A Carton of Eggs: Part 5—Vital Farms Organic Pasture-Raised Eggs

An egg carton: Great for keeping a dozen fragile eggs grouped together and cushioned.  Also, great as a blank canvas that can be filled with written and visual messages.  This is the fifth in a series of articles about all that info printed on an egg carton.

Also in this series:

Part 1 - Hipster Hen Wonder Eggs

Part 2 – ALDI’s Goldhen Farm Fresh Eggs

Part 3 - Wild Harvest Cage Free Large Brown Eggs

Part 4 – Locally Laid Eggs

For my fifth venture into egg carton messaging, I picked up a dozen eggs from Vital Farms at my local Whole Foods.  I first heard about Austin, Texas based Vital Farms when I ran across their very amusing and spot-on ad on the net.  In addition to being really funny, this ad calls “bullsh*t” (their word choice!) on all those eggs labeled “cage free.”  When you buy eggs with “cage-free” stamped on the carton, you probably think you’re doing the right thing.  Cage-free eggs are a huge improvement from eggs that come from hens living in tiny, cramped battery cage torture chambers.  But as Vital Farms points out in its ad, hens laying cage free eggs probably live in one square foot of space in a cramped barn and never get to go outside.  Vital Farms advertises its eggs as “pasture raised” and guarantees that each hen gets 108 square feet of outdoor space.  These seemed like my kind of eggs, so I bought some and then took a look at the information on the carton.

A Short History of Organic Eggs

Readers:  I'm transitioning my blog to a new platform on Squarespace.  I've updated this blog post and moved it to the new location.  Click here to get there! - Randy

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Millions of Mistreated Chickens—The Truth About Meat Chickens

“You don’t have to be a vegan to wonder if it is right to put another entire species in perpetual pain in order to satisfy a craving for chicken salad and deviled eggs.” – Andrew Lawler, “Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?”

Broiler Chickens (Wikimedia Commons - Naim Alel -  Птичник.JPG)

There have been a few readers who have taken umbrage to my posts about the mistreatment of chickens.  And I get where they’re coming from.  It can be distressing to navigate to my blog looking for pictures of cute Hipster Hens happily pecking and playing in my coop, and instead get hit over the head with stories about millions of chickens being mistreated.

But here’s the deal—if you scroll down to the bottom of this page you’ll find Randy’s Chicken Blog's mission statement.  There you’ll find these declarative sentences: “My chickens are really cool.  All chickens are really cool. The majority of chickens being raised for meat or egg production, in spite of their inherent coolness, are treated cruelly. You can help make changes by your purchasing habits. Educate yourself! Read labels! Check company websites!”  I think it would be unethical to blog about chickens without also discussing the issues surrounding the treatment of commercial chickens. While it’s great that we love our backyard hens, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the majority of the chickens alive in the world right now have miserable lives.  It is important that we chicken appreciators stay informed about the situation because we do appreciate chickens and we recognize them to be intelligent, sentient creatures who have the capacity for joy, but also the capacity to suffer.

A Carton of Eggs - Part 4 - Locally Laid

An egg carton is great for keeping a dozen eggs grouped together, and for providing eggs stability and cushioning in transport.  Beyond that, an egg carton is a very useful marketing tool.  All that blank space can be filled up with information, promotional messages, and art.  This is the fourth in a series of posts about the stuff printed on specific egg cartons. 

Also in this series:

Part 1 - Hipster Hen Wonder Eggs

Part 2 – ALDI’s Goldhen Farm Fresh Eggs

Part 3 - Wild Harvest Cage Free Large Brown Eggs

Part 5—Vital Farms Organic Pasture-Raised Eggs

For this post, I went to a nearby supermarket and bought a carton of Locally Laid eggs.  In my own coop, the Hipster Hens were in the midst of their autumnal molt and egg production was incredibly low.  Given that we had some house guests who expected their morning scramble, I really did need to buy some eggs anyway.  And in buying the eggs I also got a carton to blog about. So, I killed two birds with one stone, right?  Please don’t tell the Hipster Hens I was talking about killing birds.

Locally Laid is a Minnesota-based, family owned and run egg company that has recently expanded into Iowa and Indiana.  Jason and Lucie Amundsen started Locally Laid Egg Company in 2012 to provide pasture-raised eggs to local markets and as proponents and practitioners of “Middle Ag”.  My backyard flock of Hipster Hens currently tops out at 26 birds.  Cal-Maine Foods, the nation's largest egg producer, the last time anybody counted, had around 26 million hens.  Locally Laid has around 1800 laying hens.  Middle Ag.  Get it?

A Carton of Eggs: Part 3 - Wild Harvest Cage Free Large Brown Eggs

Also in this series:
Part 1 - Hipster Hen Wonder Eggs

Part 2 – ALDI’s Goldhen Farm Fresh Eggs

Part 4 - Locally Laid 
Part 5—Vital Farms Organic Pasture-Raised Eggs

Readers:  I'm transitioning my blog to a new platform on Squarespace.  I've updated this blog post and moved it to the new location.  Click here to get there! - Randy

Randy's Chicken Blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by linking to products available on Amazon.

A Carton of Eggs: Part 2 – ALDI’s Goldhen Farm Fresh Eggs

Previously in this series:

Part 1 - Hipster Hen Wonder Eggs

This is part two in my series of posts where I labor to get to the bottom of all that information that covers those egg cartons that reside in our fridges.  Right now I’m looking at an egg carton that was purchased from ALDI a while ago.

ALDI is a grocery store chain that started in Germany and lately has been expanding its presence in the United States.  The company website shows that the majority of its supermarkets are located on the East Coast but that they're also moving into the Midwest and California. 

 The brand logo proclaims these eggs to be “Goldhen Farm Fresh Eggs” and the picture shows a white chicken on a background of radiating yellow stripes at the top and green on the bottom.  It is stylized but it the chicken is obviously standing on a grassy hill in the sunshine.  Apparently egg companies like to present a bucolic image.  Check out the names on the egg cartons next time you’re at the grocery store and notice how words like “country”, “sunny”, “brook”, and “meadow” keep popping up.  Following that trend, Goldhen tells us that these eggs are “farm fresh”.  What does that mean, exactly?  In this day of backyard chickens, the freshest eggs may actually come from the coop in your urban backyard – far, far away from the nearest farm.  Of course raising hens on a commercial scale in the city is not practical, so these eggs no doubt came from a farm somewhere out in the country.  So how fresh are they?  Well, there are “sell by” standards that must be maintained.  Were these eggs laid yesterday?  Probably not.

A Carton of Eggs: Part 1 - Hipster Hen Wonder Eggs

Here’s the cool and unique thing about eggs: They come with their own container - the eggshell.  Granted bananas and potatoes have their peel, and oranges and melons have their rind, but what other animal-sourced food is prepackaged?  I can’t think of any!

Of course, you seldom buy just one egg.  They usually come in batches of a dozen, and those dozen eggs need to be contained in something – hence the egg carton.  In addition to keeping eggs grouped together, a carton provides stability and cushioning in transport; an important thing - we’re talking about a product that is “as fragile as eggs”, after all.   An egg carton also provides lots of blank space that can be filled up with information, promotional messages, and art.  And that’s as important a carton function as either of the others.  Selling, after all is about merchandising, and merchandising is about branding.  An eggshell is pretty anonymous.  When you look at an eggshell, you don’t learn a whole lot about the hen that laid the egg.  It’s not like she has the ability to stamp her initials or trademark on the egg as she lays it.  But then the hen really doesn’t care too much about branding.  The egg company cares though, thus all those words and pictures on a carton.

Edging Away from Cruel Eggs Part 4—California, and now Massachusetts!

Battery Cages (Maqi-commonswiki)

Read "Edging Away from Cruel Eggs: Part 1 - California’s Prop 2"

Read "Edging Away From Cruel Eggs: Part 2—Slogging Toward Enactment"

Read "Edging Away from Cruel Eggs – Part 3: Strange Coop-Fellows"

On Election Day, 2016 a fantastic new law was approved by voters and practically nobody noticed!  Question 3 was approved by 78% of Massachusetts voters--when enacted it will “prohibit any farm owner or operator from knowingly confining any breeding pig, calf raised for veal, or egg-laying hen in a way that prevents the animal from lying down, standing up, fully extending its limbs, or turning around freely.”  With that vote, which was worded very much like California’s Proposition 2, the citizens of Massachusetts mandated that certain cruel animal husbandry practices, including battery cages for laying hens, will no longer be allowed.  The measure also bans the sale in Massachusetts of cruelly produced eggs and meat from other states.  The Massachusetts law will go into effect in 2022 and prior to that it will no doubt be challenged just as thoroughly as was the California law.  

In parts One, Two and Three of “Edging Away from Cruel Eggs” I talked about the inherent cruelty of battery cages for laying hens, how California voters decided to ban them, and how that ban was subjected to numerous legal challenges by the egg lobby and other interests.

The final challenge hanging over the California law was filed in 2014.  The plaintiffs were the states of Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Kentucky, represented by their attorneys general, and Iowa, represented by Iowa Governor Terry Branstad.  In their challenge, they argued that the California law protecting hens was unconstitutional because in stipulating that cruelly produced eggs from other states could not be sold in California, it interfered with interstate commerce and would unjustly harm the citizens of those states—each of the plaintiff states was an agricultural state that produced lots of eggs.

Edging Away from Cruel Eggs: Part 3 - Strange Coop-Fellows

Read "Edging Away from Cruel Eggs: Part 1 - California's Prop 2"

Read "Edging Away From Cruel Eggs: Part 2—Slogging Toward Enactment"

Consumer polls have consistently shown that the majority of egg buyers think that keeping hens in small cages is cruel, that they would prefer to buy cage-free eggs, and that they would be willing to pay more for them.  So when California voters passed Propostion 2, “Standards for Confining Farm Animals” in 2008, an initiative that mandated more humane conditions for chickens by 2015, that’s when the egg industry should have gotten to work figuring out the best way to give their customers what they wanted.  Instead, what ensued was years of turmoil and stress as most in the egg industry looked for every possible way to block the changes required by Prop 2. 

In Part 2 of this series, I wrote about how certain egg producers rolled out “enhanced” cages as their answer to the required changes.  In spite of the positive spin of their PR fanfare, enhanced cages were really still just cages—they just gave each hen slightly more space.  I also discussed a lawsuit filed in California State Court in 2010 by egg companies that argued that the new rules were too vague because Prop 2 didn’t specifically say how much space a chicken really needed.  The case was ultimately dismissed in 2011.

Chickens in Battery Cages  (Wikipedia Commons - public domain)

It took less than a year for the next legal challenge—this lawsuit was so very similar to the first one that they could have been twins.  William Cramer, a trustee of a family business that owned egg farms in Riverside County, filed his suit in Federal District Court.  He claimed that Prop 2 violated the US Constitution because its vagueness would prompt arbitrary enforcement.  He maintained that most egg farmers would stop operating rather than comply with the new regulations, which would result in skyrocketing egg prices.  The Association of California Egg Farmers (ACEF) joined this suit just as it had the previous one.

Edging Away From Cruel Eggs: Part 2—Slogging Toward Enactment

Read "Edging Away from Cruel Eggs: Part 1 - California’s Prop 2"

California’s Propostion 2, “Standards for Confining Farm Animals” passed in 2008, but the fight against it didn’t stop with its passage.  The forces aligned against it included many of the country’s top egg producers and their minions   “Egg producers” refers to the gigantic corporations that sell eggs and egg products.  It is a very misleading term.  I’m very sure that not a single one of the guys who run these companies has personally produced an egg, ever.  Egg production is really the job of the millions of caged chickens in their enormous “production facilities”.  And I don’t suppose that any of those guys resemble the image of the stereotypical farmer either.  They most likely spend their days behind a desk or at a boardroom table, and are about as likely to look like Old MacDonald as a giant chicken confinement building looks like a red mansard-roofed barn with a crowing rooster on top. 

 

Battery Caged Hens (Maqi~commonswiki)

Edging Away from Cruel Eggs: Part 1 - California’s Prop 2

My Hipster Hens live the good life. They have plenty of space to move around—each bird has 9-10 square feet of coop space, they can go outside every day as long as the weather allows it, and “outside” is either the spacious “hen pen” or the half-acre chicken run.  Both the run and the pen have plenty of dirt for scratching and lots of trees for shade.  Both coops have ample roosting space, plenty of nest boxes and a large container of sand for dust bathing.  The birds get free choice commercial chicken feed, grit, and oyster shell as well as some scratch grain every night as a treat and all the garden waste and kitchen scraps that I’ve got. 

The Hipster Hens - July 2014