Free-range. Free-roaming. Vegetarian. Pastured. Farm-fresh. White. Brown. Organic. Omega-3 enriched. Not Certified Organic, but Certified Humane.
Choosing a good egg on the shelf can be as confounding as choosing one in real life. But here are some tips to get you started.
1) First of all, color does not make a nutritional difference: this isn’t brown rice vs. white rice. The color of the egg is simply determined by the breed of chicken that hatched it.
2) When following recipes, especially for baking, size does indeed matter. If the cake calls for extra-large eggs, then use extra-large eggs. (Eggs give rising power to many baked goods, so it’s important to get the chemistry right.) In a pinch, use two medium eggs.
3) Many of the eggs you buy at the grocery store have been irradiated: hit with gamma rays and x-rays. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service correctly states that “irradiation of food reduces the numbers of harmful bacteria that may be present in food, including E. coliO157:H7, Salmonella, and Campylobacter.” However, irradiation also kills off a lot of good bacteria. This is why raw milk is so popular among those who can secure a pristine source.
Why do we irradiate? Because much of our food supply is a raised in a way that is counterintuitive to the natural history of animal husbandry. For instance, cows evolved to eat grass, but we feed them a diet based heavily on corn and other grains. This acidifies their system and makes them more susceptible to E. coli. If you’re raising animals the traditional way, then there is usually less of a need to nuke their eggs, meat and milk, and you generally end up with more nutritive value on the other end.
Chickens are often raised in deplorable conditions: thousands of them packed into a tiny space that then needs to be bleached down regularly. The chickens have such little room that they cannot even spread their wings. Some of them go mad and end up being debeaked, otherwise they’ll peck at and injure each other too much. Because they’re crammed in so tight, sickness develops and spreads quickly, so antibiotics end up being used and overused. They get so little exercise and are bred to be so large that they have a hard time even standing up. They get 67 square inches of cage space per bird: that’s less than an 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper. And the feed? Let’s not get into that. Just remember that what they eat, you eat. And much of what they eat, you wouldn’t want to ingest.
4) That said, when you’re sourcing eggs, there are good, better and best choices. More on that tomorrow.
P.S. That picture up top was my breakfast this morning: salsa (which I made last night) with scrambled eggs and a bit of cheese. The twist? I cooked the eggs in coconut oil. Faaaaaaaabulous. Southeast Asian meets Mexico, and it turns out they get along splendiferously. Try it this week!
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