How Do Your Eggs Stack Up?
(Page 2 of 6)
April/May 2007
By Laura Sayre
Madison is not the only U.S. city witnessing a chicken revival. The organic gardeners’ group Seattle Tilth has been organizing chicken classes and coop workshops for almost 20 years; similar movements are underway in Minneapolis and Portland, Ore. As egg prices rise in tandem with concerns about food quality and safety, “pro-poultry people” from San Francisco to Brooklyn are reclaiming their right to raise small flocks within city limits.
RELATED CONTENT
Learn how to make homemade nutrients (fertilizer) for the plants in your hydroponic garden....
You may not be getting enough of some essential nutrients, and the right multivitamin can help make...
THE HEALTHY PLATE: Recipe for chicken and shiitake mushroom lo mein...
With this unique design, anyone can keep a few chickens, even in small back yards....
How to mix your own chicken feed, including buying mixed ration feed in bulk, feed ratios, protein ...
It’s not just an urban movement, either. The Mad City group gets questions from all over the country, Rheal says. More and more citizens are rediscovering what their grandparents knew: Backyard flocks provide flavorful, nutritious eggs and a host of other benefits, from companionship to manure for the compost pile.
Better Flavor and Nutrition
Anyone who’s eaten eggs from hens with access to fresh green pasture knows how different they are from typical supermarket eggs. What you notice first is the color of the yolks: a deep, bright orange-yellow instead of a wan pastel shade. If you take the time to crack a few sample eggs into individual white bowls and compare them side by side, you’ll notice other differences: in pastured eggs, the yolks stand up firm and round and the whites tend to stay intact when you crack them; in conventional eggs, the yolks are often flat, the whites loose and watery.
Those differences of color and texture signal flavor, nutrition and performance benefits. Most people say pastured eggs taste like eggs — meaty and protein-dense, ready to complement other foods such as cheese, herbs and vegetables. In an omelet or frittata, their richly colored yolks also make them look as good as they taste.
Expert bakers swear by pastured eggs’ greater ability to do what eggs are meant to do in recipes, too. Virginia grass farmer Joel Salatin says the pastry chefs he sells to “are our most loyal fans. When they make cakes, they say our eggs will give them 30 percent more lift.” The chefs also report that pastries made from Salatin’s Polyface Farm eggs stay fresh longer.
Common sense will tell you that pastured eggs are healthier than eggs raised in large-scale commercial houses; chickens on a more nutritious diet just produce more nutritious eggs. Scientific evidence is accumulating to back up that theory.
In 1999, Pennsylvania pastured poultry producer Barb Gorski used a grant from the USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program to have meat and eggs from her own birds and those of two other farmers tested for a range of nutritional factors. The pastured eggs were found to contain 10 percent less fat, 34 percent less cholesterol, 40 percent more vitamin A and four times as much omega-3 fatty acids compared to the standard values reported by the USDA for commercial eggs. (Numerous studies suggest that diets high in omega-3s can help protect against heart disease, mitigate the effects of Type II diabetes and otherwise benefit the human body’s immune responses.) The pastured chicken meat (with skin on) contained 21 percent less fat, 30 percent less saturated fat and 50 percent more vitamin A than the USDA standard.
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
Next >>
