Can someone compare and contrast egg lands best vs “normal” store bought eggs vs cage free .
I don’t need you to lay out nutritional info but rather pros and cons of how chickens are raised and what goes into the feed that egg lands best feeds their chickens.
Also not really asking about flavor profile. Looking for thoughts on overall health of the chicken, egg, and my body and some thoughts on how to save money!
Thanks
I don’t personally know about Egglands eggs but labels are often deceiving when purchasing eggs in the grocery store. So if you are concerned about the conditions that chickens live in while raised I would say buying locally or from someone you know is your best option. The labels on eggs in stores are misleading at best. For example; cage free simply means the birds had room to move around- not necessarily outside. If they have access to the outdoors it does not necessarily mean they have access to vegetation; it could simply mean there is a very small concrete caged in space that technically is outdoors. There isn’t really a whole lot of regulation over what manufactures label as cage free, free range, etc. and what I mean by that is- their definition of these labels is not necessarily our definition.
Here is an article that touches on these different labels and what they really mean.
https://www.bhg.com/recipes/trends/difference-between-egg-labels/
And here is an article from Egglands Best. https://www.egglandsbest.com/faqs/animal-welfare
Pasture raised chickens probably produce the best eggs but we have no scientific proof of this outright. You can probably eat any egg you want and be fine. Theoretically a organic pasture raised chicken is raised on purely worms, grass, and a organic grain feed so the eggs would be better for you but who knows.
As I continuously post on here, find a lical farmer at a farmers market… start up a relationship where he/she knows you are a guaranteed customer and see how much money you will save. I have farmers that will call me when they have a surplus of product a b or c and they know I will buy it. (9 kids, We eat a shitload of great locally grown/raised food including the best renewable resource— Deer meat! Free ranging and free!)
I use to work on a pastured farm, the chickens were able to go outside from sun up to sundown (this is for security reasons, a lot of animals hunt at night) and the were on 1500 acers of a grass fed only cow farm, the chickens forged the land and also were given a rationed amount of USDA Certified Organic feed that we went and picked up monthly from the USDA mill in Tx. The diet does determine the color of the yolk, with thay being said when you know what you are feeding the chicken, you know if you are getting a good quality egg.
Look at the yolk. Every yolk will be on a spectrum of yellow to orange. The more orangeish ones are correlated with better nutrition, at least anecdotally. When I’ve bought and compared 2$ eggs vs 3.50$ eggs vs 5$ eggs, that’s what I noticed.