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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

The color of an egg yolk is based on what the chicken ate and has no bearing on how idyllic their lives were. There are plenty of pasture raised chickens without the deep orange color because the plant material around them (you can get nearly white colored yolks from a hen that has literally miles of pasture around them).

If there a lot of capsicum peppers around for instance, the yolks will turn almost red.

How firm it is relates directly to how old it is and how it was treated, regardless of how they are raised. You can get an ultra-firm egg yolk from a factory farmed hen. The eggs you get in a supermarket however are typically several weeks old - long enough for the egg yolk to start to lose its firmness.

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I really wish I could find labeling on what the chickens are fed... you really can't get it... I would suspect that Pasture-Raised with supplemental corn feed would be sufficient... I just wish it was part of the labeling.

IMHO it affects the taste and structure of the eggs more than the meat of chickens... I also notice the differences with beef a lot more too in terms of what they were fed. It would be really nice if meat, eggs and dairy could be better labelled as such. Then again, it would be nice to see slow-pasteurized milk make a comeback too.

I agree. The big food companies doesn't like it. So it doesn't happen. My brother in law, who researches the EU food industry told me that there are about 150 purchasing departments in the EU where the majority (I think it was high end, but can't remember the number) of food for 500 million people pass through. That is an awful lot of concentration of power over our food. Not surprising they like obscurity if they make more money that way.

If you look on the egg carton, there should be a 3-digit date code telling you when the eggs were laid. That code is the day number of the year (so 032 would be Feb 1, 182 is July 1, etc). I've gotten in the habit of figuring out which day number it currently is, then at least I know how old the eggs are that I'm getting.

Would the expiration date not proportionally correlate to the date the eggs were laid?

Julian day, FWIW.

The Linux / MacOS 'date' command will give you that:

    date +%j

They make date math easy.

If you want to know a specific date, add the Julian day to Jan 1 for the year:

    date -d "Jan 1 2014 + 358 days"

Well, yeah, but I imagine "what the chicken ate" and "how idyllic their lives were" are pretty closely related. In any case, I've never once found a firm orange yolk in my eggs — supermarket, farmer's market, or otherwise. Joel is probably doing something right here. (Or maybe his eggs are just really fresh, I don't know.)

In the same book, he mentions that they have to keep their chickens inside during the winter, which means no bright orange color to the yolks during those months. Try again when the weather is warm?

Good pasture and good nutrition helps for the firmness. If you want a rich, golden yolk, feed them marigold petals. It doesn't take much to really darken the yolk, and our birds seem to like them.

We get a deep, rich golden color from simply giving them cracked corn. That holds all winter as well, as we supplement heavily with cracked corn to help them stay warm.

Yes. I feed mine extra scratch in winter (cracked corn, wheat and something else I forget) to keep their body temperature up in the cold and it does keep the yolks looking good.

Also chicken scraps make a difference.

I picked up a dozen at the feed store last time I was there and except for the fact that the shells were brown or green, the eggs themselves were just like supermarket eggs in appearance and taste. Typical for being raised on the cheapest feed out there.

Yolk color is a red herring, you can feed chickens in cages many things to affect the color of the yolk, and it has nothing to do with quality of life.

Generally quality of feed correlates to quality of life. Factory farmers aren't going to take the time to make sure a chicken gets greens and reds and yellows in their diet.

Generally. Of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras#Controversy

Just really fresh I think. Backyard chicken eggs from my coworker are like this. I don't know what the big deal about the firmness of the yolk is, but I'm not a pro chef. Tastes like an egg to me. When she gives me eggs, they last a really long time. She says that the way to tell if their old is by how fragile the yolk is. If it breaks going into the pan, then it's bad.

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