With the total number of eggs recalled now growing to over half a billion, I wanted to add a few additional thoughts to my previous post on the topic.
As commenter Bill and Dogs notes (BTW, Bill, it's wonderful having you as a new reader):
I am currently in the city but have purchased a farm on which to retire and raise cattle and chickens. I have been unable to eat eggs since I left the farm and no longer had my own hens. My birds were contented, active and had both commercial and natural foods. ... Store bought eggs are so horrible by comparison that I just don't bother. I will be eating eggs again in a few years.
I'm not a big egg eater myself, but want to underscore Bill's point: Once you begin eating your own eggs, or anyone else's local eggs laid by active and happy hens, it's extremely difficult to again eat eggs laid by "concentration camp" hens. I travel on business from time to time, and simply cannot order egg-based dishes in restaurants. Farm fresh eggs are so good, they've ruined all other eggs for me.
Yesterday morning, I used olive oil and a cast iron skillet to saute a chopped onion and three different kinds of fresh peppers. All were straight from a neighbor's garden (for various reasons, particularly the adoption of Yeoman Farm Baby, we've been unable to stay on top of our own garden this year. But our neighbor's farmstand is as good a substitute as you can get.) To this I added four scrambled eggs, laid the previous morning by our hens. Once the eggs were done, I served them onto a freshly-picked and chopped garden tomato.
To my knowledge, a dish like this cannot be purchased in any restaurant at any price. And after tasting it, no restaurant omelet or grocery store egg will work for me.
3 comments:
I concur. I live in the city too, but raise broilers and turkeys on my friends land. We trade them for eggs from another homesteading family I work with. The taste is unbelievable. There is no substitute for locally grown foods particularly if they are "organic" and the livestock humanely treated.
To echo your friends' experiences, store-bought eggs started making me nauseous a few years ago - even the smell is sickening when they're cooking.
We occasionally have a chance to buy free-range farm eggs from a friend of a friend, and they're wonderful - they smell delicious as they're cooking and I can eat them without a hint of uneasiness.
I recently bought a half gallon of organic milk for cooking with as our goat milk has been low waiting for kidding to come next month. Ug. That stuff is disgusting. I wonder how we ever drank it before- it just tastes sour and plastic-y. I can only imagine the same for eggs though thankfully I haven't had to buy any for a few years. Oh, and did you notice that now the FDA says they need MORE power and authority to prevent such horrible contamination? And just WHO are they going to crack down on??? They'll raise taxes and dump it all into a system that flat out isn't working. Maybe they'll just insist that all eggs be cooked right out of the chicken. Lets just set the poor birds straight on the frying pan. They couldn't be any more miserable than they are already! I love this country but sometimes its maddening!!!
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