Sure as eggs is eggs there are eggs and then there are EGGS. To illustrate the point I took a photo of my breakfast this morning (see the very obviously breakfast-like photo above – note the black spot is pepper). I generally try to avoid going down the whole route of this is what I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, because who, apart from me, cares? But, these are eggs from my parents’ farm and as I was eating them I couldn’t help marvelling at the colour and then I got thinking about the fraudulent business that is egg-selling in the vast majority of UK supermarkets.
When in London I try really hard to buy good eggs, because I think happy chickens make for tastier and more nutritious eggs. I also like to think the chicken has had a decent life and not been forced through its life at an unnatural rate with all the discomfort that entails. We are supposed to have come a long way in the UK from the days of simply accepting battery eggs, but why is it that no supermarket egg I’ve ever eaten shows this healthy almost luminous colour?
For a while I would only buy organic, but if I’m honest my parents’ hens aren’t always fed organic feed and I’m quite open to the idea that food can be very good without being organic (it’s just how you prove the standard that matters, but that’s a whole other debate). I then switched to Clarence Court eggs, partly because I like the lovely brown shells, but also because the yolks seemed more orange. I recently decided to stop buying them, because – and this is purely slanderous speculation – the yolks looked artificially coloured to me.
Real eggs and by that I mean eggs laid by chickens that get to scratch around pecking at bugs, grass, bits of this and that, SHOULD look the same colour as these. Of course at different times of year hens lay nicer and greater volumes of eggs, and in July there is a lot of lovely grub in the garden for them to peck at, but why can’t I find eggs like this anywhere else? If you happen to know of somewhere in London feel free to let me know.
Oh, and one more thing. It’s obviously not all about the colour, but also the flavour. It’s very hard to describe, but the taste of these eggs is something quite different from the norm – in a good way.
Egg-related rant over. For now.
Anna-Marie Julyan 