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Comment by voakbasda | Hacker News Reader

We raise chickens on non-GMO feed and collect over a dozen eggs per day. The eggs available at Walmart are utter garbage compared to those raised locally on good feed and pasture. There's no comparison.

Farm fresh egg yolks are the same orange color as the HN banner, while Walmart's eggs are pale imitations that were raised with copious antibiotics and literal shit in their feed. I would go so far as to say that their eggs help define the absolute bottom of this particular barrel.

I would be ashamed to be a producer for them, and it is upsetting to see their prices held up as some kind of standard. We could do better, but our metrics for success have been boiled down to little more than current clearance sale prices.

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Serious Eats did a taste test between home grown and store bought eggs. They found that if they added food coloring to the store bought eggs to make the color more orange like the home grown eggs, that taste testers were just as likely to prefer the store bought.

It's not just about the taste is it? I'd eat junk all day, if I only cared for the taste. Different color (without food coloring) signals different nutrients: https://www.justchartit.com/egg-yolk-color-chart/

I read somewhere that you can manipulate the yolk color through different types of feed, but I'm not sure if that's true or not. I used to raise a bunch of hens and yeah... nothing beats eggs from healthy ones. I "did" however get sick of eggs for a while... they're almost too productive! I finally built a network of neighbors who were gladly willing to take them off my hands.

That is 100% the determining factor in yolk color. It comes down to carotenoid content of feed.

Also, in reference to the original comment, there is no difference between GMO and non-GMO feed either.

Some may claim that high carotenoid feed results in more nutritious eggs. That's debatable. Even super-cheap eggs are packed with nutrients. It's an egg, after all. However, the nutritional difference in conventional eggs vs backyard eggs is practically irrelevant. The differential nutrient contents are not significant and come in higher quantities in other foods that we all have cheap access to.

The differential nutrient contents are not significant and come in higher quantities in other foods that we all have cheap access to.

That's a fact that gets so often overlooked. Some food you eat just because you want a particular nutrient.

Anyway, there's a huge difference in taste. We had chickens when I was a child and later we bought from others that also fed weed to the chickens.

Yep -- You can change the feed to change the yolk. These are the "standard" colors: https://www.dsm.com/anh/products-and-services/tools/yolkfan....

I started buying the really expensive pasture raised chicken eggs for ethical reasons and can't go back to normal eggs anymore. They taste so much better. I'm sure yours are even better.

Though the ethical choice is better in your case, I came to realize that chickens (as they exist for agriculture) are kind of strange abominations of what they came from, and they really do live bizarre lives of eating and pumping out eggs. As soon as they're spent they get turned into dog food or similar. Ethically it's better if they aren't trucked around and crammed in cages, but the end result is still servitude in which your body is used until it stops working the way people want it to, at which point you're disposed of like garbage.

In my mind I thought "If I care enough to reduce suffering to an arbitrary point, why not just eliminate it from my diet entirely? Why do I get to decide at which point the chickens suffer the correct amount?". Especially when the more ethical choice still involves the exploitation of the chicken, it seemed like the right choice to stop eating the food they make.

I don't miss eating eggs so it wasn't a hard choice to follow through on. I know some people depend on them far more than I did, or fewer foods are available to them. It's an interesting quandary though and I don't think my decision was the objectively perfect conclusion or anything – it's just worth considering over time.

If you get some backyard chickens you'll realize that 1. they don't need to suffer to produce an egg and 2. they can live a long damn time.

Certainly, I had backyard chickens for most of my childhood. I'm not sure the relationship makes sense for me is all. Within a strictly ethical context, it seems to me that abstinence from eating chickens or eggs is the only answer yielding the most completely satisfying results.

It's a very subjective thing though. I've had people argue that simply having the chickens offers them a chance to live whereas if everyone thought like I did, all the chickens would die. I don't agree with the "benevolent master" kind of rhetoric and it shifts the analysis of the problem, but it demonstrates the breadth of perspective on the matter quite well.

At that lengths would there be any reason to have a pet? A cat, perhaps?

Now imagine said cat lays eggs ...

Haha, it's a great question. My conclusion at this point is that caring for a rescue makes sense. I wouldn't buy an animal from a breeder. I don't have pets, but I do like the idea of a rescue in which the benefits are more evidently mutual, and the relationship isn't initiated like a purchase.

You're comparing a good life with bad death.

I don't see why you think so, but I'm interested in understanding better. I might explained myself poorly and infer the meaning of my words differently than you do without prior understanding. Or you're right and I'm not realizing how I'm doing this. I don't mean to make a comparison between a good life and a bad death, though.

I am fine with a chicken living in a servitude that involves walking around in nature, getting fed as much as they want, having shelter and warmth at night, having plenty of social interactions, having human caretakers watching them every day, and getting a quick painless death after a few years.

I agree, ideally we wouldn't kill animals for the convenience and satisfaction of our diet. However, I fully recognize the selfishness and lack of empathy I am demonstrating. I think the limited amount of energy and effort I have in my life is much better placed on things I care about more than a chicken getting killed after a few years when its natural life span would be closer to 10 or 20 years. Said in another way, I think my time spent thinking about other endeavors in my life is more valuable than another 7-17 years of several chickens' life.

If I believed chickens had a greater sense of sentience, self awareness, and experienced life much at all beyond mindless eating and shitting, I wouldn't eat them. This is why I don't eat beef/pork/mammals.

> I think my time spent thinking about other endeavors in my life is more valuable than another 7-17 years of several chickens' life.

I suppose I could argue that you don't even need to spend time thinking about it; you can just stop eating chickens. You aren't faced with a challenge here because the solution is clear and freely available.

> If I believed chickens had a greater sense of sentience, self awareness, and experienced life much at all beyond...

The more I learn about birds the more I think they're far more sentient and aware than we give them credit. Some certainly seem to possess more mental acuity than others, but I no longer believe chickens are vacant little meat vehicles.

One thing to consider is that the chickens you're familiar with have been raised in conditions which are conducive to them appearing fairly stupid. They're trained to expect very regular conditions, and are never given a chance to exercise their brains in order to become sharper or display more awareness.

If you met humans who lived a similarly deprived life, I suspect they would also appear useless and stupid.

We've also bred chickens to be a certain way, and that aspect of it is a bit unsettling to me. If we've in fact created a creature which is that stupid and vacant so we can consume it without feeling bad, there's something disturbing about that picture. It's like removing the soul from something so you can abuse it freely. In order to spare our conscience we effectively had to "kill" an entire lineage of living things. We know that the bird chickens originated from is not a grain-pecking zombie, so... What have we really done, and why? Is that something we should perpetuate? I find it quite a disturbing concept if it were to be true, though I do doubt that chickens truly are so mentally dull that their living or dying is irrelevant.

> I am fine with a chicken living in a servitude that involves walking around in nature, getting fed as much as they want, having shelter and warmth at night, having plenty of social interactions, having human caretakers watching them every day, and getting a quick painless death after a few years.

One interesting thing to me here is: If you think it's okay to kill the chicken eventually, why does it matter if its life prior was good or not? Where do you draw these lines and why? If you care about the chicken a _bit_, why do you, and why don't you _more_? What qualities would a chicken need to possess in order for you to decide it's not okay to eat it?

Upon asking myself this I realized I didn't have good answers. I prefer witnessing chickens being alive over having them on my plate to enjoy for a fleeting moment.

I'm not arguing at all; most people disagree, so I realize I'm probably wrong. It's very much a "feels"-based discussion.

Isn't yolk color mostly related to the amount of carotenoids in it? I regularly see yolks of all colors in grocery store eggs, and they don't taste any different.

Is there any macronutrient differences, though? And i'll be honest every egg I've every tasted has just tasted like egg.

The main differences that I noticed was the thickness (strength) of the shell, and that you can change the taste somewhat by modifying the feed.

Do you scramble the eggs mostly? I find I notice the most specific things about eggs when I leave the white and yolk separate. Scrambled eggs can be different too but it's harder to notice IMO.

What happens to the chicken system when you go on vacation?

Edit: @voakbasda: thank you for the prompt and courteous reply, good info :)

I have not taken a vacation away from my farm in over ten years. I have had no interest in doing so, because I have everything that I want here.

But chickens? You can load up a feeder and provide ample water that would last for many days without supervision.

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