so, what about eggs? i make a constant effort to eat eggs from happy hens. to me, a happy hen is one with room to roam, a comfy place to sleep and one well fed and looked after. i was fortunate to share the eggs from my brother's hens while we lived together. the hens and i became quite close and i thanked them every morning they laid. we named them: spirit, ghost, hatchett face and juniper. my brother's favourite was a voluptuos isa-brown called chickadillo. but she died and it was very sad.
unfortunatley, not all hens are happy. and i wonder, when we purchase a carton of eggs if we think about the conditions under which the eggs were laid.
it can become confusing, standing there, in the supermarket with egg carton after egg carton staring down at us. organic, free range, caged, battery, 300g, large, duck, emu, elephant - the labels are endless! i always buy free range and depending on the cost, organic free range. but what does free range mean? i will attempt to explain the labels...
free range:
for an egg to be labelled 'free range', it must have been laid under strict conditions. FREPA (Free Range Egg & Poultry Australia) have compiled a set of standards to which farmers must adhere to in order to label their eggs 'free range'. these standards include things like maxium range density of live birds per hectare, lighting and feeding codes and the forbidding of de-snooding (cutting of fleshy appendage that attaches just above the beak) and toe trimming.
No comments:
Post a Comment