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Eggs-pert Advice J
How to Buy Good Eggs from Happy Hens More than 90 percent of eggs sold
by Judith Fertig
anice Cole, the author of Chicken and Egg: A Memoir of Suburban Homesteading with 125 Rec- ipes, knows how delicious a really fresh egg tastes. She keeps three chickens she calls “the girls” in
the backyard of her suburban Minneapolis home. “Jasmine, a white Silkie, lays small, beige-colored eggs; Keiko a black and white Ameraucana and Silver Wyandotte cross, green eggs; and Peanut, a brown, feathery Cochin mix, brown eggs,” relates Cole. Cole has learned a lot about the natural lives of chickens.
They need 14 hours of sunlight to produce eggs and lay about one per day. Chickens must be protected from predators, locked up at night in their coop for optimal well-being and let out in the morning to roam. Here are some tips for buying the freshest, most delicious and humanely raised chicken eggs.
How to Read an Egg Carton Deciphering the language on an egg carton is a first step. Diet affects flavor. “Eggs from pasture-raised chickens allowed to roam—eating grass, worms and bugs in the back- yard or a pasture—will look and taste better than eggs from chickens limited to an inside space eating chicken feed,” says Cole. “Pasture-raised eggs will have a fresh herbaceous, or grassy, flavor with an ‘egg-ier’ essence.” “Look for the terms organic, free range or ideally,
pastured or pasture-raised,” advises Adele Douglass, in Herndon, Virginia, executive director of Humane Farm
40 NA Triangle
www.natriangle.com
today come from giant egg factories. ~ PETE AND GERRY’S,
AMERICA’S FIRST CERTIFIED HUMANE EGG PRODUCER
Animal Care (
CertifiedHumane.org). “USDA Organic” is a U.S. Department of Agriculture label
confirming that the food the chicken ate was certified organic. “Non-GMO” indicates a diet free of genetically modified ingredients. “Free-range”, another USDA label, means the chicken had continuing access to the outdoors. “Pasture-raised” assures that the chicken roamed outdoors daily, eating what they wanted; the ideal scenario. “Cage-free” is a USDA-regulated designation ensuring that
the chickens were allowed to roam freely about within their building to get food and water. “Natural” has no real meaning says Douglass; the term invokes no USDA regulation and nothing about actual farming practices. “Certified Humane” or “Animal Welfare Approved” means that each free-range hen has at least two square feet of outdoor space; it’s the most desirable designation, says Douglass. When farmers want to raise egg-laying chickens, they
need to provide physical conditions similar to those Cole affords, but on a larger and more effi-cient scale, usually without the love. In regions where 14 hours of daylight are not a given, farmers use artificial lighting. When snow is too
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