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.
This was my exact experience as well! One benefit of a relatively small town is a lot of people have free range hens and you can get some really tasty eggs
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.
100%. If you break a store egg and a farm egg next to each other, especially in the spring when the chickens start having access to insects again, the farm egg is almost cartoonishly orange next to the store egg.
I had a farmer I got eggs from for years and years. I was so lucky. 50 cents a dozen from 2003-2017. I eat a lot of eggs too. My family goes through two 30 packs a week.
He told me about a month before he stopped. “I done got old, can’t do it anymore. I keep falling and if I break my hip they might as well take me out back and give me a mercy bullet.”
I asked everyone under the sun. No one I found after that was consistent. I thought I found someone a few times, they disappeared after a few months. I gave up and started buying my eggs from the store.
All things must pass. Damn though, that one hurt to lose.
During my quest to find a new source for eggs though, I found someone with duck eggs. I figured, “Ahh, an egg is an egg, right?” Wrong. Duck eggs are not very tasty. They’re fine as an additive to a cake or something, but no way will I ever eat them again. Gah.
What’s really weird is that eggs are remarkably similar even when raised on entirely different diets or conditions. While farm raised eggs and organic or free range eggs are slightly better, the difference is much more minimal than I think most people think.
I went on a whole deep dive with that topic a while back and the result of that research was pretty much just that eggs themselves are pretty good for you but it matters a lot less which eggs you buy and more than you eat more of them.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe in the US. Here you get what you pay for. You CAN get good eggs from "happy" chicken. They just cost a lot more. Like 5-10x.
Only thing missing is like the name of the chicken that shat out your egg 😁
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.
Similar thing happened with pork in California, ultimately we kept the new rule (which is nowhere near enough but its something) but only after enduring an entire year of whinging from the pork industry and astroturfed "news articles" about how expensive bacon was going to be.
Now it's eight months since the rule came into effect and wouldn't you know it the pork industry hasn't collapsed.
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.
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?
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.
We have the most overall, and are number six per capita (using wikipedia's numbers). I like to put it this way: China has three times our population, and they still have fewer prisoners that we do, so which one is truly the "police state"?
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.
I can't talk for the US, but organic labels usually have pretty strict requirements. Enforcement is often lacking though, but it is definitely not just a marketing spin and guaranteed suffering.
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.
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.
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.