Man shocked to discover that eggs are eggs
April 17th, 2008 by admin
Sunday’s Northwest Florida Daily News included a story about a man in DeFuniak Springs who purchased eggs from a small produce stand and was shocked to later discover a partially developed embryo when he sat down to eat (it must have been a slow news day). The paper explained, “When Dearon Carroll boiled three farm-stand eggs for lunch last week, the last thing he expected to find was a chicken.” Carroll said: “I was fixin’ to eat it. . . . I just happened to see it and said, ‘There’s something wrong here.’ I could see its eyes, beak. You could see its feet underneath it.”
It says a lot about our relationship to the animals (and animal products) we eat that we are shocked to find something identifiable- eyes or a beak- in our food. (Mr. Carroll was so disturbed that he filed a complaint with the Florida Department of Agriculture.) It is certainly easier to believe that eggs come from the grocery store, not from a chicken. Perhaps the shocking thing should be not that Mr. Carroll found a fertilized egg, but why it is rare.
In Florida’s egg industry, it is next to impossible for a male and a female chicken to mate and produce fertile eggs, and then for the hen to nest and incubate the eggs. On the industrial-size egg farms where most eggs come from, as many as 100,000 hens may be crammed into a single building, but there is not a male chicken to be found. In the industry’s hatcheries, male chicks are separated from females shortly after birth. Male chicks are of little economic value and they are killed, usually by the cheapest (cruelest) means available. If by chance a male chick was missed at the hatchery, the bare wire cages used in egg farms make it impossible for a hen to build a nest in which to lay her eggs. The cages are so small and crowded that the chickens are unable to even stretch their wings! Even if an egg had been fertilized, the angled cage floors roll eggs onto a conveyor belt, frustrating the hen’s instinct to warm the egg (fertilized eggs must be incubated to form a chick).
Hopefully, last week’s “discovery” will not only remind us that eggs come from chickens, but also cause us to think about the sad lives of chickens in modern egg farms.