Homestead mailing list

["Karen L. Black" <karen AT plamondon.com>]

Sage writes:

> I recently read where they are now feeding chickens brown 
tinted chalk and that makes a white egg chicken lay brown 
eggs. 

I think this is pretty unlikely. Could you find the source of that claim?

> This was due to the fact people believe the brown 
ones are more wholesome and better for you. The quality of 
the egg should have nothing to do with the egg's color, 
but how the hen is raised and what she feeds on. Because 
the standard factory bred hen lays white eggs, people just 
assume the other colors are not from factories.

This is an interesting inversion of the old paradigm, that brown eggs were
not as good as white. Let me explain:

Back in the early 20th century, brown-egg-laying hens were the most common
farm bird. When there was a surplus of eggs, the farmwife would make a
little money at the general store by bringing in the eggs she had collected.
The store owner would then sell them to an egg jobber, who would candle,
grade and pack them and ship them to the city. The eggs were rarely
refrigerated at any point in this chain, so you can imagine that even the
"grade A" eggs weren't all that fresh. It was a given that nobody would eat
eggs from the South in the summer, since temperatures there would rapidly
spoil eggs. (Milo Hastings in "The Dollar Hen" tells of a car of eggs,
delayed in shipping, that had live chicks at its destination.)

Farmers near large cities, seeing a huge difference in price between
"strictly fresh" and run of the mill eggs, started specializing in egg
farming. They kept Leghorns (and Leghorn crosses) for three reasons: the
birds laid very well (the first hen to lay 300 eggs in a year was a Leghorn
cross), they ate less per dozen eggs than heavy-bodied birds, and the white
shells looked cleaner and were much easier to candle for meat or blood
spots.

The association of "strictly fresh" eggs with Leghorns took hold through
most of the country. New England was the exception. Boston got most of its
eggs locally already, and so the Rhode Island Red's brown eggs were the most
popular there.

Karen Black