Eggs can be fried, boiled, or mixed with various ingredients to make mouthwatering recipes for breakfast or any other meal during the day. In many American homes, eggs remain the favorite breakfast staple and one American can eat up to ten trays of eggs per annum according to the Washington Post.
It is easy to rush to the store to buy a tray of eggs for use at home, in your restaurant, for use in a bakery, or in a small business down the street. What most people never ask themselves is whether there is a difference between eggs bought from a store and freshly laid eggs bought from a farm.
Where do most stores get their eggs supply from?
Most eggs stocked in stores come from farmers who raise chicken in small spaces in their backyards and sometimes on the roof of their homes. These chicken live in cages all their life in very overcrowded environments.
To boost egg production, many farmers give antibiotics to their chickens so that they can lay bigger eggs more often. They don’t get many chances to eat grass and insects but they purely rely on factory-made food which has antibiotics too.
Due to overcrowding, it’s easy for the chicken to become sick and some of these bacteria or viruses can be contained in the eggs. What you will likely get from the stores are eggs full of antibiotics and sometimes disease-causing bacteria.
Farm eggs production procedure is entirely different
Chicken raised on a farm are free to play around, eat grass and breathe fresher air away from crowds. Grass, green leaves, soil grains, and insects form an important part of chicken nutrition.
When they eat green plants and insects, that nutrition goes into the eggs and if you get your eggs from the farm you will buy a more nutritious product compared to purchasing from a store.
Their taste is different
Eggs are delicate and it matters the way they are collected, stored, and transported. Caged chickens do not have nests for laying eggs and most of the time, the eggs get dirty. For an egg to stay fresh, it must allow air to circulate freely.
If it’s dirty, it will block air from circulating and it will affect its taste. This is one of the greatest challenges with store-bought eggs. Eggs grown from the farms have a very unique taste and it’s easy to distinguish between the tastes.
Eggs from a store might stay on the shelf for several weeks
Eggs supplied from caged chicken are many and they flood the stores most of the time compared to eggs from the farms. Eggs that remain on the shelf beyond two weeks lose taste further and their nutrition value gets affected too.
Anytime you go to buy eggs from a store, you never ask how long they’ve been on the shelf. You likely have consumed almost stale eggs which can affect your health. Even if they are not yet stale, you don’t get all the nutrition benefits.
Eggs supplied from the farms are not many and in most cases, the farmers supply all the eggs laid each day. That means you get fresh eggs all the time and you get every nutrition benefit an egg should have. Even if your home is far from the farm, farmers do deliver eggs directly to homes to make sure consumers get them when they are still fresh.
How long do you take to eat all your eggs?
When you go to a store or farm to buy eggs, you will most likely buy one tray on the minimum depending on the size of your family. Once you bring them home, you cannot eat an entire tray in a single day but if you stay alone, it might take you two to three weeks before you require another supply.
Now imagine buying eggs from a store and they have been on the shelf for three weeks. If you keep them in your house for another three weeks, it will be dangerous to your health and some of them might start to have a foul smell.
The case is different when you buy eggs from a farm because the stock will most likely be what was collected that day or the previous day. Even if it took you another two to three weeks to consume a tray of eggs, you will be sure they will still be okay to eat.
Cost difference
Because eggs from caged chicken are produced in plenty, they tend to be less expensive and that is why many people prefer to buy eggs from a store without considering other differences. Although breed matters, most eggs from the store tend to be bigger and it’s mostly because of antibiotics.
Eggs from the farm might be a little smaller and because they are not always easy to find, their cost tends to be higher but the overall benefits a consumer gets are more.
