a Chinese, I know there are organic and non-organic type on the market. But I never thought of choosing eggs based on their life. Just mind boggling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ironically, you cannot choose how comfortable the human's life is for most products.
If you put the eggs up your butt at the grocery store, you can choose how uncomfortable everyone will be.
Username checks out
Egg
Thanks for the laugh, needed it this morning
Where do you get your human eggs?
Buried in the sand like turtles, where do you get yours?
Hard as shit to find, but looking for products from worker cooperatives can help you to find free range human goods
You kind of can depending on where it was made
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/0YY7K7Xa5rE
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?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8103914/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renewable-agriculture-and-food-systems/article/abs/vitamins-a-e-and-fatty-acid-composition-of-the-eggs-of-caged-hens-and-pastured-hens/552BA04E5A9E3CD7E49E405B339ECA32
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).
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.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/why-the-u-s-chills-its-eggs-and-most-of-the-world-doesnt#:~:text=Cooking%20usually%20kills%20the%20bacteria,hens%20are%20vaccinated%20against%20salmonella.
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.
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!
I told my American colleagues that in Denmark we get 3 consecutive weeks off during the summer, and the company is not allowed to contact us. We also get an additional 2 weeks off we can use whenever we want. Oh, and + 5 days (in hours). Again that we can use whenever.
Their jaws dropped.
Or the fact that we actually pay people to study (~1000 USD a month), instead of putting them into crippling lifelong debt.
If it's like the system in Sweden, it's actually ~$400 straight up benefit, and ~$800 in a very favourable (optional) loan with very low interest that is paid back over 25 years.
Any hot Swedes here need a live-in student fuck toy?
coughs
Wanna come visit France?
It's better than the system in Sweden. You can get an optional loan on top of the base benefit (with a very cheap interest rate) of up to $520 every month.
Meanwhile my boss's boss was telling me last year that I had taken too much of our "unlimited" PTO after 2 weeks...
I'd be tempted to reply I haven't even used 5% yet.
I've only used 1% of my power
Yeah I'm jealous
I would be too
I get like 3 weeks off per year. Including holidays. Total. And that's actually considered quite good in my market.
Then I don't want to tell you about our sick days, and they can be many! Oh, and you cannot get fired if you're on sick leave, vacation or any other form of leave (parental etc). I feel really lucky living here!
And I literally can't leave the office for ten minutes to go buy lunch downstairs. Gotta bring my lunch and eat it at my desk while fielding internal and external questions.
Also we get sick days during holidays
Not how comfortable their life is, how much you buy their industry's marketing spin about the option for a chicken to stand in a pool of chicken shit, hormones and antibiotics or to be forcibly laying in it for the entirety of its life.
Your options are wretched vs horrific.
Eh, there's also substandard:
The best option is to raise them yourself. But almost nobody does that, so I guess you pick how much you want to spend for the chicken to have a better life.
Or just skip eggs
“Go outside” for free-range is also a tiny little pen that chickens don’t really know how to use.
There’s another option: Pasture-raised, certified humane. They have >100SF of outdoor space per bird, shelter, and eat a mix of insects and supplemental feed.
Aldi sells them for about 75% more than conventional eggs.
For more about Certified Humane and Pasture Raised:
https://certifiedhumane.org/wp-content/uploads/Standard_LayingHens-2023.pdf
Page 18 (19 in PDF land)
Some farms even have mobile barns on wheels that go around the field to have the chickens graze on fresh grass.
This is obviously something you saw on Reddit and didn't bother fact checking.
If you buy from any producer of chicken, there is no such thing as cage free. All the chickens get transported to the slaughterhouse in cages. That being said, conventional chickens are not stuck in cages. Maybe some mom and pop shops do this? Not the major producers, the sheer amount of cages needed would be profit prohibitive. They're raised in a chicken house but they are packed in side by side. USDA defines free range as 2sqft per chicken. A chicken is give or take 30x smaller than a human so equivalent is if you grew up with a 60sqft personal bubble. Pasture raised is 108aqft per chicken, but the thing to remember is chickens are a family pack animal, so even if they have all the space in the world they won't use it. They'll stay near their home.
Chickens are essentially a brainless animal and their body can continue to function without a head. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
Also the species of chicken has a significant impact on quality of life and taste. I don't know if there is any actual data but modern broilers cannot live long just due to their genetic breed. They're a generic breed that grows super fast and has health issues as they age.
Chickens don't live a great live in any production arena, but the worst is the transport and the slaughter which doesn't change regardless of their free range designation. If it's really something that bothers you, the only real solution is just to stop eating chicken products.
Broilers aren’t kept in cages generally, but if you don’t keep layers in cages then it’s a lot more labor to collect the eggs and make sure they don’t just eat them or break them. So the lowest quality eggs will come from chickens that live in cages stacked several rows high, with an incline in the bottom of each cage, so that when they lay the egg will roll onto a sort of conveyer belt that moves the eggs over to be packaged.
Source: my rural ass high school had ag classes and we went to some of these places. I guess it’s possible this has changed in the past 20ish years, but from what I know it hasn’t changed that much. If you didn’t grow up down wind of some of these places, consider yourself lucky.
Ok, but that's not what cage-free means, cage-free means they don't live in a cage. How they're transported was never part of it. I'm guessing "free range" chickens are transported in cages as well, because that's a lot easier.
Idk, this looks like a cage to me.
That doesn't make sense, humans stand upright, chickens are more long. I'm guessing the size comparison you're talking about is total size, not size on the horizontal plane. A chicken is something like a foot long and a half foot wide, or something like 1.5sq ft. That meas there's half their body length in space not filled by another chicken in a 2sq ft area. That's not a lot of room.
Chickens are foragers, so yes, they'll absolutely use the space provided. I have friends who raise chickens, and live in an area where raising chickens is common, so I know what chickens do. If I ever forget, I can walk down the street and watch chickens for a half hour and see what they do. They don't clump together, they spread out to forage for bugs and whatnot, and they only pack together when they go back to the coop to sleep, or if they are in danger (there is safety in numbers).
But yes, chickens are quite dumb.
Well yeah, they're genetically selected to have maximum meat because that's the most efficient way to farm chickens.
Likewise for egg-laying chickens, they're selected for volume and consistency of egg output. Some breeds make brown eggs, some make white eggs, and those are sold to different markets (usually brown eggs are sold at a premium here because people think they're better in some way; they aren't).
The two types of chickens (eggs and meat) are generally not the same, and my understanding is that egg-laying chickens are discarded rather than sold once they stop laying. I could be wrong (maybe they're used for chicken nuggets and other processed chicken products), but they're definitely not used for the cuts sold at stores because their meat is too tough.
It's really not, I'm merely pointing out what the terms mean. I buy whatever is cheapest at Costco (currently cage-free is the lowest tier), and if I cared about the welfare of the chickens, I'd raise my own (and their eggs taste better anyway).
Eh, good thing factory chicken is a thing of the past in The Netherlands, it's okay vs decent vs good.
Rondeel is decent: https://youtu.be/zwleQLKU-UI?si=kh7T6b_bV0HMXjzO
Label Rouge (France) is good: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aHlCEIAOpEk
Yeah sure it's €4 to €5 per 10 eggs instead of €2.50 but there's a big difference in quality. You get watery whites, tasteless yolks and paper thin shells with the cheapest eggs. Same for chickens, the Label Rouge ones are really small at 1.5 kg in comparison to faster growing ones.
As fucked as the poultry industry is, that's not really a thing for a couple reasons. First is the FDA banned that practice, so in the USA at least you're not going to find any poultry products where hormones or steroids are used -- "hormone/steroid free!" is marketing BS stating they're not doing something illegal.
Second: we've selectively bred chickens (broilers) that grow so freakishly fast and big you don't need to give them hormones or steroids -- their bodies naturally produce excessive amounts. These are chickens that need their food supply controlled because they will literally eat themselves to death if allowed to. They grow so large and quickly it's common they develop leg issues leaving them immobile, and most will "naturally" start to die of heart attacks if they aren't killed after 8 weeks.
I suppose "here" isn't the EU then. 😬 https://food.ec.europa.eu/animals/animal-welfare/eu-animal-welfare-legislation/animal-welfare-farm/laying-hens_en
https://youtu.be/G__PVLB8Nm4?si=VWlR6m_AF0HeJ61X
b r a v e
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
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...
heh
It hasn't... blown in you might say?
At least here in the UK, unless you directly see where that egg was laid, assume it was horrific.
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
Also, just to be clear I’m sure many places are horrible. I’m just talking about one that I recently went to.
No, my wife’s childhood friend runs a small farm with her husband and kid.
It’s a farm.
There are sheep and chickens. A dog to help with the sheep.
They aren’t rich. The chickens are not abused as far as I could tell. They are egg laying chickens. At some point they don’t lay eggs well and then they get sold. There is no retirement plan for old hens.
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 seems 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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9832119/
Let's hope this works out.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Free range isnt that free
You should try ‘free under capitalism’.
Our chickens walked once.
I mean its nothing but a marketing spin all chickens suffer harshly in the egg industry. Even a true CCP devotee wouldn't be surprised and would probably expect meaningless marketing differences to get a leg up on competition.
sure, but at least where i am, free-range chickens have a minimum of 1 sq. m. of space, which is 0.9 sq. m. more than otherwise
Unless you're a male chicken, then your range is whatever the dimensions of the Live Rooster Masher is.
AFAIK, "Organic" usually just restricts what the chicken has been eating/injected with, not it's living conditions.
In the US, maybe. In Europe there are many restrictions regarding living conditions as well, meaning “organic” is usually the best option if you prioritize animal welfare.
... and even then I find them pretty bad in quality compared to fresh eggs from the nearby farmer, I must say, from my own experience.
I mean, that’s pretty hard to compete with 😅
yeah, they're pretty great. sadly i haven't had a good egg in a long time (farmer quit), so I've stopped eating them.
Certified humane (pdf): https://certifiedhumane.org/wp-content/uploads/Standard_LayingHens-2023.pdf
That's, without meaning to sound cute, paltry.
Ah, I should have specified the pasture-raised standards:
Free-range are only required to have 2SF and don't have a mandatory outside time.
Did they tell you it is the same for cows in Japan?
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 $$
"Does it involve an egg?" - Bortus, Moclan, The Orville.
We got the "500 cigarettes" meme out of it, but that whole series is so fucking memeable.
We're never getting season 4, are we...
https://www.space.com/season-four-the-orville-start-production-2025#:~:text=Scott%20Grimes%20confirms%20season%204,start%20production%20in%202025%20%7C%20Space
Holy shit! Somewhere there's a devil freezing his balls off.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/bcgH6fgedoA
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.
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?!?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/10/31/26-stories-of-swine-world-s-largest-pig-farm-opens-in-china_6002372_114.html
I don't know but one can make guesses based on this.
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
No it's not.
Not so. Wikipedia has a decent article but here's the crux of it:
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.
That still means there are about 500 million people living in rural areas of China.
So more rural Chinese than total Americans.
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.
Kinda true when you think about it
As a Chinese, I know there are organic and non-organic type on the market. But I never thought of choosing eggs based on their life. Just mind boggling.
I call them "free-will eggs". It sounds better in Spanish as opposed to "cage-free eggs".
Silly person, Free Willy doesn't lay eggs, they are a mammal
Huevos sin caja vs huevos sin libertad... What?
"Huevos de libre albedrío" con respecto a "huevos libres de jaulas" o "huevos de libre pastoreo".
"cage free" translates to "libre de jaula"
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.
We buy free-range eggs but battery iPhones...
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.
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.
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.
I can see this too. Although, I can't imagine a world where a truly ethical definition would be reached by anyone in the business of selling chickens.
If we did not raise chicken, we would have more wilderness supporting other animals.
I just go by price. And sometimes I just really want jumbo eggs.
The more expensive eggs taste better and only cost a quarter more. Would you pay 50¢ to make your breakfast taste better? You should.
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.