Brown Eggs and Bermuda Grass
(Food • Garden)
Just as Richard Brautigan fulfilled one of his desires by ending Trout Fishing In America with the word “mayonnaise,” so I have always wanted to start a New Year with fresh, brown eggs.
Not brown eggs for the sake of their brown-ness, mind you, but eggs laid by hens given the ability to scratch around in the chicken yard for their food as opposed to being crammed six to a foot-high cage with less living space per bird than an 8.5 by 11 piece of typing paper.
Look, I’m not saying that Big Ag and the Industrial Egg Producers are evil animal abusers. I’m just saying my family and I no longer have any interest in buying the off-white-yolked, paper-shelled, possibly salmonella-coated runny eggs their battery-caged birds produce.
I come from family farm country, and in days long gone, uncles and aunts on both sides of my family raised and slaughtered their own livestock, plowed fields with their own big work horses and raised their own chickens, for meat and eggs both. Friends and neighbors still raise their own chickens, although my older relatives had to stop decades ago when greater Cleveland, Ohio, spread out the way Houston, Texas, does now, and gobbled up all their farmland.
(I had an uncle who used to somehow attach chickens culled from the flock onto a heavy clothesline, the better for quick multiple execution, efficient except that the headless bodies kicked and writhed, and scared visiting children a little before totally giving up the ghost.)
Which is, I suppose, beside the point. The point is that, the more you delve into the practice of American industrial food production, which has done its best to supplant the art of farming, the more you find that many of the end products being sold at our groceries and fast-foot restaurants are at best nutritionally inferior and at worst amount to genetically altered, bad-tasting, chemically laced crap.
But these Cargill/Archer Daniels/ConAgra No. 2 field corn-fed animal byproducts are cheap! and nearly the only things easily available to most of us, especially those of us tethered to corporate jobs on the far end of a commute, with no time at the end of a hard day beyond popping in at Kroger’s for a frozen simulated dinner treat of hot buttered groat clusters, ready in six minutes depending on the heft of your microwave oven.
So anyway, between the stern admonitions of our resident food-safety expert against even thinking about eating raw industrially produced battery cage eggs and mounting hard evidence that chickens at pasture produce much more nutritious eggs in a setting much less prone to disease, I became willing late last year to start spending more money – twice as much or more per dozen than Industrial Eggs cost – for the real thing.
It was at once hilarious and sad to see Nick, our 7-year-old, exclaiming at the bright orange yolks and how good these “new” eggs tasted. Sad because once upon a time such objects, laid by fat, happy barnyard hens, were our default eggs.
I recognize there has to be some kind of nutritional/cost benefit ratio at play here, and it’s pretty damn hard to make a choice to do better by your family, nutritionally speaking, when your budget has been based for decades on your role as end-of-the-line consumer of easily available and undeniably inexpensive American Industrial Food.
It seems to me, though, when it comes to eggs from chicken prisons, $1.40 a dozen may sound like a bargain, but you’re getting what you pay for: less than a milligram of Vitamin E, 487 international units of Vitamin A, and 10 micrograms of Beta Carotene. Compare that to eggs from pasture hens: 3.73 milligrams of Vitamin E, about 792 IU of Vitamin A and 79 micrograms of Beta Carotene (which is why those yolks are so orange). At the same time, the Industrial Eggs contain 25% more saturated fat and more than a third again as much cholesterol.
Frankly, I’d just close the loop and raise my own chickens if not for Bosco the Crazed Leopard Dog, the other neighborhood dogs, hawks, snakes, cats, owls, possums, raccoons and the possible stray coyote hereabouts.
As for the bermuda grass in the headline – that’s what I pulled from between the tines of my little Mantis tiller late yesterday afternoon while plowing the back 40 (40 by 20 feet of raised beds way out back). These had laid fallow for two growing seasons in an attempt to drive off the damn nematodes. Now they’ll house some cool-weather herbs, such as cilantro and Italian flat-leaf parsley, and maybe some onions I should’ve put in the ground in early November. After that, ‘maters, and probably another fist-fight with the nematodes.
→ B.Dunn, Jan 03, 2009, 09 07 am
