Perhaps I’ve been an IT analyst too long. Perhaps I paid too much attention when I watched Food, Inc. Perhaps growing up on a farm has taught me too much about things city folk get befuddled on. All I know is that it gets frustrating to see see things like this, which were obviously created more for marketing than journalism.
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/the_conscious_consumer/132/four-myths-about-eggs.html
First off, I also remember the ASK.COM commercial with the family driving the RV cross country and mom asking the family what the difference was between white and brown eggs and the commercial stating “no yolk”, which was wrong, but didn’t stop the commercial from airing quite a bit before getting pulled. Maybe every other Web portal has been running SEO articles on eggs now as a way of bitch slapping them for a glaring error?
It’s easy to be pissed at whoever wrote this article because they didn’t finish it. They also didn’t understand the universal maxim, “All myths, no matter how distorted, have some basis in truth or fact.” We as humans forget what the basis is/was, but remember the myth. The 2004 movie with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley, while not as fantastical as some tales, was actually built around the latest research into King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. http://www.blockbuster.com/browse/catalog/movieDetails/230479
The research in this article really sticks in my craw. It is much along the lines of all those scientists who peer reviewed each other’s work stating meat had everything it needed to spontaneously generate maggots when left unattended in the sun. Those raving lunatics actually got that puddle of feces published in text books and forced down the throats of young and impressionable school children.
Most of you will not have taken an animal science class in High School, so, here’s a link to a chicken table.
http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/chooks/chooks.html
Quite a ways down on the list you will find a row for the Leghorn chicken and a description of “the ultimate egg machine.” In a captive environment on a corporate farm, this chicken will crank out the most eggs for the least amount of feed. If you manage to buy white eggs at a store in a box with a corporate logo on it and those eggs don’t come from a Leghorn chicken, I will be shocked.
Now, let’s spin the calendar back to pre-corporate farm days when we had grocery stores and local farmers bringing in fresh produce instead of corporate suppliers. You can kind of get back to this style of food selection at a Farmer’s Market put on by a city/town, but not completely. Livestock had regular daily cycles on family farms, they still do. At a certain time each morning they are fed and, weather permitting, turned out. At a certain time each evening the same thing happens. Usually you start with the large animals, like the cattle and/or sheep, and the others catch on when they hear all the noise.
While eggs from chickens were nice, the chickens weren’t really there to produce eggs. Most farms had quite a large flock of chickens because chickens were there to provide meat and, even more importantly, provide bug control in the garden. The larger the garden, the more chickens you needed. We didn’t have pesticides, or at least pesticides which really worked. If you look at the chicken chart link I provided, the far right column describes how they like human contact. This was very important back in the day. The wife and the younger kids would spend quite a bit of time out weeding in the garden and you wanted the chickens to stick around for pest control.
At night, even the chickens were locked in a pen or shed. While it was meant to protect them, it didn’t always work out that way. A fence which could keep the chickens in wasn’t much of an obstacle for the fox, the weasel, or the coyote. Once in, the white chickens were easiest to spot, well, you know what happened then. The result of this was that only farmers who were running large egg operations from inside of buildings to feed cities bothered with the white chickens and the small family farms had lots of brown/black/dark colored chickens. The only time those chickens were ever cooped up inside a building was winter.
Now we have gotten to the fact behind the myth. As the article pointed out, chickens raised on mostly pasture, where they ate grass, insects, and anything else they found, along with grain, produce eggs containing higher levels of omega-3 fat, and vitamins E, A, and in some cases D. This nutritional difference gives them a flavor difference and a health difference. The organic market has been spouting this for years, but they haven’t bothered to connect the research dots to get back to what we’ve always known.
Brown eggs always were healthier than white eggs because the chickens which lay brown eggs were raised differently than those which lay white eggs. White chickens didn’t survive that long in an environment where their predator list wasn’t limited to man and the occasionally hungry barn kitty. This different lifestyle meant that brown eggs always were different than white eggs.
Today, unless you know who and how the chicken was raised, you cannot be certain there is any difference in the eggs. Thankfully, we still have neighbors down the road that raise chickens the old fashioned way.
