do you buy 'Free Range Eggs'?

[Monica]

The hens that laid these eggs are 'free to roam' but are still stuck in a barn. By 'free range' I think most people have a romanticized ideas of the old farms of the 1800's when farm animals grazed in open pasture. This is most definitely not the case with these eggs.

This is another case of despicable false advertising. Free range did indeed, at one time, mean that the chickens were outdoors and able to walk around in the sunlight and forage for bugs and basically have a normal chicken's life instead of being confined to a tiny cage the size of an old record album cover containing 4 chickens who were debeaked to prevent them from killing each other out of sheer frustration and agony.

I was so delighted to see even the mainstream grocery stores carrying free range eggs, and marveled at the low price. I naively thought this meant the egg industry was making progress towards more humane treatment of chickens! How disconcerting to find out I was wrong! AHA this explains it! How disgusting, that they have co-opted the term and taken advantage of people's ignorance.

Sort of like wheat bread which gives the false impression it's whole wheat, when, in actuality, refined white flour is still made from wheat, so the term means absolutely nothing.

We're 98.675 vegan so I only buy a dozen eggs on the rare occasion my son's girlfriend wants to bake something. One egg in a batch of cookies or pancakes, once or twice. Then I usually end up feeding the rest to the doggies as a treat. I have absolutely nothing against the idea of eating truly humanely produced eggs; they're a wonderful source of protein and, if truly organic, essential fatty acids and other wonderful nutrients. Their cage-raised counterparts are a joke by comparison. And that's not even getting into the hormones and antibiotics the eggs are saturated with. Aside from the extreme cruelty issue, feeding such eggs to children is pretty much the same as having them on potent hormone drugs.

You can tell the difference, too: the truly free range egg yolks will be deep, dark orange, in contrast to the cage yolks which are a sickly yellow.

When my son was little and his friend spent the night and I cooked him scrambled eggs in the morning, he wouldn't eat them. He complained that they were too 'yellow.' I asked, "well what color are the eggs your mom makes you?" and he said, "kinda white."

Thank you for posting this. I will be much more careful to make sure any eggs I buy truly are free range and not some marketing trick. It's worth the couple of extra bucks. Gosh, I'll gladly give something else up, to not support such obscene false advertising. And, local farmer's markets are becoming more popular all over the US (not sure about other countries), where locally-produced produce and eggs can be purchased for a lot less cost. Because the produce isn't shipped, it may have less chemicals too, because they don't have to wax the cucumbers, for example.