We constantly have eggs on our minds! Our refrigerator is full of eggs and we cannot seem to eat enough, sell enough, or donate enough (to the Servant Center) eggs to get rid of them! We think each day about the nutrition our pastured chickens are providing us. In each of our boxes of eggs we put a small piece of paper with nutritional information about the eggs and the chickens.
Mother Earth News compared pastured eggs with a recent study by the USDA on supermarket eggs. They found that the eggs laid by chickens allowed to eat a natural diet and run free on pasture have the following:
• 1/3 less cholesterol
• 2/3 more vitamin A
• 1/4 less saturated fat.
• 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
• 3 times more vitamin E
• 7 times more beta carotene
Alas, people seem more interested in buying the cheapest eggs they can find, assuming all eggs are the same. Educating shoppers about the health benefits of eggs from pastured poultry and the long-term savings through reduced medical bills that can be realized by eating eggs produced as nature intended is challenging. Through our blog we try to do a little educating to help people realize the benefits of eating "real" food rather than "packaged nutrients" (thanks to Michael Pollan for that term).
I like the info on pastured eggs -- really cool. About your comment of having more to deal with. what came to mind is something not very Quakerlike, but when have I ever been appropriate? A friend at work had a quote in his office from a Russian saying something like: It's useless to fight the paperwork - we have to eliminate the bureaucrats. As an analogy, the eggs are the paperwork and the chickens are the bureaucrats -- get it?
ReplyDeleteCosmo, If you read the NC Egg Law you'll discover who the real bureaucrats are--and it's not the chickens. Re: your analogy--if we use the chickens as bureaucrats and eliminate them we get rid of the paperwork (eggs) and then have a new problem--hunger. (In the current political climate I don't think hunger is the outcome of eliminating bureaucrats.) We are reducing our flock size and have recently sold about a dozen layers to others in the egg business.
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