The eggs in the UK are so delicious. The yolk taste particularly good and is more brown than yellow. I think they have more omega 3s because they’re mostly free range eating bugs. The eggs in the UK also seem to keep a nice egg shape with the egg whites holding together.
I think any attempt at free range is doomed to failure. Even as they are battery farmed currently, the price at the supermarket is not terribly cheap. The cost involved in free ranging these things would at least double the shelf price.
Intensive farming uses less resources and is better for the environment. It also produces lots more food. Sometimes a chicken is just a chicken. Unless all of you want to give up your modern conveniences and live like the Amish, you just have to accept things like this. The real problem is that surplus food is wasted instead of getting to people who need it.
I think people will choose free range if you clearly educated people of the health benefits of a free range egg and how horrible it is to keep chickens in those cages. Idk, that’s why I pick it.
Seems eggs all over the world is produced in inhuman conditions with only consideration given to profit. I heard the eggs at Costco is really good but I never tried it myself. They’re also really expensive, 2x the price of buying it from the traditional market.
I don’t know if I believe the whole cage free thing… this image about sums it up…
In our household we’ve had a few genuine rotten eggs recently, absolutely revolting. It’s only within the last few months this has happened in more than a decade living here. I’ve noticed as well the quality of the yolks has been getting worse with them frequently bursting when cracking open the egg. We tend to buy the more expensive eggs too that claim to be free range, but there has been a definite downshift in quality.
As mentioned in the shared video, battery cages are already banned in the EU. Apart from a short panic about supply, when the ban took effect, prices for eggs are fine.
Every egg is labeled with its type of origin: Cheap eggs from big henn houses, free range farming or from organic farming. Every type is available everywhere and you get what you pay for.
I agree that battery cages should be banned, especially as Taiwan cares so much about food.
The West has some absolutely horrible “farms” (they really shouldn’t even be called that) but there are a lot more options. In the US, you can easily find eggs and meat from small producers who follow humane practices and if you live in the right location, you can even visit their farms and see for yourself.
The big difference between the US and Taiwan is that there’s a large enough segment of the market in the US willing to pay a premium for “ethically produced” food. I don’t see that here, which I suspect is a combination of culture, economics and awareness.
Nope. It’s more expensive, less productive, and more environmentally destructive. It only appears to be efficient because governments tilt the playing field (at about 30 degrees from the horizontal) to make sure that it does appear so. They do it with subsidies, taxes, laws, barriers-to-entry, and good old-fashioned corruption.
The critical point is this: no egg production facility can be profitable at the prices demanded by the distribution guys. It’s physically impossible. And I mean physically impossible (the laws of physics are against you). This has been the case for at least 100 years (I’ve not checked further back than that). Governments therefore have to cook the books so that egg producers can stay in business. Or at least they think they have to. If they dismantled the set of rules that punish small producers and reward big producers, those battery farms would disappear into a sea of red ink.
I’m starting up an egg project right now - genuine free-range, not “cage free”. However, this is not an egg production facility. The only way you can make money out of a chicken is to utilize all of its chickenness. Agri scientists are obsessed with feed-conversion ratios, completely ignoring the fact that the “lost” 70-80% of an animal’s feed (the bit that doesn’t make eggs or meat) is still turned into a useful product, viz., labour and poo. The economic outputs from my chickens are (in decreasing order of importance)
Land fertility management (scratching and pooping)
Disposal of excess biomass with good food value, but not fit for human use
Eggs
Meat (male birds; profit = zero).
The profit on eggs is inseparable from the other functions of the chicken. I intend to sell eggs at a 25% higher price than the battery-hen product (US$0.20 instead of US$0.15) because that makes it worthwhile. I could, in theory, sell at the same price as a battery-hen egg. But if I did that I would have no price-signal for the superiority of my product, so it would be stupid.
Is your project in Taiwan? Sounds really interesting. If it is, when you’re selling, I hope you’ll post the information on where we can buy eggs from you.
