Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
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BUT, there are definite upsides:
- Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and can become quite tame. They can purr.
- I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
- It's fantastic to get ~8 free eggs per day (from 13, 3 are not laying this winter)
- Morally/ethically, it seems like the best way to eat eggs if you're caring for them in a loving manner (compare to factory farms)
Consider the downsides:
- You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. Imagine euthanizing your dog or cat by hand...
- Predators, foxes and hawks, you need defenses
- Veterinary services can be harder to find. Most vets don't want to deal with chickens. However, it also tends to be cheaper than a vet for a dog/cat.
- Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
- If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them.
I think there are more upsides than downsides, but you should think about these downsides before taking the plunge. Don't let it dissuade you. Overall, they have enriched our lives immensely and I would recommend it to others!
1: https://www.anthonycameron.com/projects/cameron-acreage-chic...
My father asked for, and got, a chick for Easter once.
It grew into a rooster that took over the backyard by terrorizing the whole family. Only my grandmother, who had grown up on a farm, was willing to go into the yard.
> Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
A friend of mine complained to me a few years ago that the people in the apartment next to hers were raising a chicken. The crowing woke her up in the morning. But she consoled herself that soon enough they'd eat it.
I was pretty amused at the whole idea of raising a chicken inside an apartment.
So, if you want to keep backyard chickens, save yourself the trouble and get the red sex linked chicks. They are hybrids whose color is very reliably determined by color, so you can be pretty sure you aren't getting a rooster chick.
It's either that or brace yourself for the process of turning the occasion young rooster into fried chicken before it gets too obstreperous.
He traded it in for a more "woke" one.
When I was a kid, we also had chickens and roosters around. At one point we had a smaller, white rooster who would take any chance he could at terrorizing the family as soon as we brought them food.
Unfortunately for the bully, we also had a second, bigger rooster, who would keep an eye on him, and come running to beat his ass and chase him away as soon as he spotted nastiness.
The white bully ended up in the soup. The grey defender died of old age.
- The smell… Chicken crap is horrible. Our neighbour has chickens, we have flies. Lots of black flies.
- Bye bye garden… My dad has two chickens (did I mention the smell?) that free roam and absolutely tear up everything looking for a tasty bite.
- Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
The research done was mid at best. They just went "oh yeah there was huge variance in the hobby chicken PFAS data so we took the average". Most of the hobby eggs had little to no PFAS in them.
Furthermore, because of privacy laws, they weren't allowed to know where the eggs came from. They say they found no correlation between PFAS contaminations in eggs and known high PFAS areas but that's actual bullshit if you can't look at location data.
It's absolutely attrocious they were allowed to publish like this and that no one called them on their bullshit.
Overall, unless you are in a place where you know you have high PFAS concentrations, it's most likely fine? You could send off a few eggs for testing to make sure, that's a 200 euro test or something. Do that once per year just to make sure and you should be OK.
> We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
KNOWN PFAS contamination was around heavy industry, and yeah, if you live near those regions, maybe don't. Otherwise proceed with scepticism and/or some testing.
Dutch source for the thing about rain worms: https://nos.nl/artikel/2539934-hoge-concentraties-pfas-via-r...
This includes feed. Commercial animal foods literally contains waste, such as plastic, due to waste food recycling not being required to be unpacked.
Sure, you _can_ control these things, but more often than not, people don't. Semi commercial hobbyists don't have the money.
Though like many discussions about microplastics today, where "higher levels", and what microplastics, cross over into actual health issues is vague.
It's like a cat's litter box. If it smells, then clean it more often.
There were several lessons that we learned. Chicken will find dry earth to use as a bath. If one do not want that then you need to remove access and solve the underlying need. They will also dig up seeds and eat seedlings, so any fresh worked soil need to be covered/restricted. They also eat some fruits and herbs, but not others.
In term of total work they did save a lot of time and the garden was in much better shape than before.
I used the believe the same, but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land. Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals.
But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?
She tells a story of a wonderful pet goat. Until one day it was "gone to another farm", and they enjoyed goat curry for dinner.
The older siblings knew... and now they dont talk lol.
Straight psychopath approach to child raising. The adults were all convinced this is how you made kids grow up tough
The trope is about something different - it's about intentionally making a subject bond with an animal over long time, as with a close friend, and then finally making them kill the animal as a final test of loyalty.
Doing that in real life, and for no good reason, is just sick.
In the end it makes me feel like the people eating their nuggets but have a traumatic reaction to what created them are the odd ones.
Having them as a product does not mean you don't care for them, on the contrary, but I would say it's a completely different type of bond.
> But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?
I would argue it's about the purpose, not the bond. You don't kill a pet, but you do kill food. And you should never kill for the sole sake of killing.
But also some people who raise animald for meat hire a person to collect them for slaughter in part because of the emotional toll involved.
As to your last question.. I think you might be confused? People don't like to kill in general. Go outside and ask people how they felt getting their first kill on a hunt as a kid, you're going to realize that a unifying element is learning to deal with harming another animal.
Bonus: being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.
I used to believe this.
Then I came up with a twisted question to ask people (I am fun at parties)
The question is something like, if you had to come up with a name for someone to kill within twenty four hours can you do so? The conditions are you get a full and unconditional pardon. It won't be held against you at all. If need be, we will even arrange it such that the person can't protest. However, once you agree, you must come up with a name and you must follow through. You must kill this person no matter what within a short time frame (make something up like a month).
I expected people to answer no. You can't come up with a name in a day! However, over half the people I have asked have said they have a name right now.
(for a pithy version: "I've never wished anyone dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure")
Your question is like a game, and people you ask will most probably treat it as such. People 'kill' in videogames, but most would not like to actually kill in real life.
But then there's the question on whether you could trust your own judgement.
E.g. I wonder how many people would choose Kim Jong Un without realizing how EXTREMELY progressive the guy is on the scale of the hell hole that is North Korea.
Allowing just anyone who wants access to the countrwide intranet with some curated and heavily censored information from the outside and ending the crackdown on user generated content? Blasphemy! Allowing a selected few foreign restaurants to open up? Witchcraft! Building semi-normal housing in the prison camps you toss entire families together with their children, grand-children and elders in? Cracking down on systematic rape and arbitrary mass executions in those camps? He's going to come for our (prison) children next! Trying to shut down the practice of high ranking officials forcing young girls into sex slavery squads? And even after inflicting an "undisclosed physical ailment" on him, he still only barely agreed to restart the squad, controls the selection of girls himself instead of allowing us to force anyone we like into it, requires parental consent, makes us wait until the girls receive an education and doesn't recruit anyone under 14 anymore? SCREW HIM!
And many other things that seem absurd to us and the Juche system for exactly opposite reasons. Like allowing other countries but China and Russia to offer work in their special economic zones, agreeing to a meeting with the US President at the border inside NK, considering negotiations with South Korea and allowing very limited cultural exchange, giving some priority to increasing living conditions for anyone but those who have the priviledge of living in the capital, turning a blind eye to tiny private markets selling some less controversial contraband, ....
The guy is just barely holding on in a system that completely vaporized anyone with even but a tiny bit less than utmost loyality to the Juche ideology. For several generations. All institutions, government bodies, civic organizations, education and corporations are under complete control of Juche extremists. And then there's this one basketball obsessed fatty raised in Switzerland.
His greatest achievement so far is probably opening up their intranet to about a quarter of their population (less than 1% were allowed to use it before him) and slowly expanding the group of people who have access to the outside internet. At this point more people have access to smartphones than to television or radio. And now social media and chatrooms are apparently being reopened after the previous government took those from the 0.1% elite who had access to the intranet back then in 2005, because they organized a spontaneous sport event with a few hundred people.
And not long ago the NK government became very worried about people accessing the global internet through their intranet enabled devices, extending the application used to connect to the intranet with spyware trying to detect foreign network accesses. So it seems VERY likely to me someone hard to stop is currently hooking their intranet to the global internet in the background. And the NK establishment is not very happy about it.
Maybe the life of North Koreans will become much better within one or two generations.
I don't think that's surprising, and it doesn't meant that people are okay with or blasé about killing people. Like, arguably this is just the trolley problem rephrased; there exist people whose death would clearly be a vast net benefit and would save many other lives. So is it okay to kill them? It's not an easy question.
I think it's more or less unrelated to the issue of killing one's own chickens; there is no such thing as an evil chicken who death will save thousands.
I'm not saying people have an inbuilt moral objection to the idea of killing, I'm saying most people find hurting other living things emotionally difficult.
If people don't like killing in general, or killing animals more specifically, they can live a wonderfully health(y|ier) life by going plant-based, be responsible for less killing, and today do it without having to give up the textures and experiences they've be conditioned on.
It's difficult in 2025 to conclude that a person who doesn't choose to eat this way is particularly opposed to killing, in the way that you propose.
Tofu, seitan and TVP are all good, but they're extremely boring (user error attributes to this I'm sure).
Every vegetarian/vegan I've talked to is just not into weightlifting, so they sort of dismiss the diet needs we need. We always go back to chicken because of this
Have you tried various types? cannellini beans don't seem to have the same effect as others in my experience.
The tvp are tasteless by design, my way is to use them to mimic sliced beef recipes therefore 1) they get different flavors depending on what I cook 2) they trigger my memories and those makes me feel more taste that they are.
For the beans digestability another tip is to remove/by dehulled beans, that’s the hardest part to digest. Also soaking them overnight is a big help for digestion.
[1] I especially like grinding up the tempeh to turn it into a plant based burger substitute, and making "Perkedel Tempeh" (tempeh fritters)
I'm curious what your targets are. I've found getting 0.8g of protein per kg of bodyweight (USDA recommendation) is easy on any diet whereas 1.5g/kg or higher on a vegan diet can be hard depending on your target macro ratio. If you're bulking or doing long-distance running/biking (i.e. carbs aren't a limiting factor) then it's totally doable. Besides tofu, seitan, and beans there's lentils, chickpeas, edamame, spinach, nuts, seeds, nooch, etc.
> beans: ... My wife gets bloated painfully
If she's committed to making beans work you could experiment with varieties and preparation methods that are more digestible, or she could try Beano. But honestly that seems like a lot of work.
> beyond meat: it's expensive, gas and bloat is still an issue, a big one
Same, I just can't digest it. I'm glad the faux meats exist for folks who want them, but I'm sad at how it's displaced other veggie burgers at restaurants.
> Tofu, seitan and TVP are all good, but they're extremely boring (user error attributes to this I'm sure).
I've come to appreciate the blank canvas they provide but that did take a lot of trial and error to get to the point where I knew what to do with them. Similar to beans it depends on how committed you are. (In my case it took a long time for the incongruence between my food choices and my ethics to grow big enough to overcome my innate laziness and affinity for barbecue.)
> Every vegetarian/vegan I've talked to is just not into weightlifting, so they sort of dismiss the diet needs we need.
I know a few vegans into powerlifting/streetlifting, and as mentioned above bulking isn't too hard -- the real issue is cutting. Every one of them supplements with protein powders, especially while cutting. Then again, so do all the omnivore lifters I know.
My partner and I have been fully plant based since 2018 and variously play rugby and train triathlons.
Also, what if we increase the calories of the animal we choose to slaughter, say we start raising massive whale-sized animals instead, would that tip the scales?
However, do keep in mind that a large proportion of agricultural output is used to feed animals.
That’s like saying you kill chickens to eat eggs. You don’t kill a plant to eat its fruit. In fact, plants benefit from animals eating what they produce, be it oranges or tomatoes or something else and crapping the seeds somewhere else for proliferation.
And fruits are broader than most people think. Many of the things you think as vegetables are fruits: pumpkins, zucchinis, tomatoes. But even outside fruits there is food you can harvest without harming the plant, like potatoes. And we haven’t even gotten into seeds and grains, like rice.
So you can definitely live without killing what you eat.
why do you get to decide that it isn't the purpose of a cow to be eaten?
You're arguing on the Internet, it's already a waste of time and space.
Clearly you’ve never experienced the sight of animals in a slaughterhouse, as they realise what is happening to the animals in front and begin to panic and violently bellow and push back.
> You're arguing on the Internet, it's already a waste of time and space.
That is only true for people who don’t engage in good faith and don’t have a genuine desire to learn and are open to changing their minds. For everyone else, it can and does provide value.
Why do you get to decide that the purpose of a cow isn't to be eaten?
I guess someone could also repeatedly bash you over the head with a tire iron and break your legs, and when criticised reply “how do you know their purpose isn’t to get hurt?”
“Well, when I approached them to hit them, they cowered in fear, asked for mercy, and tried to flee.”
“Your attempt to evoke an emotion doesn’t answer the question though. How do you know their purpose is not to be ravaged?”
If you build a chair, the purpose of doing so could be to sit or to earn money by selling it. We can derive exactly which from your actions and the outcomes, but there is still an identifiable purpose. However, it is entirely different to claim your purpose is to build chairs.
Similarly, in my previous example someone can hit someone else with the purpose of harming them, but it doesn’t mean that person’s purpose is to cause harm.
Do you see the difference? I do kind of feel like I’m discussing middle school philosophy here. I surely hope that is not my purpose. This whole conversation was unnecessary with a tiny bit of steel manning on your part, don’t you think? Does it truly seem reasonable to you to claim an entire species’ purpose is to do something they do not only not pursue but actively avoid? I’m confident you are able to see the point by now.
Neither you nor I get to decide what the purpose of another sentient being is.
If someone raises their human kid “to be eaten”, that would be the purpose of the kid.
Does that make it ok to eat the kid?
Pretty sure it is the cow's purpose. Humans first domesticated a wild animal and then with selective breeding cows were "made". That has no weight on ethics tho.
Surely the right move here is not to play, but if you don’t get annoyed trolls can’t win either.
This whole argument is absolutely meaningless.
edit: just pointing out I'm not directly replying to you but to the whole thread.
They are the "fruiting body" of the fungus, but biologically they are not fruit.
I think you’ll benefit from this video. Don’t let yourself be consumed by emotions of an imaginary argument. The entirety of your point is a response to something you imagined I said and not my words or intentions.
The real problem is the sheer number of humans we have to feed. Hopefully another couple centuries of low birth rates will help.
Same with chickens that lose the ability to produce eggs.
I'd say main benefit is not doing it youself.
I guess you should just be pro child slavery and enslaved some kids to do your housework then?
Cars kill 50k Americans a year. I guess we are just ok with killing peoplr and therefore shouldn’t be against murder either?
It doesn’t even take philosophy 101 to understand there’s a significant moral gulf between killing deliberately and incidentally.
For a lot of people it's an exchange thing. You give the chicken a place to stay, food and care and in exchange you get to eat it when it gets old. They do bond with them but there's this understanding from day 1.
If you don't get that out of it it'd turn into an omlette so instead of turning into an omlette it gets to enjoy a large percentage of its life.
You develop bonds, just different ones and you learn to place limits because you know what the purpose of the animal is.
I still felt it when I was really little, but that was gone by the time I was a teenager and the reality that this was our living set in.
You needed HN to figure that out? I assume this is obvious sarcasm but almost none of the domesticated animals species would exist if almost all humans throughout history weren't willing to do that.
Even eating dogs was perfectly standard in most more "primitive" and/or destitute societies.
I have a farmer friend who occasionally has to kill one of his milk cows. He names them, pets them, cares for them like a pet. It pains him to kill them, and I always know when he’s had to do it— I can see it on his face. I’ve bought some of the meat form his cows, and I was grateful for the meat, and the man who raised the cow with such care.
The same, by the way, applies to vegetarian stuff. The amount of critters being killed to keep them away from the veggies would probably shock you, especially in the rather inhumane way its sometimes done in industrial farms. Shooting, for some baseline, is considered one of the most humane ways of dealing with large pests.
I simply see nothing wrong, at all, with eating meat. It's a natural and normal part of life and also, by far, the easiest way to ensure you hit all your necessary nutrients without going overboard on calories - especially if you live an active life and/or are into things like weight training.
We rightfully find these immoral and don’t engage in them.
That’s not a defense of the immoral act. It’s just words to describe the immoral act.
Some birds will abandon weaker chicks to focus on the ones most likely to survive. Others will allow siblicide. That these behaviors exist and have existed for billions of years is a fact orthogonal to morality because birds don’t have the capacity to reason about systems and the mortality of actions.
“Living things” is a sleight of hand, logically. When it comes down to it, everything is just atoms in the end. So why not murder? Why not steal? Why not exploit the poor? Reductionism leads us down some very dark paths indeed.
People generally dislike gratuitous pain and cruelty, hence we're seeing a push for cage-free hens and the like. They don't oppose slaughter in and of itself.
Slavery is an excellent cognate to this.
It’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? If you’re not careful with your compassion, you’ll end up having it for all sorts of beings you’ve come to see as like yourself.
No it's not. I always find the idea that humans are not in some way special (at least to other humans) off-putting. Even animals treat members of their own species generally better than they treat other species.
I love animals, I think we should treat them with dignity and respect as much as possible. At the same time I would not hesitate to kill an animal for food or if it endangered another human.
You said yourself:
>I think we should treat them with dignity and respect as much as possible.
It becomes more possible to treat animals with more respect and dignity every day. For vast portions of the population (Not all! Not yet!) the slaughter of animals for food is becoming less and less necessary.
So the question becomes, given that you believe we should treat animals with as much respect and dignity as possible, do you believe you have a moral imperative to take advantage of these systemic advances?
I think where we disagree is the question of whether slaughter is necessarily undignified or disrespectful. When I say "treat them with dignity and respect" I think the experience of the animal up to the point of death is what's most important. The slaughter, if done humanely and quickly, is not inherently immoral to me. For example, I think most people would agree that it's better to "put down" a suffering pet than let them die of natural causes.
My problem mainly lies with industrial farming practices like battery cages.
Yeah, we definitely have common ground here. I’ll also mention that industrial farming practices are also cruel to people. Slaughterhouses in the US are overwhelmingly staffed by migrant laborers who work in unsafe conditions, for low pay, being exposed to antibiotics that damage their long term health.
We can and should do better.
That's clearly not true, and a projection.
They don't oppose slaughter because they find no objection with killing an animal for nourishment, "necessity" having no bearing.
There's something missing from this analysis. Namely that animals that have many offspring generally expect most of them to die and this is part of selective pressures that keeps the population healthy. If, for example, a mouse could reason morally it might still let many of its weaker babies die because keeping them alive would not be good for mouse-kind. It's inappropriate to assume that the child rearing morals of a low-fecundity, high-parental-investment species like ourselves applies to other species with different reproductive strategies.
I agree. If a mouse could reason morally and inside the system it currently inhabits, it might reason that way because it was unconscious of or had no access to alternatives for survival.
It’s is absolutely inappropriate to assume any morals on a species that has no capacity for reason.
This has no bearing on the argument. That is just as true of vegans who purchase boxed products.
It's also fairly US-centric. If you observe countries with the longest lifespan, lowest CVD incidence and overall best health outcomes, they consume a more varied whole-foods diet with animal products.
> the classic diet
This is the Americanized diet of ultra-processed foods. Whole foods are the solution, which is in no way shape or form contingent on whether animal products are included (unless the diet is "carnivore" which is not representative, and even there you can find traditional societies who fare ok even if not completely optimally).
This scales principally with excess weight gain.
> The fact is meat is often the central peace of the dish, second the carbs and then salads, cabbages and roots.
This is one meal, dinner, and the fact that it is more protein-heavy is not the problem. Nevermind ratio, some diets are devoid of fiber. The secondary "carbs" are just pasta, white bread, crackers, etc.
If you consume a whole-foods diet, with a dinner that has a larger meat component, you will easily, easily have enough fiber.
I mostly agree but not with the easy part: you thirst has a maximum and people can’t ingest as much food they want without a limit. If you have a large meat component there’s less space in your belly for the vegetables. The point for carbs is the same (they cut your satiety and you’ll be less hungry for the cauliflower). Thought I get your point that a diet including meat isn’t bad in itself, but if you look around the biggest meat eaters are not the fittest, however the opposite might often be true.
So is dying of smallpox.
Wikipedia:
> Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence.
Completely natural, and completely normal.
That doesn’t mean we should be engaging in it in 2025.
The naturalistic fallacy is not justification for killing living things.
I love my chickens and I'm really sad when I lose some to predators. Yet I have no issue to harvest them for eating. They are not pets, I raise them for eggs and meat.
Maybe it's because I was raised on a farm, but I make a difference between pets and farm animals and that does not mean that I don't have a "bond" with some of the latter.
You have be arguing in bad faith if you claim that you don't see difference between a random cat and a cattle.
If you think it's wrong to kill animals to eat, I would ask you "By what moral standard?"
We have dropped some practices and we continue with some. We no longer leave the dead to rot, we bury/burn them, and so on. We developed religions, science, etc, and we are in a different era now, our lifestyle has completely changed, we don't have to hunt, don't have to build our own shelters, and we are no longer nomadic.
I am of the opinion that `killing animals` is a practice we can safely stop now, it was a necessity at that time, but right now it is completely optional.
There are various angles to look at this. One is sustainability and another one is morality.
Sustainability: Do you think we have enough animals to feed 8 Billion people on earth meat daily? I hope you know why we had to fallback to agriculture as a source of nutrition. Why most early settlements were started on river banks?
Morality: My moral standard is: Don't kill animals for my own sake of pleasure, kill only what's necessary for my survival, kill only what is there to kill me/hurt me.
So can I "kill" plants?: Yes (Using the term 'kill' wrt plants is just wrong, but I will continue with it for the sake of argument).
How is it morally okay to kill a plant but not okay to kill an animal?:
Let's agree on the definition of an animal. By animal, we all mean the set of (humans, pets, goat, horse, pig, lion, etc), there are no plants in this set. They are in a set called `living_beings`, which will have bacteria, viruses, insects as well (who can be further clubbed into smaller sets). Now my moral standard is "Not kill animals" (Not 'don't kill living beings'). It is on this entire set, not selectively for X or Y, which will be hypocritical. I am applying the same level of morality to everyone in this set. Now coming to plant-based food. First of all vegetarian food is not just plants. It is fruits, vegetables (akin to fruits), seeds, leaves, and other different parts. The plants are not always "killed" unlike when producing meat-based food (except eggs). The plants are "evolutionary hardened",i.e. built for harvesting, they don't die if you pluck a fruit (moreover they drop it naturally). They don't die when you take a flower or take a bunch of leaves (as long as you are within limits). The same can't be said for any animal.
Is the use of pesticides, deforestation, and killing of insects/rodents okay for producing large amounts of vegetarian food?:
No, I am against that but I don't see any other alternative to feed the calorific needs of 8 Billion people on earth. Of course there are other farming practices but they can't be commercialized or don't have high yields. As much as we can, we should try to eat locally sourced items to avoid carbon emissions due to transportation over large distances.
So what will be my ideal world that is according to my moral standards?: Ideally, everyone has a backyard where they can grow their own plant-based food. If you want better nutrition coverage, keep some chicken and eat the eggs. Let the chickens enjoy their lives, doing chicken things.
Will I eat an animal if I am stranded on an island with nothing else to eat?: Yes, at my current level of ego, I would prefer to stay alive by killing and eating the said animal.
At 2 years old my son could blind taste test tell the difference between my neighbor's chicken's eggs and store bought eggs.
He refused to eat eggs (still doesn't) until we convinced him to try one of the eggs from our neighbor's chicken's. He liked that egg. Every time we've tried to pass (fancy!) store eggs off to him as our neighbor's eggs he's called us out for lying to him.
He'll reliably eat eggs from the chickens across the street and nowhere else.
So yes, there is a difference in taste!
She eats her eggs and asks for more. If we run out and I fry up some store bought ones, she refuses to eat them - even when I don't tell her where they're from.
Same goes for chicken meat from the grocery store vs. pasture raised broilers from another neighbor.
When it happened the first time it was something of a canary-in-the-coalmine situation for me.
My 2 year old would only prefer to eat frozen chicken nuggets. That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.
> That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.
My kids prefer nuggets over the whole roast chicken my wife and I eat. The salt, MSG, and seasoning of the nuggets along with the fat from the oil tastes better to them. Sadly, nothing I say will convince them otherwise.
- 1 pack of 6 thighs or 3 breasts
- 4 tbs corn starch + 1 tsp salt + 1/2 tsp each of curry powder, cumin, smoked paprika to coat
- slice chicken thinly and use a mallet to flatten to make it even and cook faster (this also increases the ratio of breading to chicken which they like)
- coat each slice in the corn starch mix
- beat 2 eggs and then dredge the coated slices in egg
- coat the now egg coated chicken with bread crumbs of your choice
- fry in a flat pan with just about 4-6mm of oil
- about 60-90 seconds each side
That really gets down to reheated chicken nuggets, pizza, and other classic school lunches.
The alternative would be to have a school that has a sufficiently large and trained kitchen staff to prepare diverse food, make sure that the food selection that they have meets the requirements (and that the kids aren't just eating the deserts).
I'm recalling back to my school food eating days and the kitchen had four people - two serving, one cooking, one cleaning.
High school had two or three in the cafeteria - and they were constantly putting out the fast food equivalent food items. I can't even remember if there were salads (if there were, I don't think I ever ate them). [Burger, deep fried [fish, shrimp, chicken], French fries] was my lunches for four years.
Though I'm also not entirely sure that schools are to blame for the narrowing of food preference with kids. They don't help, but I'm not entirely sure they are to blame.
The kids get used to eating it at schools and birthday parties where people go for "safe" choices like pizza.
I, too, remember in my elementary school days in the 80's, that we had real, cafeteria prepared lunches (shep's pie was my favorite). But it was also a small rural school.
> They don't help, but I'm not entirely sure they are to blame.
https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2003/10/07/fussy-eating-ma...
> Scientists at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Unit, University College London, wondered if children were reluctant to eat any unfamiliar foods, or whether they were selectively rejecting certain types – perhaps those most likely to pose a threat to heath. Early in human history, the presence of toxins within many plants made eating fruit and vegetables risky for children, while meat carried a high risk of food poisoning.
That was from 2003... article from the same author in 2005: Age and gender differences in children's food preferences - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15975175/
And the term to look for is Neophobia (related article from 2022 Neophobia—A Natural Developmental Stage or Feeding Difficulties for Children? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9002550/ )
> 4. Causes of Food Neophobia The source of food neophobia can be traced back to evolution when a neophobic attitude protected mammals from consuming potentially poisonous food. As an omnivorous species, to survive, humans had to distinguish between safe and poisonous food. Although this ability has lost its value today, it can still be observed in children around 2 years of age (sometimes earlier), when unfamiliar foods or foods served differently than before cause anxiety in the child, and a relative preference for familiar foods is apparent.
Kids eat better in a lower-middle-class area preschool in France than they do in the most expensive daycare in the Bay Area.
> ...
> Not many schools can afford gourmet offerings like Mount Diablo’s, which also benefits from California’s year-round growing season. But school menus in several places have improved in the past decade, with fresher ingredients and more ethnic dishes, said School Nutrition Association spokesperson Diane Pratt-Heavner.
> In a national survey of 1,230 school nutritiondirectors, nearly all said the rising costs of food and supplies were their top challenges this year. More than 90% said they were facing supply chain and staffing shortages.
> The survey by the nutrition association also found soaring levels of student lunch debt at schools that have returned to charging for meals. The association is urging Congress to resume free breakfast and lunch nationwide.
> “This is the worst and fastest accumulation of debt I’ve seen in my 12 years in school nutrition,” said Angela Richey, nutrition director for the Roseville and St Anthony-New Brighton school districts in Minnesota, which serve about 9,400 students. They don’t turn away a hungry child, but this year’s school meal debt has surpassed $90,000, growing at a rate of over $1,000 a day.
> Making food from scratch isn’t just healthier, it’s cheaper, many school nutrition directors say.
> But that’s only possible when schools have kitchens. A national shift away from school kitchens began in the 1980s, which ushered in an era of mass-produced, processed school food. Pre-made meals delivered by food service companies meant schools could do away with full-time cafeteria staff and kitchens.
> ...
Los Gatos High School Hires Chef Consultant to Improve Student Meals - https://youtu.be/nMMO9fBWnjc
I visited Taiwan recently. Small island, semi-tropical with a long growing season. Stuff grows year round. Lots of markets with fresh fruits and veggies so lots of stuff is "local". The supply chain is short.
You go to even a random food stall and it can be just a few steps removed from true "farm to table".
The US is huge (logistical challenges that favor large scale, industrial food handling for economics) and many parts have short growing seasons.
In the US, the schools have Sysco and ConAgra trucks rolling up loading pallets of prepared foods. Depending on where you are, the food prep workers are contracted out to some third party private company. In my children's school -- in a fairly affluent area -- I'd guess that almost all of the food is prepared and heated from a bag.
Deciding that we need to serve food at a minimum of cost with a minimum of staff who is minimally trained according to a minimalistic nutritional guidelines, and charge children for the privilege of choosing to eat, and you aren't getting a feast full of fresh produce.
Japan is a decent model in making meals more communal and spreading the labor requirements around to students so that staff can focus on back of house work, but it starts with a higher budget basis to start with, makes meals mandatory, and provides significant subsidies.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with nuggets. Nobody criticizes Italian meatballs, which are ground-up beef in balls. But then for some reason ground-up chicken in a different shape isn't "real chicken"?!
https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/chicken-mcnuggets...
I'm sure there are many traditional Italian meatball recipes, but as one example, I had an AI convert the US measurements from Chef John's recipe, and it estimated 900g meat and 494g other ingredients, so 65% meat.
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/220854/chef-johns-italian-...
Of course the ingredients differ in a lot of other ways than just the percentage of meat. That's just what I looked at.
Honestly, ground meat is ground meat. What makes you think ground chicken is "quite different"? Why are you putting it in scare quotes? The chicken breasts used to make McNuggets are literally no different from the standard chicken breasts sold at your average grocery store.
And in both cases the ground meat/chicken is mixed with binders and flavorings to keep it together and keep it moist and make it even tastier -- variously including flour, breadcrumbs, water, salt, spices, etc. depending on the recipe.
Obviously nuggets are battered and fried. But then so are traditional Italian delicacies like arancini.
Yes.
> Honestly, ground meat is ground meat. What makes you think ground chicken is "quite different"?
Because when people who don't sell chicken nuggets have looked closely, they have found that to be the case.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/11/232106472/wh...
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00396-3/fulltex...
> And in both cases the ground meat/chicken is mixed with binders and flavorings to keep it together and keep it moist and make it even tastier -- variously including flour, breadcrumbs, water, salt, spices, etc. depending on the recipe.
Sure, or textured soy protein concentrate[0] to fill out the meat or soy lecithin [1] to emulsify the unholy mixture
0 https://www.tysonfoodservice.com/products/tyson/chicken/nugg...
1 - https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Fully-Cooked-Chicken-...
a chicken nugget is not the same thing as whole chicken, because it has many chemicals, additives, flavouring agents, msg, organ meat, etc and is then battered or crumbed and deep fried before being packed. It also has a different texture altogether, and is eaten with the hands which children find easier than using cutlery.
compare a child tasting two different varieties of dark chocolate in comparison to a milk chocolate with caramel filling, or two varieties of whole milk to chocolate skim milk, et cetera.
What I wanted to convey is just because kids have a preference for something doesn’t mean it is better. So more a flaw in the syllogism.
It will depend on whether the whole chicken is chicken proper, or one reassembled from nuggets.
You're trying to propagate an urban legend. HN is not the place for that.
In the United States, mechanically separated poultry has been used in poultry products since 1969, after the National Academy of Sciences found it safe.
Yes they can include mechanically separated chicken, which is basically a fancy name for saying they scraped all the meat off the bones. But that isn't "mostly skin and cartilage", it's meat. There may be trace amounts of cartilage and small amounts of skin in it, but they are nowhere near the main components.
If you're still not sure, just look at the protein content of chicken nuggets. The quantity of protein can only come from actual chicken muscle. Skin has little protein and cartilage has virtually none.
There are a lot of urban legends out there about what chicken nuggets are made of. But they're precisely that -- urban legends. They're false.
Seriously, do you think researchers are wrong on this?
Meanwhile, other studies show that inclusion of 40% mechanically separated meat does not change the appearance, taste or desirability of chicken nuggets. Do you really think the majority of producers are not going to turn that waste stream into more product and profit?
It doesn't matter though, I still prefer my friend's eggs to store-bought ones, I'd rather not support that dirty industry.
That said, this applies to scrambled or fried eggs.
Omelettes not so much, as seasoning might play quite a big part, and even less with cakes, baked goods, etc. in which eggs are just one more ingredient.
While there are some taste differences in egg yolks, the taste difference in meat, between chicken that ate mostly what they had found themselves in a large area with abundant vegetation, insects and worms, and chicken that had been raised in industrial complexes, is huge.
Multiple groups have done tests on this. Kenji did a somewhat informal test, where he dyed the eggs so you couldn't discern the farm egg. The Japanese have done expert panel chicken feed tests. It's interesting stuff!
I think people want this "farm egg" thing to be true more than it really is true. People got mad at me on Twitter when I griped about those Vital Farms eggs (don't buy those eggs! they cost more than 2x as much as commodity organic eggs!).
It's not that much more expensive if you were to compare with store-bought eggs that actually match the quality.
In the warmer months, they also supplement their food from the yard when they eat a lot of grasses and fruits
As someone who lives in a country where tipping culture doesn't extend to bars, I was imagining something quite different at first
I agree that you won't make money or a profit. The coop money you will probably never earn back, but I can cover the cost of a sack of feed (£12 or so) by selling boxes to colleagues for £1 each.
I think the eggs taste better because a) what the hens eat and b) because they are much fresher.
I've had to kill chickens (and hate doing it), which is sad, but I've never taken one to a vet. It makes no sense to get a £80 vet bill on a chicken that cost £20.
We've brought chickens inside the house when they're ill (we have tiled floors) but don't do it on a regular basis. If chickens weren't incontinent, though, they would make great indoor pets. Surprisingly smart and pleasant animals. This will also sound weird but if you pick one up, they also smell nice - kind of like a new puppy smell.
[0] https://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/maintain-the-garden/ke...
It was bad enough keeping them undercover for one winter.
This logic is confusing. You are taking a purely transactional view when it comes to the chicken’s health, but you also admitted they don’t turn a profit. In that vein, it makes no sense to get the £20 chicken in the first place.
Your utilitarian view is also the opposite of what the person you’re replying to is describing. Do you believe that if one gets a pet cat or dog for free from the street and they get sick, “it makes no sense to get an £X vet bill on a pet which was free”? And if not, what’s the difference? Neither is making you money.
I would also be very surprised if any vets ever managed to treat a hen successfully. They tend to hide any illness until very sick.
I know for a fact it is possible. I am acquainted with veterinaries and have kept chickens temporarily while they were recuperating.
> They tend to hide any illness until very sick.
Indeed. So do rabbits and other “exotic” pets. It does make treatment harder, but experienced people tend to develop a sense to notice it sooner. You yourself have probably already developed that skill to some extent and might be able to identify “strange” behaviour is specific individual chickens.
That might be hard to do with a flock of 20. If they were pets the calculation might be different.
And yes, there’s a bit of the mix of pets and livestock. We only have five hens, and they all have names. If you’re naming your animal, is it a pet?
First was one taken by a fox. My wife chased the fox and he dropped the chicken (she was too heavy for him). She had a broken leg and a broken wing. Both perfectly treatable and she went on to make a full recovery, resumed laying. As result of her closer contact with people during her recuperation she became very tame and socialized with visitors on the deck in the evening. Arguable she became a pet after her vet treatment.
Second was one with an eye infection (eyelids swollen so she couldn't see). She also made a full recovery.
I don't take every sick chicken to the vet, but if you've kept chickens for long enough you get an idea when it's likely to be mworthwhile (it's never financially worthwhilte). What's worthwhile will vary according to what you can afford and how you relate to your flock generally, the age and health of the hen and likelihood of recovery.
She somehow got one of her talons very loose and it ripped off, naturally becoming infected. The treatment was antibiotics and later full amputation of the toe in question + chicken house rest. She's still living happily, but would've died without treatment. Overall, it was a surprisingly cheap treatment ($130CAD?)
Never considered the ROI, but I built a big walk-in coop for maybe $200 in materials. Think that'd pay off with the current price of eggs, if we sold them.
They good at deterring delivery drivers though, and generally alerting people.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. By analogy, it makes no sense to have my cat go to the vet either (and pay thousands of dollars for a ~$50 cat lol), but they still go. I guess it's all about personal choice and perspective. It does feel a bit silly in a way though
> but if you pick one up, they also smell nice
Agreed, a clean chicken can smell really good!
> If chickens weren't incontinent, though, they would make great indoor pets
That's the big thing! On Japanese twitter, chicken diapers are a popular item!
And I haven't seen it discussed much, which tells a lot that the HN-ers are city dwellers with little experience in the countryside life. But the biggest, nastiest, deepest problem with anything animal is ... shit.
Animals produce shit and lots of animals produce loads of shit. And chickens don't have the notion of "this area is for eating, this one's for shitting", they will shit all over the place. So if you don't enclose them and can run to your porch, they'll shit it up so gotta be careful where you step or sit on. If you enclose them, better be prepared to wipe shit of your boots coze no way you can avoid it forever. Then the "pleasant" activity of cleaning up loads of shit from the chicken coop and dispose it somewhere.
Overall, having lived on a farm, my childhood memories of interaction with animals resume to "lots and lots of shit everywhere" :)
Yes. I volunteered at a Raptor conservancy. Fantastic animals and being trusted to help fly them in a display was one of the best things I've ever done. It made up for all of the poop cleaning. At least owls have the courtesy to cough up pellets containing the little bones of their prey - it reduces the poop volume and the pellets dry into hard nuggets that easy to pick up (and fun to pull apart later). Black Kites were okay-ish - most of their poop ended up on easily cleanable wall sheets behind their (outward facing) perches. But vultures. yeech. They are fascinating from a social perspective and some were very playful - pulling on your bootlaces until they were knotted, for example, but their poop is gross and voluminous. They also can use defensive projectile vomiting if they feel threatened, which is as (un)pleasant as it sounds.
But overall, great animals to be around.
As soon as somebody showed me this as a kid, I would constantly be looking in pine groves for pellets. There was something fascinating about pulling them apart and finding the little mouse bones. Whenever I have a chance now, I point it out to kids. Some of them are fascinated like I was, some of them can't understand why I showed them something dirty and boring <shrug>.
At the Raptor place, we used owl pellets as part of kid-focussed activities. We'd give them a couple of pellets, a pair of tweezers and a chart of bone outlines, and say "see what animals you can identify". Tiny little jawbones were always popular.
I hated chickens, the only animal I may have disliked more were sheep and that’s only because sheep are so unbelievably annoying.
Chickens to me were nothing more than noisy garbage disposals.
It's large compared to the average, but the longer we've had chickens the more we're convinced they thrive better when given appropriate space (anecdata about average age of our chickens vs all other people with chickens we know), leading me to think something like yours is still too small even for 2 chickens.
For us the minimum is now such that there's at least some of the gras/moss left throughout the year instead of the puddle of mud we used to get. Plus I'm not gonne lie: seeing their (and their ancestors) behavior 'in the wild' it feels morally/ethically better as well. Especially the younger ones are keen explorers: easy to see when let ranging free - they'll go in a radius of like 100m around their nest, but not much further than that. Apart from that one mandatory weirdo obviously.
For the second coop, we bought a pre-built shed that's about 8'x12' (much taller and roomier than the first), and even that is starting to feel too small for 13 chickens with all their various items. They have a much larger run now, but even that still feels like it might not be enough for them!
Does this also take into account the current price of eggs in the same product category? i.e., organic, free-range eggs?
For current Erewhon prices, 8 eggs a day is $11.30 in free eggs a day, so $339 in eggs a month?
https://erewhon.com/subcategory/33022/eggs - $16.99 a dozen
Still absolutely worthwhile for my mentally though and one of my major life goals
These numbers are absurd. You need a wooden box and some chicken wire, and chicks cost less than $1/bird. I don't understand why this always comes up on HN, where people are spending thousands of dollars on chickens. It's the simplest animal you can possibly own and they should pay for themselves almost immediately.
The cheapest way to build a chicken coop is to go to the local rubbish tip, or tip shop if the top doesn't let you fossick. Be a little imaginative with your design. For example, you can build them out of PVC water pipes. They are light, don't rot, wire can be pop riveted to them, and they are very easy to glue.
I also turned a 80 litre rubbish bin into a chicken feeder. Getting the design reliable was a few of weekends work of trail and error. However once done my time was paid back over and over again. A rubbish bin can hold an entire 30kg bad of food. It takes my chickens 3 months to go through a bag, so the reduces feeding to once per month. (We also gave then table scraps, which is a daily chore.) I also built a automatic water station out of an old office bin and a toilet inlet valve. The net result of all that is the chickens can got for months without you touching them, which is far longer than any family holiday.
Like some others here, I don't quite get the cost aspect. A carton of 12 eggs in about $6 here, and 3 chickens produce about 2 cartons a week. The food costs about $10/month. If you have a yard, food costs can be reduced by about 1/2 allowing them out during the day. Allowing them to graze can automated too - you just need a 12v electric car window opener connected to a battery, solar cell and timer. Again, if you get these things second hand they will cost you less than the $60 of food they save in a year.
All that said, yes it will take a few years to repay the costs, and even if you automate to the degree I did taking the table scraps out to them and getting the eggs remains a daily chore. To me the engineering project of "how can I automate this at least cost" was as interesting as the chickens themselves.
If you're building a chicken coop out of materials you didn't find lying around on the ground, you're doing it wrong.
Traditionally it's done by decapitation. Head dies instantly. No need to suffer. Body runs for a while. Don't forget to ask for forgiveness...
It does require a bit of technique though, and the consequences of not doing it right at first can be very upsetting.
And thank them for their help and for providing you with food.
I've had mine for about 6 months now and they've totally won me over...
They're far more friendly and intelligent than ever I imagined. Mine love hanging out with me in the garden. One of them is very affectionate and will sometimes decide to sit on my shoulder and is happy to be held. They're all totally different and have very unique personalities which I didn't expect. Their personality will depends a lot on the breed of chicken you get too and some are much more tame than others so it's worth thinking about the type of chicken you want.
I've trained mine to come to me when I whistle which can be super useful when I need to get them back in the run. Obviously you can't train them like dogs, but they're surprisingly smart and will learn things.
They've very curious animals. Mine like to fly up onto my window sill to watch us in the kitchen which is quite sweet.
They'll eat pretty much anything so they're very cheap to keep once you have your coop built. I have 3 (getting a 4th soon) and it's costing us about £3 per month for their feed which makes up about half of their diet, and for that they'll give us about 60-90 eggs. I wouldn't get them for the price of eggs though. If you want to give them a good home it's going to cost you. They're also quite a lot of work. I need to clean mine weekly, feed them daily and provide them general care. Buying an automatic coop door is a good way to reduce some of the hassle of having to let them out and shut them in every day.
I don't eat mammal meat, but I do eat chicken and fish and its been hard for me to eat chicken recently. I'm trying to reduce the amount of chicken I eat in favour of eggs.
Chickens are ruthless and will not hesitate for a moment to kill and then cannibalize their coop mates. The best way to avoid it is to have a single breed as they tend to start by attacking anything different, literally spots or discolorations, on other birds.
Yes, chickens will eat other chickens.
> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them.
All eggs taste the same. Which is great because eggs taste great.
> Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
Chickens are filthy animals and the thought of having one indoors is disgusting.
It’s one of the reasons factory farms clip the beaks.
And regarding egg taste, have fun reading this: https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-the-best-eggs
Send me as many papers as you want, but respectfully, I have empirically tasted the difference. I have no interest on imposing my opinion on anyone, but to me it's pretty obvious and easy to understand and accept that a better fed, better cared for chicken will produce better eggs.
A bit like with Wagyu steak, no?
There have been many studies on this and in true blind tests people do not prefer one over the other. The Kenji tests are interesting as he even dyes the eggs green to prevent the color from giving it away.
> Send me as many papers as you want, but respectfully, I have empirically tasted the difference.
You think it tastes better because you know the provenance of the egg. It's like a placebo effect. Try your own blind study and see if you can actually tell the difference.
> I have no interest on imposing my opinion on anyone, but to me it's pretty obvious and easy to understand and accept that a better fed, better cared for chicken will produce better eggs.
There's plenty of non-taste reasons that they're better. You might care about the welfare of the animal. And the vitamins or balance of fatty acids might be different. But they all taste the same.
> A bit like with Wagyu steak, no?
A Wagyu would be significantly more marbled than your off the shelf USDA Choice steak. So of course it would taste different. The balance of protein v.s. fats and distribution throughout the meat would be completely different.
They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multiple days, we had to literally keep her warm between our hands.
Now she is a grown up chicken and she loves it when I go outside.
Also they are in fact pretty intelligent animals, and they are really curious about what happens around them.
I’d ever go as far as saying that they could be the perfect household pets if only the evolution gave them sphincters.
That was a nice personal discovery.
Strongly disagree with this part of your statement. The scale of suffering from industrial animal processing far exceeds anything from past centuries. The one-on-one cruelty of past centuries exists today as well (there are plenty of hidden camera videos to that effect), but what's really different is that now we treat animals as if they are mere inputs to industrial processes, as if they have no feelings or emotions or capacity for suffering.
In past centuries, chickens roamed free, sheep and cattle grazed on fields, etc. It was an idyllic experience compared to today's factory farm hellscape.
There's not really any human analogue to industrial meat factories, except maybe like Nazi concentration camps, or ... I mean really only that, right? Maybe something Genghis Khan did might occupy that same space.
Like Eazy-E famously said, it's not how you die, it's how the moments from your birth, all the way through to the end of your life in this world, add up. Do you get a positive number?
Chicken/horse born on a ranch? Yeah.
Chicken/horse/cow born in a concrete meat factory? I mean, I don't think so...
Not to mention the meat of such animals tastes much worse.
Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.
What will they think of next man versus self? What if the thing that man creates in his hubris isn’t actually better?
We are the ultimate result of 4 billion years of evolution. Nature has made itself redundant in some ways.
Actually, transcend is the wrong word we are still a part of nature of course but we can literally leave the planet and have the ability to irradiate this globe to erase most macroscopic life.
We are an outside context problem as an Iain Banks Ship Mind would say.
It’s a huge responsibility and opportunity that we will almost certainly squander.
Our culture and foresight has brought us into such misalignment that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric drugs, you have a lot of homeless, a drug epidemic, there's a general crisis of meaning, males have given up on finding partners, women are all competing for a few men or think they're all animals and stay away from them. To be able to eat quality food costs a lot and few people have the time or energy to cook anyway because city life is so stressful to most.
We are living in a profoundly sick society and economy all over the world. WW3 is knocking on the door, one wrong move and we fuck up the only ecosystem we have in the galaxy.
I'd bet if people were given the choice between living in a small fishing village from 2000 years ago and modern lower middle class the choice would be obvious.
So to say we have mastered nature and we know better requires a lot of hubris.
These are not the same thing. You're interpreting "uncaring" as inherently cruel, but it's not; just uncaring.
Whether or not it is moral or ethical to eat animals is an arbitrary decision made by emotional beings. There is no right or wrong there, only what people feel.
Someone who is vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons is making a choice, not living some sort of universal truth. Someone who eats meat is also making a choice.
Someone who eats meat but criticizes others for eating the "wrong" kind of meat is a hypocrite.
Certainly the way we farm animals for food can be sustainable or unsustainable. I wish people would focus more on that aspect than pointing fingers and making it a moral issue.
You're defining the word cruel to narrowly. Per Merriam-Webster "causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain" and Cambridge "(of an event) causing suffering". Natural forces can be cruel. So can fate and life.
- a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]”
- and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process.
Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).
(I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)
I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom.
Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa.
At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence)
Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization.
I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.
Having actually slaughtered and butchered chickens I raised, I'd rather raise my own. I know the chickens I raised had a better life and death than factory farmed chickens.
If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.
Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906.
The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket.
I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.
Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.
Neither is using fire to cook food.
Your point? (Or are you recommending a raw food diet?)
There's even a small amount of vegans that consider lab meat to be something immoral (how they loop their head around that one, I do not know).
I'm currently dating a girl that's vegan and is super chill about it, but when I was 16 I dated a vegan girl also. My mother made two separate dishes for her, one specifically with esoteric stuff she would like (Christmas being special and all that). Then my mother made the mistake of quickly flipping some burning food with some meat in it, then using the same spatula to muddle the vegan dish. That girlfriend immediately said she would not eat that dish.
I nearly decided to break up with her at that moment.
I'm never quite sure it it's anecdata, but it always feels like there are much more obnoxiously stringent vegans than there are obnoxious meat eaters.
On the other hand, I've seen firsthand how vegans have to consistently defend their lifestyle choice, because by making that choice they reveal the "default" was never really that. Same with those who chose to be sober.
As I grow up I am beginning to realize just how many "bad personalities" and "horrible life choices" are really just driven by a poor environment - and that speaks more of our society and governance than the individuals.
If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.
I've never met any other kind of vegan person. If they were concerned only about the living conditions of the animals, then they would eat free-range ethically-raised meat. They don't. Even if it's really free-range and not what the government allows to be called "free-range."
And on top of that it does make a statement about one's values. Even if someone was ok with doing all that homework, they might want to give up meat as a form of protest against all the factory animal farming out there.
IMO everyone should read it, regardless of your stance on eating animals.
But definitionally a vegetarian is someone who abstain from eating meat period, regardless of the source. Someone can avoid eating unethically sourced meat but still eat ethically sourced meat and thus definitionally not be a vegetarian. So it's fair to assume that ethical vegetarians (those who practice it for ethical reasons) believe that all meat consumption is unethical. Otherwise they wouldn't be vegetarians.
I acknowledge there is probably a caveat of people who practice vegetarianism because they don't believe they can find ethically sourced meat and thus forgo meat consumption entirely. I find that strange though as cage free meat is pretty widely sold, at least in the USA per my experience.
Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself.
Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k
Millions of Indian people have been vegetarian for hundreds (if not thousands) of years now. I guess there are manufactured meat replacements now, but I prefer to just eat things like legumes over factory made vegan food.
Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.
"Between 1960 and 2000, the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food fell from 17.0 percent to 9.9 percent." [1]
I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
You are correct that it used to be even higher. The US BLS estimates around 40% of DPI was spent on food at the turn of the century (1901). [1]
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....
A classic case of mixing up correlation with causation?
As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.
Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.
Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots?
Chicken -> poultry
Cow -> beef
Pig -> pork
That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.
Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good.
Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.
I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.)
One mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours.
So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood.
I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)
Livestock guard dogs work better, but then you're dealing with a large dog that isn't a pet and isn't socialized like a house dog.
Not really, because you want to dog to be bonded to the livestock, not the humans. The dog lives outside amongst the other farm animals. They tend to be more territorial and protective than pet dogs. All that said, I've seen them used more with sheep than poultry.
We've given up and are switching to bantams in an enclosed run.
...that roosters are total assholes.
There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.
It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.
If people realise they are still comfortable eating intelligent emotional animals like chickens, the dogs and cats of this world should watch their backs!
That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
Whatever they taste like is very very secondary to that.
I am absolutely not advocating that we start eating pets. I would feel terrible about it too. And if I have an option, besides starving to death, I would take it.
The other reason why predators have become pets is because they had a strong additive value in terms of hunting or protection. Dogs in term protection, and hunting and cats in terms of pest control. Groups with these kind of pets tended to fair better.
Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.
Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.
Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?
I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.)
My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.
Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.
A mean rooster has a surprisingly high terror-to-size ratio, and can easily draw blood with its spurs. And they carry grudges, and they’ll stalk you.
I learned from that, and other experience of hand-to-hand combat with birds, wildcrafting eggs [1], and such, to "never let a bird see your back". I like it how those little red-wing blackbirds like to sit on POSTED: NO TRESSPASSING signs because that is their attitude. They'll dive bomb you but also flap really hard up high at the sky to nip at the wings of hawks who are lazily cruising. You might not even notice they have a nest to protect if they weren't getting in your face about it.
[1] at least seven years ago, I think...
They can't figure out obstacles very well if they can see where they want to go, but are impeded. They just pace back and forth, frustrated, instead of walking around the obstacle.
They are very social, recognize people, and can be trained in some limited ways (eg. to return to the coop with whistles, if you associate it with treats).
A upside that was not mention is that chickens are excellent in cutting grass and keeping weed out of bushes, especially roses bushes. They generally don't eat fruits on bushes like raspberries, but our strawberries was not safe so we used a gardening net over those (also keeps other birds out). Smaller plants/seed may also need a net until they grown in size large enough that the chickens are not interested anymore.
A major big upside we also got is that they hunt down slugs and other insects that otherwise can cause major damage to a garden or lawn. Even ant colonies, which can often be a pain to remove and a major annoyance if they invade your home.
On the downside, chicken hierarchy is a very real thing and they can get into quite bloody fights with each other.
We've had other times where one might appear a bit sluggish, but then the next day are back to normal. Probably ate something bad?
uh, speaking hypothetically and not at all of our own family chicken adventure when I was a kid/teen.
Also, if you have to kill a chicken, study how to do it and practice beforehand. Botching it will also live with you - I learned this one the hard way.
All that said, I'm glad I had the experience of (helping) raise chickens. It was an adventure, and the eggs were great. I've pondered it on and off again as an adult but have thus far resisted the temptation.
Good: Fresh unwashed eggs don't need to be refrigerated. They are perfectly safe at room temperature on the shelf for days.
Bad: You can't leave them with other pets without supervision. One of the dogs got himself a taste for chicken and already ate at least three. You can't train this out of the dog, unfortunately. I had to put down one poor chicken that was deeply injured but still alive. We constantly stay vigilant to keep the dogs and chickens separate.
Speaking from experience, I can say "Yes, you absolutely can train this out of a dog." However, it is not easy and it is only marginally more easy if you start at a young age of the dog. Furthermore, there are breeds that have no interest in chickens at all, anyway. LGD may actually even protect them.
My GR goes into livestock guardian mode whenever the rabbits are free roaming in the garden (even though he's a bit scared of them ever since one bit him on the nose), but some dogs, terriers especially, will just instinctively chase and kill a rabbit.
I assume it's fairly similar with chickens.
Personally, I find them rather savory. Although deep fried with a bit of honey is good too.
Or you might find them delicious and need to raise more of them.
Before the industrial revolution, 80% of us worked the land, most familiar with animal agriculture.
Anyways, one buck and 2-3 doe rabbits can give you something like 300+ pounds of meat per year. Close to a pound a day would be sufficient for most people. Of course you aren't going to eat only one thing, so you will have other sources of meat for variety
see https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/how-chickens-tripled...
Are you trying to power your whole house during a power outage, or just a few necessities like a space heater, a few lamps, and maybe a hotplate?
Isn't the more likely case that they shit everywhere but the family loves them so much they won't let you put it back outside?
They did tests on chickens, and apparently they understand the concept of showing restraint on a current action, with the view on having a larger reward later.
Something along the lines of: "If you don't eat these grains now, we'll reward you with twice as many grains later".
That's something that dogs can't do, for instance.
This one is something I think people maybe don't consider. My brother has chickens, they have a coop but pretty much have the run of his property in a rural area. He has had to kill a coyote and a bob cat so far. Not a reason not to get them, but something to consider before doing so.
Housespiders and cacti might be easier.
You need to use quail proof feeders, tho, or you're going to spend a fortune on kitchen scraps or whatever you intend to feed them. They eat just about anything peckable except oats (if you didn't end up with picky ones). Cookef rice, seeds, peas, boiled eggs, sometimes nibbling on each other (-.-), or dirt cheap quail feed. Also mealworms ... its catnip for quails.
> You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation.
I recommend cutting the head off with a pair of high quality, large and well maintained scissors.
Put a bucket in front of you, put the scissors from behind on the neck, just below the head, and cut in a single strong motion.
The lil birdy will not understand what is happening and wont feel uncomfortable during the process. Its head then looses consciousness in sbout 15 seconds, compared to about 30 seconds for the cervical dislocation method. (It'll loose the ability to feel pain MUCH faster than 15s, but I dont think we know how quickly. But probably faster than it'll realize that there's pain in the first place. You've probably cut yourself before and noticed that the pain only kicks in after a moment.)
It is also way easier to not screw up. Just remember to ALWAYS cut the head off completely, as fast as possible. Lil birdie wont die from bloodloss, but sudden loss of spinal fluid, which is WAY faster.
The cervical dislocation method is also very effective, but also much easier to screw up, a bit more uncomfortable for the birdy and could introduce quite some anxiety for the birdy if you hesitate for even but a moment.
On the other hand the cute little critters dont understand how scissors work or what they're for. Even if the method is much less pretty, it's by far the most peaceful method for the birdy.
One other advantage is that they will absolutely hoover up the ticks out of a yard. I’ve tried to talk my various friends who move upstate into getting some for this reason… but yeah it’s a couple grand up front and a new hobby.
In my case, we had too many roosters and their competitive/protective behaviour was causing serious injuries to the hens, so we had to make the tough decision to reduce their numbers. Being in the middle of nowhere, there weren't many options for the rooster in question, so it seemed like the most humane thing to do at the time.
This made me smile very wide, thank you for sharing :-)
Can confirm. My dad's cousin is a little bit country and has had meat and egg chickens for years. She comes to visit sometimes, and always brings eggs. Store-bought quite literally pales in comparison, which is to say that the dandelion yellow yolks of store bought eggs have nothing on the rich, flavorful orange-as-a-child's-drawing-of-the-sun yolks from her eggs.
I eat fresh laid eggs very rarely (though have been thinking of raising my own), but can confirm that every time I've had truly fresh chicken eggs the taste is notably superior.
With some distance it’s quite amusing, but it’s claimed a large part of his life, being the obstinate bugger he is.
You can't tunnel in pea gravel.
Whenever someone mentions how unique you can be with language and come up with amazing unique sentences never uttered by anyone before...I shall think of this
I wouldn't leave them in a small coupe without a run for that long.
I didn't notice a significant difference in taste either. Eggs taste like eggs, it is one of the foods where there is the fewest difference between home grown and store bought, and also between different grades of store bought. And if there is any difference, I think that freshness is more significant.
One big difference, though it doesn't matter much when you eat it is the shell. Good quality eggs, including those from backyard chicken tend to have a stronger shell that breaks cleanly.
Maybe if you give your chicken specific food, your eggs can have a specific taste. How you feed them can affect the color of the yolk, which can matter for presentation, but it doesn't tell much else.
You don't have to eat your chickens, it’s up to you.
predators and rats and avian flu are the tough problems.
how hard would it be to break even with 200 chickens in a typical European town (excluding land costs)? i am just imagining if a small company decides to raise its own chickens-eggs for lunch time...
I visited a farm as a kid and we had fresh chicken for dinner one day. They had one of those orange road cones with the top cut off a bit to fit the chicken in upside down so they could easily chop off its head. They then run around for awhile after that because their nervous system is still working for a minute or so. Just something to interesting to learn as a 5th grader, I guess.
Looking online on reasons to euthanize chickens, it seems to be about not prolonging their suffering when ill.
I don't really know much on farming practices, and I'm not commenting to say that things should be one way or the other. However, I do note that with a human, euthanasia is not a common practice, specially without consent, and one would typically just numb the pain until they pass on their own, i.e. hospice care.
Maybe that's not possible with animals because chickens can't really communicate on the effectiveness of drugs...
Still much better treatment than factory farming.
Saying all of that, I would rather eat eggs from chickens that had a half-decent life than those kept in horrible conditions.
1. Soaring egg prices are due to culling + deaths related to the proliferation of H5N1 (Avian Flu).
2. The reason we have been proactively culling is to minimize spread AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, to minimize the number of exposures H5N1 could have to Humans.
3. The reason we want to minimize exposure between chickens and humans is because each exposure of an infected chicken to a human is an opportunity for the virus to jump host, and adapt to better transmit amongst humans. The mutation (mammalian adaptation of the virus) can happen in the chicken before it jumps to a passing by human, or in the human once infected with the virus.
We are only a few minor adaptations away from this thing being BOTH extremely deadly AND extremely transmissible between humans. Worst case scenario. The latest strands found in Canada and now Nevada are extremely deadly, and just need the Human to Human adaptation. With enough at bats, it will have it.
The idea of dramatically increasing the number of humans exposed to sick flocks by having people start their own backyard chicken coops feels suicidal, for humanity.
The latest hospitalized patient in Georgia was exposed through a backyard flock, by the way.
That being said, I have no faith in the Trump government to do the right things required to stop the spread of this and I feel like we are pretty screwed either ways.
The exception would be a neighborhood/community where a lot of people have backyard chickens. But even then, wouldn't the chance of infection still be low?
Another worrisome attack vector is cats, but that's a whole other pandoras box we'll leave alone for now.
To get an idea of how transmissible/infectious this thing is, it has jumped from birds in Asia, to dolphins in florida, and has eradicated entire populations of seals in latin america, cows, cats, ferrets, rats globally, to almost all bird populations in Antarctica. There is no species / geographic radius that will likely to unaffected. The death rate in each species may vary considerably (cows in US as an example, don't seem to die in great numbers), but it is highly transmissible even between species.
I'm sorry these aren't the best sources, but I'm in a rush and wanted to help you get an idea of what we're dealign with here in the context of your backyard flock, specifically. If you keep digging in all of the themes above you'll find even better sources:
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-02-20/...
https://scar.org/library-data/avian-flu
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/m1218-h5n1-flu.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06173-x
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06173-x
https://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/news/catastrophic-mortality-e...
Aren't we safe? If not, what are the possible vectors? Is it from random birds flying in my yard? My visits to grocery stores?
Edit: link (gift NYT link) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/cdc-bird-flu-cats-...
> Perhaps the biggest and most lasting change, Auewarakul says, is that this outbreak abruptly accelerated the transition from backyard chicken farmers to large-scale industrialized poultry farms. He says this was a big cultural transition since chickens had been part of everyday life for many Thai families. [...]
> The shift to these industrialized farms has not fully eliminated avian flu in chickens, but the disease has been largely contained. With ongoing monitoring, cases are often identified early and dealt with before the virus can gain a foothold.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/06/12/g-s1-...
viral pun
The reason the US has been culling is because they refuse to vaccinate chickens. Even China began vaccinations in 2004 ... over 2 decades ago.
Sarcasm aside, if the US isn't vaccinating our birds, what are the drivers for that? Cost concerns?
Instead the US performs cullings and reimburses the farmers, which has the knock on effect of wiping out all the egg laying hens our own domestic market depends on to protect the broiler export markets.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html?co...
I can believe the export market is much larger than the number of chickens killed so far, but the cost of developing a better test seems likely to be lower, especially given future outbreaks.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/caring/index.html
What is a "150-day fallow"?
3,062 CNY/T -> $422/tonne -> $0.287/dozen @ 24 oz / dozen large eggs [1]
while US eggs are still nonsensically priced at $8.03 / dozen. [2] Like worldwide logistics doesn't even exist. Seems like a market discrepancy when there's several 100 to 1000 cargo ships transiting the Pacific currently that might be loaded with 3,062 CNY/T ($0.29/dozen) eggs.
A thought occurs - perhaps it’s the mega farming that is the root of this problem and having some backyard chickens won’t really move the needle any closer to doom?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to directly compare the development of bacterial antibiotics resistance with the adaptation of viruses to be able to infect other kinds of hosts. Surely these disease vectors follow different developments.
It wouldn't surprise me though if intensive animal farming [3] has the capacity to exacerbate these problems, if only based on the high concentration of animals kept together and the generally poor health of these animals (poorly functioning immune systems, which is the whole reason for the overuse of antibiotics).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock
There is no needle - it only takes one case. While a megafarm may be a bigger vector, it can be quarantined, whereas everyone having backyard farms can not.
A few highlights:
> As a result of the smaller flock, egg production has dropped slightly from 8.1 billion eggs per month in 2021 to 7.75 billion eggs per month in December 2024. Importantly, however, per capita production of eggs in the U.S. has not dipped below per capita consumption of eggs in any year between 2022 and the present. Meanwhile, the total value of egg production has risen significantly, from $8.8 billion in 2021 to $19.4 billion in 2022 and $17.9 billion in 2023.
Note the $17.9B 2023 figure obviously doesn't include the most recent price increases.
> Instead of using the windfall profits they are earning from record egg prices to rebuild or expand their egg-laying flocks, the largest egg producers are using them to buy up smaller rivals and further consolidate market power.
> Almost all shell eggs are marketed through contracts between producer firms and chain buyers where egg prices are based on weekly wholesale quotes published by Urner Barry, an industry consulting and data analytics firm. According to leading industry commentator Simon M. Shane, this convergence "on a single commercial price discovery system constitutes an impediment to a free market," with the benchmark prices released by Urner Barry potentially serving to amplify price swings led by the largest-volume producers and to prevent independent, competitive decision making by others.
Because people can't buy eggs that don't exist.
In the years since, they would export. Egg whites stayed in the US, and egg yolks would go to Europe. American consumers don’t want yolks.
I would also guess that demand is fairly constant for eggs, so large changes in price are needed to deter a small number of consumers from buying (low elasticity of demand).
"rebuilding" a laying flock is a fairly quick change, if the infrastructure is already there.
[1]https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/four-states-join-jus...
[2]https://farmaction.us/2023/10/12/food-price-fixing-is-still-...
The US chicken market (not necessarily eggs specifically) was in the Morgan Spurlock documentary follow up to "Supersize me", and it looked like the chicken "mafia" controlled the business.[3]
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=eggs&inpu... [2] https://groceries.asda.com/search/eggs [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicken!
That’s a euphemism if ever there was one. He was a raging alcoholic, and his alcohol consumption (which he denied entirely) accounted for pretty much all of his negative health effects during the film.
> However other people have partially reproduced the health effects of what he did
But nobody has been able to reproduce it entirely, or even account for the weight gain and ill health effects he experienced based solely on his food consumption. And several people recreated his stunt and were perfectly fine, or even had their health improve. It’s not about what food you eat, it’s about how much and your overall lifestyle.
> and his level of drinking is pretty common in the USA so it's not like he's some crazy outlier.
He was reportedly drinking a fifth of vodka per day. That is excessive by any metric.
Some of these egg companies are absolutely using the bird flu as an excuse to raise prices. Right next to that 18 pack I bought was a shelf full of eggs that cost $9/dozen. No one was buying them. Just a weird situation.
Meanwhile you just go to a Kroger or Walmart down the street, pay nearly the same price, and they always have stock. It was the same thing with toilet paper early in the pandemic; we swing by Costco, utter madhouse, line out the door, everyone has cartfulls of toilet paper. I tell my friend "lets skip this and go try Target" -> Shelves weren't fully stocked, but they had some, no crazy crowds, we're good and the butts are clean.
Costco's prices aren't even that spectacularly great anymore, especially once you factor in the membership, and if you do a little legwork on coupon clipping (which is so easy nowadays with all the apps). E.g. the Kroger near me almost always has meat like 30% off on Fridays because, idk, its nearing the last day they can sell it or something. Stock up for the week then, way cheaper than even Costco.
Typically at Costco, 5 dozen eggs is under $12, sometimes as low as $8. Currently it is closer to $20, which is about your price.
The US has some awful widespread practices for their livestock.
$3.50 for 12 off-brand is available in grocers
Google says today $6.79 CAD is $4.78 USD or ~0.20/egg USD
[1] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-12-piezas/65002...
[2] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-18-piezas/39041...
[3] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-30-piezas/65002...
I have chickens, and the cost including amortization of their real estate puts family eggs at something like $12/dozen.
18 eggs today (February 20th, 2024): $8.19 [0]
18 eggs ~1 year ago (March 2nd, 2024): $3.34 [1]
18 eggs a tiny bit over a year ago (February 2nd, 2024): $2.74 [2]
18 eggs, oldest order I can find (April 9th, 2023): $2.33 [3]
A 2.5x increase in a years time. Just insane
[0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/05JYvxsf
[1] https://cs.joshstrange.com/lVlCFcRs
We only cook for diner as we don't eat breakfast and everyone's out of the house for lunch, so that may be a reason, but still. It seems a very minor and unimportant ingredient.
Eggs are a traditional breakfast/brunch food. Quite a few people have an egg (or two) every single day.
Maybe feed them your food scraps? Or bulk buy and prepare your own grains/pulses?
I'll probably get around to making our own someday, but I'm not there just yet.
I must drive past a dozen (lol) honesty boxes on the way to work offering the sale of eggs and this is my general experience as well.
Its amazing how individuals can produce and sell a product as cheap if not cheaper than mega corps with such staggeringly different quality.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/ne3ivw/i...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Ui4zmqyxY
https://www.fietsnetwerk.nl/en/places/farmers-vending-machin...
https://www.deboeropautomaat.nl
Here's a German company that will sell you your own egg vending machine:
https://vendy1.de/en/blog/egg-vending-machines/?srsltid=AfmB...
I'm sure drive-through egg vending machines would be popular in the US! (And drive-by egg delivery too.)
When we invented cooking it gave us a massive advantage because of the nutritional efficiency, yet we feed animals just random raw stuff. Would feeding them porridge instead of grain lead to higher output?
The chickens love some warm mash on a cold day like today, they'll get some yogurt too.
I was reasonably confident cooking reduced nutrition but reduced food-based disease way more.
But we have to factor in around 4 months of them not laying during the winter. So for laying months, that brings the feed price to around $60/mo or $4.80 a dozen.
So yeah, at current prices, it's worth it for us. I also haven't factored in the value of their compost, which is really quite expensive when you're buying as much as they generate, so it's probably even cheaper than listed.
In many cases you can cycle the compost back in to the feed you grow (as fertilizer).
Around here our eggs are averaging about $9 per 12 on the shelves, and you can't buy just 12, the only eggs on the shelf are the 18/24 packs so about $20-22 per pack, almost the same price as choice meat.
What state are you in, that's crazy pricing. Article says, "Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen—an all time-record." So you are stuck 2x the national average price.
Every so often, you need to do bigger chores, like go buy fees or fix something in your setup. A couple times a year you need to do a deep clean of the coop (throw out all the straw, scrape any poo that's collected on the floor or wherever, put in clean straw). Sometimes a chicken dies, and that's not fun, but it is something you have dispose of properly.
Ultimately, though, it's a hobby. It should be fun or relaxing most of the time or else it's not worth it. Like gardening or running a home server. If you're trying to just save money, maybe you can save a tiny bit in this particular moment, but there are surely better ways to save a few bucks.
I ask because I used to have a good sized garden at my old house, growing enough veggies to both preserve and distribute to neighbors because I grossly underestimated the yield. While it was nice to have the neighbors love me, it was also a lot more work than I had bargained for (especially when otherwise working 40+ hours per week) and it got me thinking about community gardens and whatnot, why those might make more sense these days
I'd still say that if the primary goal is saving money, there are better options to consider. If there are 20 single family homes living the "default" lifestyle of such a home, there are probably more than 20 cars (probably approaching 40). Can this community work out a system of sharing cars (and the costs associated with those cars)? How few cars can this group of people reasonably get by with if they are sharing?
Another option is having one big tool shed where everything inside is shared. Each single family home, by default, would probably own their own lawn mower. But a community of 20 households probably only needs to own one or two.
That said, I think there are other benefits of a big community project like a community chicken coop. It's good for building relationships with other people, it's fun, and the eggs do taste good. You could draw up a simple calendar and decide who is responsible for taking care of the chickens each day if you wanted, and that'd probably make things easy (although, tbh, one or two people will probably need to be "in charge" of the chicken coop, and following up if something falls through the cracks). A community chicken coop also makes it much easier to take a week-long vacation or whatever, because you know that someone will take care of things. When we had a chicken coop (in our single family house, not part of a larger community), finding someone to care for it was kind of a large task before we could actually leave our home for an extended amount of time.
Great, the guy who "cleans" the coop when it's his turn by gently sweeping it for two minutes just swiped all of the eggs again.
I always thought it was silly that everyone in the suburbs owns their own lawn mower, edger, and weed whacker. Why not have a communal shed on every cul-de-sac? ...Until I lended tools out to people and saw how they treated them.
I'd think most of the time you'd need some sort of oversight structure just to manage people.
Since you mentioned the suburbs specifically, I'll also note that, at least imo, that: - the suburbs are designed in such a way as to encourage atomized, isolated living (houses are relatively far a part, you usually need a car to get anywhere, fenced-in yards are the norm, etc). - presumably people are moving out to the suburbs because they find that lifestyle appealing, so there's some self-selection happening such that people in the suburbs are less interested in sharing stuff communally.
So if you were just trying to get 20 households that happen to live closest to you involved, it probably is too big a committment for them.
We have chickens, my father's still looking after them and he's had chooks since his birth in 1935 .. along with at least 10 fruit trees on any property we've had, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, pumpkins, and all the usual stuff that you can sow and that grows pretty well on its own (we've all had other jobs .. but this all stems from either growing acres of grain in some wings of the family or raising cattle in remote parts of Australia far from regular shops).
Point being, chickens do well on picking through big piles of rotting down compost from everything else so feed costs are low, return on having chicken shit turned into soil that can be used for the next garden bed is high, value of having bugs kept in check is saving on sprays, etc.
By all means keep a spreadsheet, I'm fond of them also, but having had chooks for decades we see them more as an integrated component of a bigger picture.
With any luck you can then transition into barely spending an hour at most a day (on most days) keeping things ticking along .. bursts of weeding, pruning, turning soil as needed and letting the plants do the work.
It's good steady exercise keeping on top of a substantial but "small" home garden but it doesn't have to suck up all your time once you get the swing of it.
Oranges, yep - marmalade (castor sugar + other stuff, and jars) OR skin | cut away peel and pulp, save juice and freeze for later in the year; drinking ot adding to cakes, etc.
Lazy cooking == slow cookers once every two weeks or so, make a lot of vegetable stir fry and pacage and freeze, chicken and vegetables ditto. If you use tomato stock | paste for these batch meal preps then always get a standard jar and save those in a jar cupboard for reuse for orange jam, fig jame (also look into glace figs, etc).
Keep that up and you'll be living like a 1930's off grid veteran in no time ;-)
I also have to say how awesome it is when I'm cooking and need a lemon so I walk outside and pick one off the tree. Harvesting and pressing olive oil for the first time in the coming fall will be interesting.
> Keep that up and you'll be living like a 1930's off grid veteran in no time ;-)
The house is old enough and lacking enough modern features that it already feels a bit like 1930s haha
Thanks for the conversation!
They feed them shit and treat them like shit. For most people [that I know] the whole point of doing this at home is to do things differently.
You said your way wasn't saving money.
Then I said you're doing it wrong if you're not saving money.
Then you said you're happy doing it your way (which doesn't save money).
I then questioned whether you're really happy not saving money, because you've obviously done calculations to figure out if you're saving money. If you didn't care, would you really do that?
My comments aren't all for you. We've established that you don't care if you save money or not. My comments are for those who might be looking at raising chickens to save money, and would be discouraged by your failed attempts. As I said, the fact that chickens are raised for profit all over the world disproves your claim (at least, if you don't count your own labor; obviously you can't bill even a couple of hours on a programmer's salary toward raising a handful of chickens and still save money).
Egg prices may be impacted for reasons beyond the scarcity of laying hens due to bird flu. Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy group, has written to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, requesting an investigation into “potential monopolization and anticompetitive coordination” by the egg industry. “While avian flu has been cited as the primary driver of skyrocketing egg prices, its actual impact on production has been minimal,” the group wrote. “Instead, dominant egg producers . . . have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power.
No, it's not. But that's what the egg companies want you to believe. In truth the number of egg laying hens is only down about 5% total since the beginning of the epidemic.
- https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-... - https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2015/06/economic-implicati...
Compare that to the current epidemic in which a 5 percent decrease of egg-laying hens is accompanied by a 600%+ price increase.
160M chickens were found affected so far. More culled.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/data-map-comm...
Most chicken in the USA are raised for meat. There are only 300 millions that are raised for eggs laying so those numbers are staggering.
160M chickens with "more culled" is not correct. 115M of those affected have been culled.
Furthermore it doesn't make sense to talk about absolute numbers culled over the course of years when the rate of replenishment of the egg layers is on a shorter time horizon (chicks grow to egg laying maturity in just a few months, which is why we saw a total recovery from the 2015 avian flu in just eight months). That's why it makes more sense to do a year to year comparison of the size of the egg laying population.
If your theory is that the bird flu has decimated the egg laying hen population and therefore egg production is down a staggering amount, answer the following question and decide whether the number is staggering:
How many eggs were produced in Jan 2021? How many eggs were produced in Jan 2025?
For what it's worth, America also bans vaccinated poultry imports. There were talks by the USDA to relax the ban when it comes to live animals, but I don't know if it passed.
If I maintain my flock of 18 and get decent feed prices ($0.26/lb) my cost per dozen is ~$3.50 in the winter (2-6 eggs a day) and less than a dollar in the summer (8-15 eggs a day). If I free range them feed cost is even lower.
I think everybody that can should have chickens. They need about 1/4 lb of food a day. A family can maintain a small flock on kitchen waste alone.
Yes, egg prices, as a percentage are going up a lot, but as an absolute value? I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46. That isn't, by any measurement, a lot of money more than I would have paid a year ago.
And the eggs haven't been selling out before winter storms -- there haven't been any serious storms that anybody has "prepared" for, just regular snow. There's been absolutely no increase in price for milk or bread or anything else.
This is entirely because of bird flu, it's supply and demand, it's not price gouging.
I don't know why you're trying to convince yourself that the empty shelves at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are due to winter storms, or why you haven't noticed that eggs are $9 at your local bodega. Trader Joe's in Brooklyn even has signs explaining that the empty shelves are because of shortages from suppliers.
Again -- it's bird flu, pure and simple.
Some restaurants are up charging for egg dishes although it's not widespread.
It's not the most back braking price fluctuations but it's one of the most obvious. I think the shortages are a lot more apparent than the prices themselves. And the fact it's fluctuating means it's on your mind even more as you wait out another sad, eggless week.
It’s not just the eggs, all grocery prices have gone up massively post covid. But eggs prices are easier to spot because they are super inflated thanks to bird flu, and are easy to understand as a necessity.
- they're sold everywhere
- they're bought by everyone
- they happen to be exceptionally high at the moment
It makes them an easy poster-child for inflation.
However eggs are high in a) Sat Fat b) Cholesterol.
Sat Fats cause increased LDL, and while dietary Cholesterol for many folks doesn't cause a rise in LDL, for some people who tend to be hyperabsorbers, it does.
So the knee-jerk comment that gets added anytime someone cautions about a high-egg diet isn't very accurate. I very politely suggested testing, and also said that if everything turns out OK then it's fine.
Also, the remarks people make about having “too many” eggs are such that you would think eating a large quantity of eggs would be the equivalent of ingesting arsenic, which is provably false with n=1. You only need 1 counter example to prove a universally quantified statement as false.
There was a historical situation involving tomatoes where people believed that they were inherently poisonous (because of past incidents of lead poisoning due to the tomato acid interacting with the lead in pewter plates). As I heard, one man observed that horses ate raw tomatoes without problems, so he had ate a tomato raw and was not poisoned, proving that they were not poisonous contrary to popular thought.
A more recent such case occurred at CSHL involving mm294 bacteria, where one of the research scientists licked a petrie dish containing mm294 bacteria to demonstrate that they were benign. I had heard the story as an intern at their DNA LC west years later. Some people initially expected him to become ill, but the matter had been accepted as settled in favor of the strain being benign when time passed and he did not. This is presumably why their education branch where I had been an intern used that strain to teach genetics to children (as they presumably believed that the children could not harm themselves by ingesting it should they breach laboratory protocols).
That said, the advice against eggs seems to be a relic of the highly debunked food pyramid, which catered to commercial interests rather than public welfare. I did not believe the health care providers who insisted on following the food pyramid in the 90s and history has shown them to be wrong. I will not believe remarks against eggs when they are contrary to actual empirical evidence. I have history on my side on this.
You don't think a family of 4 can get through a dozen eggs in a single meal?
> I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46.
This is literally your least expensive option and it's over the arbitrary $3-5 range you yourself defined.
You can blow through a dozen eggs in a single day or even in one or two recipes.
Seriously? I pay $12/dozen for organic pasture-raised (cheapest industrial eggs are ~$8) and eat 3-4 dozen a month.
Now you can't buy a dozen of eggs in the stores around here for less than $6.
We go through a lot of eggs. That is a very big increase when you add it up throughout the year.
Interestingly, when my grandparents were really short on money in the 20th century, they resorted to eating only eggs to get by. It remained a healthy diet option for poor people until recently.
https://www.iledefrance.ars.sante.fr/polluants-organiques-pe...
The first step is to dig up a decimeter or two of soil (the more the better) from the area you want to build your chicken run and dispose of it safely which your city government should be able to advise you on. Next you deposit a layer of clay, 4-5 centimeters thick, wet it and compact it so that any weeds or grass growing in the area can’t grow roots down into the contaminated soil, then cover it up with uncontaminated dirt that you truck in (that last bit is usually the expensive part). You can also use cement instead of the clay and you probably want raised borders so the roots can’t grow laterally either.
My city provides mulch for free so I used that as most of the fill, compacted it, then just put cheap dirt over it. The big cost is testing afterwards to make sure it really is PFAS free but my family is paranoid and it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Meanwhile most indicators I've seen imply that PFAS contamination is -in some ways- getting worse, and is not only from historical sources.
Also, earthworms will mix up deeper and more shallow layers of earth and plant roots will extract PFAS from deeper layers and deposit them on or near the surface when the plants leaf matter dies off (in fact I know of several types of plants including hemp being successfully used for this exact purpose).
I'd love to find definitive proof that PFAS can be remediated on a hobby garden scale (in one's own backyard) but I'm skeptical of the success rate and longevity of the endeavor...
https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhhs/Fold...
Also whats with people buying like a dozen chickens? Do you eat an entire dozen eggs every single day? No? Then you don't need a dozen chickens. 2 chickens will often result in people giving away tons of eggs because they have too many. Maybe a few years down the line when they lay a few less eggs you can add another one or two. If you don't eat 90%+ of their eggs, you will once again be losing money.
Also unless they are free roaming over a very large area, you do not want any roosters. Roosters in a small coop and/or yard often get aggressive and they will attack you. Yes you can cow them down if you are quick enough to grab them, sometimes mid-attack, but most people aren't because they don't want to get stabbed with their spurs. Also buying sexed chicks are not a 100% guarantee you won't get a rooster, ive gotten multiple roosters out of sexed chickens and often the only right choice is to kill them because you don't want a bunch of roosters fighting either each other or attacking people.
This would probably create resiliency for egg supply, but given that a source of bird flu is wild birds and transfer to and from humans would increase mutations wouldn't it likely increase probability of more bird flu and more human cases?
(cleaning eggs also removes some of its natural barriers, making it mandatory to refrigerate them to keep them edible)
Source? I buy small-farm eggs all the time. The industrial ones need sanitisation because of the literally shit condition the birds are kept in.
If you wash your eggs before using them, you will never get salmonella.
In thirty years in Europe, I’ve had a single incidence of salmonella infection when I handled egg shells badly while doing a Carbonara (which requires raw eggs to be spread right over the plate). This really, really isn’t a problem if you follow minimal hygiene when cooking (don’t touch food after touching shells without washing your hands in between.
Right?!
Most folks do get upside-down on it, but it’s because they want a cute instagram-ready coop or substitute money for effort. And they aren’t willing to butcher and eat them after a couple years when they stop laying consistently.
Handle your chickens like country folk and you’ll do ok. Handle them like suburbanites, maybe not so much.
My Dad says "a hen always dies in debt"
Do you need a consultant?
Good lord man!
They're for keeping the foxes out, not the chickens in!
If you plan to raise chickens, but also plan to buy a 5k dog, you probably aren’t mentally prepared for raising livestock.
Also, the shelves have been bare with eggs for quite awhile. Locally here we largely only see the large packs being sold. Its been 6 months since I've seen a dozen pack on the shelves.
Its far more than $2, where I live a pack of eggs is competing for a pound of pork or choice beef.
Last Saturday iirc it was 23.99 for 24 eggs, and there were only two packs on the shelf (both with broken eggs).
If we really want food security, we’d each probably need at least a 10 acres of land per person in the household, grow our own vegetables and grains, raise chickens, have our own cows/pigs/goats, and more.
Eggs have until very recently been a cheap source of protein as an inferior good compared others.
The problems in shortage are when the prices of all necessities are being driven up across the board to the point where you can't afford food, where government SNAP programs cannot keep up.
This is the point where it becomes food security, and yes you can go further into bootstrapping your own dependency grid given more resources. At a bare minimum it provides goods you can trade for other goods which is more food security than you had when you were completely dependent on others and the currency retaining a stable store of value.
So you can live without eggs, but when you have no other food, you can't.
If you don’t have any other food except your backyard chickens, chances are you won’t have those backyard chickens for long.
Relatively rural Michigan, my local grocer had a dozen pasture raised for $6 this week. Prior to that, it had been $4 or $4.50 for cage free. Plenty available.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are more on my next visit though.
(Though clipping one wing is more fun, that way they flap about in circles).
It takes a lot of eggs to pay for even a $200 coop + bedding and buying the actual birds.
I don't regret it 4 years in, but don't do it for the economics.
My Coop controller, which is hand build by grumpy bearded East Germans, even has modules to integrate into a smart home system and supports remote monitoring via cellular network.
https://jost-technik.de/PHB2.0-Klappensteller%20+%20Steuerun...
Also chicken are not particularly smart, so switching on light to lure them in when it’s getting dark is very useful.
A couple of months ago, I had to replace the roof on their coop and locked the door so they couldn’t get in and get hurt (they are intensely curious whenever anyone is inside their coop). Construction ran into the evening, and the poor birds were visibly (and audibly) upset about not being able to go inside once it got dark.
They’re smarter than people give them credit.
EDIT: Please read the article, especially the Feb. 19th update note at the beginning of it. Bird flu may not be so bad as it's been portrayed. And if the costs for comparatively tiny chicken farms were low enough, then their economics don't need to look good to Wall St. They're may-be-profitable little hobby farms which help local communities, while putting pressure on the greedy Big Egg oligopoly.
At the scale you're talking about...you have a bird flu susceptible flock. If backyard chickens became really common - like if every second person in a street had them - then bird flu spread would run wild (you'd also vastly increase the number of poultry-human contacts providing a vector for a species jump).
There are ways to offset the feed costs by growing your own feed or tapping into waste streams like food/produce scraps.
I say this while I'm also - on principle - extremely wary of pushing systemic change on individuals.
Who would have thought that not enforcing antitrust regulation will lead to corporations so large that they can just do whatever they want with impunity because there is no meaningful competition any more?
Signs point to yes!
So, how is it possible for the virus to get into a high-tech barn? Simple: the birds still need to breathe, which requires a ventilation system of some kind, which allows an entry point for the virus. Phillip Clauer, a professor emeritus of poultry science at Penn State, explains: “In the Midwest, they are working the fields in the fall, and you’ll see dust coming up from the fields, and the geese will land there to glean the extra corn, and they crap in the field. The dust goes aerosol, and that dust travels a long distance. We had one infected layer house in Pennsylvania, and they could tell you exactly what air vent the virus came in from. And then it spread through the whole flock.”
https://www.nwestiowa.com/news/sibley-makes-chicken-exceptio...
Fuck the city. I still have chickens and will continue to have them.
> Biologically, it takes between 3 and 5 months to grow replacement lawyers, from their hatching to their productive stages.
Impressive growth rate for lawyers. Editors take much longer to grow unfortunately
Please, PLEASE tell us this story!!
They also replenish their numbers when I eat them. Get chickens.
We built this for the family that has always wanted chickens, but doesnt know where to start. We also include 6 chickens with every coop, which I think is hilarious. The plan is to vertically integrate everything from the supply chain (feed, treats, supplements, vet visits, etc) and make it SUPER easy to have a backyard flock. It's been a fascinating and fun company to build - If you want to see some of the stuff we're doing on the tech side feel free to check out www.Coop.Farm - Also one of the things that we track where we think our thesis is playing out is how many people use us that haven't raised chickens before and we're at 71% of our customers are new to backyard ag. Also, we make standalone cameras for existing flocks and other animals and I have been super surprised to see the amount of people using our predator detection and remote health monitoring models for rabbits, goats, pigs, ducks, etc. Super fun company to build.
If you did that, I think your comment would be pretty interesting. As it stands now it leaves the reader feeling deceived and misled when they realize you're doing a sales pitch rather than a friendly conversation.
For EggsteinAI, did y'all build with CV tools like Roboflow? Or completely custom process? Would probably make for a fun read.
Bird flu never stopped our ancestors from keeping chickens outside. In fact if you let them go, they would be feral animals much like stray cats and dogs. They only "need" food and sanitation, due to their feces building up if they are kept in one place.
From my perspective, your point can be regarded as a myth.
But even if it wasn’t mostly a myth: I rather spend a little more effort on balanced nutrition than contributing to the immensely violent system that animal agriculture is.
Also I think for most (dare I say ‘well informed’) people it would be an ethical relieve to stop consuming eggs and other animal products.
And yes: there are (nutritional) concerns around eggs; for example concerning salmonella, cholesterol and saturated fats. Although I should mention science is not unanimous regarding all of those subjects.
But science is clear about one thing: bird flu is not to take lightly.
Personally I am just choosy about where I purchase my animal products. You can visit some farms yourself. Of course if you're of a certain disposition, you won't want to do that anyway.
I think the bulk of the animal industry and farming industry are despicable and cruel. I think they essentially low-grade poison our food in order to squeeze unnatural levels of production out of goods. Without a doubt, they torture animals in order to increase yield and maximize it to the space. This is grotesque and awful in my opinion.
But there are people who are trying to do it a good way. If you believe that any sort of animal husbandry is evil, then go ahead and lump all the farms in together. But if you aren't that extreme, then there is a huge difference between some of the players.
When I read things like "animal agriculture being devastating for the world including the environment", it rings true, and makes me want to dig further, support this any way I can etc. The conflation with the (IMO hella sus) health arguments makes me question the judgment and intent of the writer, and second-guess my initial agreement.
I would find it easier to sympathize with the main purpose, if it was left to stand on its own. Trust is an important concept in human interactions.
*Reading further posts in this thread, I'm going to double down and add my own frustration: I really want to support this cause and perspective, but I hesitate because I consistently get signals that the people who promote it are arguing in bad faith.
Though I think it's more useful to consider what you could replace it with if you did want to do the optimization.
I've been fiber-maxing and ApoB-minimizing for years and my breakfast lately is usually a large bowl oats + mix-ins, a tofu scramble, or a tempeh dish. According to cronometer, they have similar nutrition and calorie profile of six eggs, except they have fiber and other perks.
The downside is that it took quite a bit of motivated behavioral change to end up with new dietary staples having grown up in our egg-heavy culture.
Land use for animal agriculture has shrunk over time in the US. Methane is highest for cows, not that high with chickens. With the right practices (admittedly, they aren't migrating the clocks to fertilize land) this could be carbon-neutral, but notwithstanding, methane does not persist in the atmosphere nearly as long as CO2 does.
The whole thing is just completely silly. The focus should be on the true cost drivers like healthcare, insurance, child care, and housing.
But yeah it doesn't make any sense to care much about it in isolation, unless you run a mousse business or something.
It was not really plausible for Republicans to say they are going to do something about healthcare or insurance (I mean, hopefully that isn’t controversial—it isn’t like they are lying about that, healthcare just isn’t part of their platform). It was a folksy way to complain about the economy under Biden without complaining about capitalism.
Now it is a folksy way for Democrats to complain about the economy, that doesn’t require bringing up the fact that there was some inflation under Biden. And it has some vague healthcare relevance (since bird flu might jump to humans).
The way stuff gets talked about in America now is intense focus on extremely niche stuff. Our legislative branch is not really functional anymore, so we can’t talk seriously about solving big problems. So, let’s put a on our blinders and talk about eggs. The eggs represent our whole system, it is dumb as hell.
For example, a family of 4 might use a dozen eggs a day for breakfast. End of the week that could be 6 dozen eggs. When prices were cheap that’s $15, but now that would be just under $60. Quiet a tough pill to swallow for those on a budget.
This is the chief reason why Canada's egg prices have remained sane while the US has exploded. It's not like we don't have bird flu here and we haven't had culls. We just have smaller flocks.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-u...
Still, backyard chickens are a hobby, for if you like chickens. It will always cost more than an egg farm.
There was some move some years ago here in Ontario to push for a small flock exemption to allow for egg & pooultry sales outside the quota system for flocks under 300 bird. And I don't mean roadside sales, but market sales. So there has been some accommodation for smaller market players.
From what I understand there is no path for the small flock program to get from 300 birds to full up full time. I'm sure 300 birds/year is still hobby farm. Nobody is earning a living on that.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/egg-shortages-bc-grocery-bir...
Presumably the risk of spread of bird flu to humans increases though, due to the increased amount of contact. And then the increased risk of mutation leading to human to human transmission.
Bit wild to me that we don't seem to be taking this very seriously other than "o no my eggs" given we just had a pandemic a few years ago.
I saw this morning that we now have the first cases of rats with H5N1, so... things are going great
Then imagine spreading that misery to all the wild birds you love in your neighbourhood.
I was concerned because of the culling last year (over 130,000,000 fowl culled in 2024, before the election, even! weird!) that it might be hard to get new chicks, but as i was told
> Chickens lay a lot of eggs
in the US farm to table is 60-90 days for eggs, that's why we wash them and refrigerate them. Yard eggs you don't wash, and only keep "cool" like room temp, until you're ready to use them then you wash them with a foodsafe sanitizer (or dawn if you're making boiled eggs) and prepare.
130 million chickens et al killed prior to november of 2024, and 90 days to the home? looks like this will let up around mardi gras.
I wonder who will take credit? because, here's the secret: It's the chickens.
In my estimation, the slaughter of chickens for disposal slowed down during the summer. Any reason why would be speculation i am unwilling to back up at this time.
Wash your hands if you handle livestock, people. and if you're around LOTS and cleaning up their poo, wear a respirator and eye protection. It's got what plants crave, but not humans!
Recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc5pZ-PY-H8
The compromise is mainly having to introduce a new food to your diet and change your habits.
By comparison, if you own a dog, you have to clean that too. And pick up it's excrement every day.
So maybe I could
That sounds.. pretty cheap?
Here (Switzerland), 10 eggs (instead of 12), cost at least 4.20 CHF (almost 5 USD): https://www.coop.ch/de/lebensmittel/milchprodukte-eier/eier/...
These are the lowest quality eggs available.
Regular eggs are around $1 each and it's been like this for at least a decade now.
Are these also codes 0 - 3, similar to the European ones, with different classes of the chickens living conditions?
$2 per dozen eggs is cheaper than in the poorest countries in Europe.
The egg industry in the US is a mess of marketing words that aren’t really regulated. Words like free-range, cage free, “access to the outdoors” often have little impact on the well-being of the chickens.
Yes. This is very common. Most days breakfast is sunny side eggs. Egg drop soup, ramens, and steamed egg dishes also consume a lot.
weekly shopping list is a dozen eggs and 2 roast chickens.
The government comes in and takes over. You don’t get to decide, they kill all your chickens and cut you a check.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbIGEK2q_VA [video][22 mins]
That said, chickens are fun animals, and mine bring me a lot of joy even though I don’t like/eat eggs (the chickens came with my house; I give the eggs away).
Been a loyal customer. I get a good deal on their eggs, honey and pies.
I've been buying local, pasture raised chickens for the last 10 years. I am very fortunate to have had the income to allow me to do so. I also don't eat that many eggs (roughly a dozen a month - so it hasn't been that expensive).
The price of my eggs was always between $8-$12 / dozen (including this weekend when I easily found and bought another 2 dozen). I get that I was buying "already expensive eggs", because apparently other people were buying eggs $2 / dozen.
However, to be frank, I'm not sure how people expect eggs to be so cheap. Taking into account the land, the water, the feed, the labor, the transportation all to create a dozen eggs, it must cost more than $2.
Clearly paying a little more for the eggs has allowed me to support farms which are robust to large shocks like this (both in terms of input costs and in terms of health of chickens). I really hope as a society we can all move away from the unsustainable farms and improve the economics of sustainable farming so that everyone can afford locally grown, healthy eggs for centuries to come.
In the meanwhile, there will be people who have to buy fewer eggs (either because of health regulations - or because reality checks will always exist like with market shocks right now).
Hopefully, after this crisis, through graduated health regulation we can cause a controlled increase to the floor price of unsustainably grown eggs, while also (through technology and economies of scale) reducing the floor price of locally sourced, sustainably grown eggs.
A chicken lays a few hundred eggs per year so they’re very economically productive and you can house hundreds or thousands of them per coop somewhere the land, water, and labor are cheap.
Although we’ve sacrificed animal welfare, sanitation, and quality to get those prices.
Or do they tend to find lots of insects in their own?
I live in an urban area, but I don’t even lock her up. She just wanders about. Sometimes she goes out the front gate, and people knock on my door and ask if I’ve lost a chicken. She always seems to go back to her coop out the back to sleep and lay. Occasionally, she starts laying in some random place. When I notice there are no eggs for a week, I go hunting. When I take the eggs, she seems to go back to laying in the coop.
The biggest issue I have is if I leave the door open and don’t put a little bit of wood that she can’t jump over, she comes into the house. They poop every now and then no matter where they are, so it’s a minor issue but still annoying. She knows the cat food is in the laundry and raids it if she gets in. If I leave the front door open and she can see it from the back, she will rush around the side of the house and run in through the front door.
Alternatively, we could ensure that government policy doesn't do this in the first place.
One of the reasons we are where we are is because many think this started last fall.
Owning your own chickens has a bunch of downsides:
- They get sick / get parasites and may require expensive medication or massive amounts of work.
- They require warmth if you live in a cold place like me, and heating costs money.
- They eat a lot and unless you buy in large quantities, it is expensive. And if you buy in large quantities, you must protect the grain from mold and mice which can be hard.
- They require a lot of maintenance since they are pretty stupid and dirty animals that poop in their own water supply, food etc.
- You will get a lot more mice on your property and possibly, in your house.
- You are worried about bird flu, so you need to cover the coop with a roof. Building a roof is expensive, I spent ~$1300 for materials. That is a lot of eggs.
That said, you can get colorful nice eggs from animals you know have a good life and are healthy. Where I am from, that is largely possible in regular stores however but in some areas of the world I assume animal care is a lot worse.
I think more people should have their own animals, but they do require time and effort, more than most people can spare I would believe. We sold all of them due to this reason. We did not profit from having them, but rather lost both time and money but it is (mostly) a fun experience at least. And our waste was heavily reduced since you can feed them your food even if that is illegal where I live if you want to sell your eggs (you can buy a carrot, put it in your bed and sleep with it a week but if you lay it on a plate where you eat your food, it becomes illegal to give them it if you intend to sell the eggs).
- Uber for eggs. One household in the hood does all the chicken chores and sale eggs very locally to only some small ZIP code. Of course considering cost on a small home scale, eggs would be most likely at 15% price of shelf ones. Also bigger farmer could not just come and order thousands at such low price because the owner would not have capacity.
- diapers for chicks. If you can invent cheap diaper for chickens then 90% of chicks pollution is gone. you still have to deal with food, water, etc, BUT the major turn off will always be amount of excrement they produce.
Considering the price of eggs today, if nothing gets changed and flus will prevail, these are a billion dollar ideas :)
Edit: unless of course someone is doing that already :) I haven't checked.
They build the chicken coop against the house with a very thin wall between it and the living room.
Chickens have 41-42°C body temperature. (105-107°F) With a bit of help from fermenting poop they sit very close together and heat up the coop until it gets to hot. One chicken will go outside and walk around in the snow.
The otherwise isolated living room acts like a buffer, they gradually heat it up and it helps stabilize the coop.
I've never seen this thing in action but the old man said it worked really well. I also have no idea how many chickens were used. It would require a breed that does well in cold climate. Today people put electric heaters in the chicken coop.
If it really works that well, combined with the eggs, it could make it profitable.
Call me ignorsnt, but I'm surprised to see fewer cases of this kind of exploitative capitalism here in the EU. The only similar case that cones to mind is the gas and diesel price hike. Am I missing something or are Americans just more accepting of agressive capitalism like this? Something similar is Healthcare. Insulin for example is dirt cheap to produce but costs the buyer hundreds (iirc) of dollars.
I won’t explain all the points as they’re widely explained around the web and just a search away.
1)Ethics
2)Health
3)Environment
4)Politics
My wife fell seriously in love with keeping chickens and it kind of emotionally broke her. Always tried so hard to do things right, and something has always gone wrong.
I wouldn't advise it, personally, to most people.
Ducks are apparently a bit more resilient though. And duck eggs are great.
yeah some varieties of chicken are remarkably tough around cold which is crazy considering their original tropical origin.
Please please reduce your egg consumption. If you have people who are unhealthy and in need of nutrition, get as many eggs for them as you can. And leave it for them only. But if you are healthy, leave it for others.
Remember, the case fatality rate of Bird Flu is approximately 52%, and this is with modern medical assistance for those requiring hospitalization. Without modern medical assistance (once it collapses), that rate is a third again higher.
And obviously humans.
Most farms in australia with animals now post biohazard warnings, and instructions on how to be on the property (mostly, don't be on the property)
I love backyard chooks, lived next door to them for a decade, had the benefit of chook-poo fertiliser for the garden. This is a terrible time to keep chickens, distributed into the community at large.
This disease is hitting seal populations hard. This disease poses risks to endangered species in captive breeding programmes. This disease will be risky for immunocompromised people, small kids, pregnant women.
As egg prices continue to rise and more cases are detected, state and local health officials say there is no clear plan of action from the administration."
https://thehill.com/homenews/5154415-trump-moves-hamper-bird...
Trump cultists will find a way to excuse this and blame it on DEI/woke/immigrants/Marxists, but those who voted for him because they thought he would bring prices down are in for a rude awakening when they discover they were misled (though I can't feel sorry for them, there were so many signs).
Growing your own food costs time and resources. People are attached to the (copious) amount of leisure time they have today.
No. Trump is the answer (and DOGE!). Once we get rid of all the DEI/woke/Marxists in government, egg prices will fall. Have faith. Praise Trump!