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
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 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.
Meanwhile my boss’s boss was telling me last year that I had taken too much of our “unlimited” PTO after 2 weeks…
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:
- 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.
For more about Certified Humane and Pasture Raised:
https://certifiedhumane.org/wp-content/uploads/Standard_LayingHens-2023.pdf
Page 18 (19 in PDF land)
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
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.
