Our chickens are remarkably consistent with their eggs now. So consistent, in fact, that I’ve stopped weighing them before baking. In the early days, when their egg engines were just warming up, they laid much smaller ones than you’d get in most supermarkets, and translating these into the medium or large eggs you need for most recipes was a matter of careful calculation.
I guess it was just a matter of them getting started, but if you’re wondering what constitutes a ‘large’ egg, I wrote a post on egg sizes here.
The difference isn’t all that much and you can easily reduce the quantities of the other ingredients in whatever you’re baking if you’re using smaller eggs (much easier than adding just a bit more of another egg to make up the weight) so I have a little bit of sympathy for Tom Vesey, chairman of the British Free Range Producers’ Association. Who’s he? The man calling on consumers to stop buying large eggs.
The trouble is, I think we’re probably getting chicken campaign fatigue now. I’m all for banning battery farming, and for fairer labelling of the chicken sold in supermarkets, but getting the average shopper to buy smaller eggs because they’re more comfortable to lay is stretching the point somewhat (even if it’s not stretching the chicken’s vent).
The Telegraph, which reported the call, explained that the problem lies in chickens being bred specifically to lay larger eggs and that this can cause them serious health problems. Naturally, by continuing to buy larger eggs we’re perpetuating this breeding programme.
The report also outlines the financial implication of chickens laying smaller eggs, and at first sight this call looks purely magnanimous. If a farmer sells medium eggs to a supermarket they get about 77p a dozen. For large ones they get £1 and for extra large ones they get another bit on top. So encouraging us to buy smaller eggs could see the farmer out of pocket by about 25%.
Except if you buy smaller eggs and have two for breakfast rather than one large one, as Tom Vesey suggests, you’ll use up your store of eggs twice as fast. And that means the farmer could actually be 54% better off.
So I’m undecided. Big eggs good, or big eggs bad? Fortunately I don’t need to think about it as our birds only lay what – in terms of weight, at least – would count as a middle-of-the-road medium.
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