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I don't know how eggs are produced from the chicken and raised to be shipped to the grocery store... does anybody know? How the chicken lays it? How the egg is watery when we break it, instead of having a fetus chick or whatever u may call it?
If you buy eggs at an everyday grocer they come from virtually an egg factory. There are rows upon rows of wire cages, each containing three chickens. Food goes by on a conveyor belt, there is a water trough. The bottom of the cage is slanted and open enough for the eggs to gently roll down and away from the birds. After a year most of their feathers are gone either from fighting or plucking them out from boredom. That is their whole life from around twenty weeks to their first molt (changing of the feathers). At first molt the birds go to become soup or weiners or.....A new crew is brought in.
Hobbiest often buy them at this point because after the molt they feather out nicely and lay much bigger eggs, even double yokers.
There are no chicks in the eggs because the girls have never met up with a guy. They simply ovulate a lot. About 300 eggs a year.
I buy cage free eggs, so in my head, a farm wife comes out of her farm house with a nice crisp white apron and a basket, and gathers the newly laid eggs from happy, healthy chickens in the barnyard. Then she washes them and places them in the very environmentally incorrect double layer plastic egg holder, and her big strong farmer husband drives them to the Publix in his old, but well maintained red pickup truck.
Well, ahumm. I just go out to the chicken house every day and see if the girls have been working.
I get 1-2 everyday. One brown one from my New Hampshire X and one "Green egg" from my Aracana.
Yes, they are furtile since I have one happy rooster..
These eggs hold up for up to 3-4 weeks since they are so fresh. Cost, well they are free range and I do supp. them some egg layer/grit.
Best eggs one can get.
Happy trails, over and easy..
I don't know how eggs are produced from the chicken and raised to be shipped to the grocery store... does anybody know? How the chicken lays it? How the egg is watery when we break it, instead of having a fetus chick or whatever u may call it?
I don't know how eggs are produced from the chicken and raised to be shipped to the grocery store... does anybody know? How the chicken lays it? How the egg is watery when we break it, instead of having a fetus chick or whatever u may call it?
Is that a serious question???
or should we move it to Great Debates?
The reason that hens lay unfertilized eggs is because in large hen houses where they produce the eggs the hens live their lives in tiny cages placed in rows upon rows of other hens and just sit there for their entire lives laying eggs. They never meet up with a rooster so the egg never gets fertilized.
The difference between fertilized and unfertilized eggs comes down to whether a rooster has been involved or not. Hens do not need a rooster to lay an egg; they do so (almost daily) on their own simply according to light patterns. However, if a rooster does mate with a hen, the eggs she produces are fertilized and, under the right incubation conditions, can bear chicks. No rooster means zero possibility of the egg ever becoming anything more than that.
Chances are you’ve never eaten a fertilized egg, because nearly all eggs sold commercially are produced by hens that have not mated. When fertilized eggs are sold for consumption, there is no danger of eating a developing embryo for a few reasons:
All eggs sold in the United States as food must be refrigerated, a process that halts any growth inside the shell. Also, the interior of any egg intended to be sold as food must be inspected—accomplished by shining a bright light through the shell (called candling)—which highlights any irregularities, such as a developing chick. These regulations hold true whether the eggs are intended for a large chain like Safeway or for the farmers’ market. Eggs with irregularities never make it to retail and are destroyed.
Hens lay eggs with or without roosters around (just like human women ovulate whether or not they are sexually active).
As a farm kid, I grew up gathering eggs daily from our chicken house (not a factory farm or large scale commercial confinement, just a little hutch and yard with a dozen or so hens and a couple of roosters). We hatched our own chicks, so we kept roosters. Basically the same setup as if you buy free-range eggs from a farmer's market.
Because chicken embryos take 21 days to incubate, an egg that's collected from a henhouse the day it's laid, even if it's fertilized, which it may or may not be, is going to be indistinguishable from any other egg, and once it's removed from that environment (and put in, say, your fridge), it's not going to incubate on its own.
Thanks. I feel comfort knowing there's no chance of a chick or chick semen being in the egg, but I don't like how they're caged and pluck eachother. So I'm gonna try and lay off eggs.
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