Of Eggs and Hens

When I said goodbye to my little flock and had to resort to getting my eggs cold from the supermarket cooler instead of warm from the nest, I made sure to choose cartons that said that the hens who laid those eggs were “free-range” or, at the very least, “cage-free.” 

Temple Grandin, that patron saint of farm animals, writes that battery hens are the most mistreated of all livestock. The suffering of cattle in feedlots is nothing compared to the misery of hens imprisoned in tight individual cages, deprived of natural light and food, forced to lay without regard for seasonal rhythms, and slaughtered after a couple of years. 

There was a time in my life when I made mayonnaise from scratch, in the blender, with garlic and olive oil, and eggs from my own lovelies. But when I was reduced to buying it at the store, I forgot to think about the hens whose eggs were used in its manufacture. Then one day, reading labels, I found mayonnaise made with eggs from cage-free hens, from the biggest producer on the planet, Hellmann’s. 

Not that cage-free hens lead an idyllic life. They don’t run around on grass, peck at bugs, or preen their feathers in the sun. They spend their lives in huge rooms filled with hundreds of their peers, making the most horrific din. Still, it’s far better than those cages. 

I bought the jar of Hellmann’s and took it home. It tasted like ordinary mayo, but I felt better as I spread it on my bread. Then, on my next trip to the store, I saw a new product on the shelf, a mayonnaise dressing from the same manufacturer that, the label said, was made with olive oil. 

I am a devotee of olive oil. As a child, one of my favorite foods was “pa amb oli i xocolata,” the all-time Catalan after-school snack: a thick slice of crusty bread sprinkled with dark, aromatic olive oil, accompanied with a chunk of almost-bitter chocolate. (If you’ve never tried it, it beats Hershey’s by a mile.) 

When the AMA discovered the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, olive oil ranked first on its list of panaceas. A powerful antioxidant, the oil is supposed to be good for the heart, the brain, the gut, and the immune system. It fights infection, lessens the risk of strokes and certain cancers, combats pain and inflammation, helps prevent diabetes and, because it keeps blood sugar levels stable, may help you lose weight. Not surprisingly, it’s even good for your mood. 

I was in the kitchen putting away the olive oil mayo when I realized that I hadn’t checked whether its eggs also came from cage-free hens. What if I had bought mayonnaise that was good for me but bad for the hens? 

The days are long gone when one could go to the store and choose stuff based on whether it looked good and how much it cost. I had barely mastered the secrets of tuna casserole when I learned that most of the foods available in the supermarket were bursting with possibly lethal substances. The first culprit, identified in the 1970s, was salt (would give you heart attacks), followed in the 1980s by fat (ditto, plus you would look awful), followed by sugar (pure poison, and ubiquitous), followed by hormones (would give you breasts if you were a man, cancer if you were a woman), pesticides, and the growing awareness of what our food system was doing to the welfare of animals. 

Trips to the supermarket became exercises in defensive warfare against industrial farming, food conglomerates, and big business, all of whom were bent on doing me maximum harm for their maximum profit. And now here I was in the kitchen, holding my jar of Hellmann’s, about to face a moral choice between the welfare of millions of hens and my own. 

But like Abraham about to sacrifice his son at God’s command, I was spared the dreadful choice. A close look at the label informed me that all Hellmann’s mayonnaises are made exclusively with, as they put it, “cage-free eggs.” 

After a year when good news has been scarcer than, well, hen’s teeth, I clutched the Hellmann’s jar to my breast. Could it really be that one of America’s major food producers had both my welfare and that of the female chicken at heart? Alternatively, could it be that consumer pressure had inspired Hellmann’s move to use olive oil, and eggs from cage-free birds? 

Whatever the reason—and I suspect it’s #2—it gives me hope. Maybe the next target for us consumers could be the bull calves that are born each year to keep their mothers lactating.  Heaven knows I sympathize with the plight of dairy farmers, but the sight every spring of farms with dozens of calves in rows of individual “calf igloos” may well drive me to veganism. In a nation that sends robots to Mars, surely there is a way we can have our cheese and eat it, with a clear conscience.

Some Things I Know About Eggs

Fresh-laid eggs are best. They're fine for scrambling, frying, or baking.  But here's what I always say when I bring a carton of eggs as a hostess gift:  if you're planning to hard-boil them, or whip the whites for a souffle, you need to age them a bit.  Leaving them on the counter overnight should do it.

The color of the shell indicates nothing other than the breed of the bird.  A pure-white shell may come from a happily pastured hen, and a brown or blue or green one from a hen kept in a cage.

If you break open an egg and the yolk is a shockingly bright orange, congratulations!  It means the hen has been out on grass, which has transmitted its gift of carotene to the bird, and now to you.

If you break open an egg and find a slight red spot in the yolk, don't freak.  It is NOT an embryo. It just means that a tiny blood vessel ruptured as the egg traveled down the oviduct.  It will vanish without a trace in cooking.

According to Temple Grandin, laying hens are the most abused of all farm animals http://www.grandin.com/inc/animals.make.us.human.ch7.html.  If you find it in your heart to care about the welfare of chickens, spend an extra few cents and buy eggs from cage-free hens.

Hens are bright, warm-hearted creatures, not mere egg-making machines.   Let us try to see beyond the egg on our plate to the living, questing being that laid it.

The Great Rooster Dilemma

The rooster dilemma has arisen because I now have seven hens, enough to support a rooster. By "support" I mean "allay the concupiscence of" a rooster. Roosters, especially young ones, are such mating machines that they will stress and wear out their wives, unless there are enough of them so he can spread his favors more thinly.

Of course one could end up with a monogamous rooster, as we once did. He was a gorgeous Barred Rock, decorated with narrow black and white stripes from head to tail and with a rakish red comb flopping over one eye. He fell in love with an elderly hen, one of those scrawny rust-colored hybrids who lay huge brown eggs day in and day out, winter and summer. We had a flock of eight hens, but he ignored all except the one he had set his heart upon. The trouble was that he didn't just set his heart upon her, but also the considerable weight of his body, his beak holding her fast behind her head and his spurs clawing her back for balance. The poor hen started losing the feathers on her back, and looking haunted and unhappy. I decided that she had precedence over the rooster, and so he went. Fortunately, monogamous roosters are fairly rare.

On the plus side, a rooster can be a surprisingly good husband to a flock. If he finds a worm or an especially tasty weed, he will call the hens making the very same clucking sounds with which a mother hen calls her chicks, and let the hens eat first. He will keep an eye out for hawks and foxes while the hens graze, and will get them to safety if a predator appears. And nothing beats a rooster for getting the flock into the shed at night.

A rooster means fertile eggs, and if one of the hens should go broody and sit on a nest of eggs, that means the possibility (albeit not the guarantee) of chicks. And a rooster crows--a trumpet-like, cheerful sound that heralds such events as the rising of the sun, or the arrival of guests.

On the minus side, a rooster crows. He often crows in the middle of the night, way before dawn, or because the dog just came into the yard, or because he feels like it. It is a loud, trumpet-like sound. We don't have near neighbors to worry about, but there is no question that, at all times and in all seasons, the yard is a noisier place with him about. Then there is the hustle and bustle of his sex life, the frequent beating of his wings for showing-off purposes, the sheer energy of the beast.

Rooster or no rooster, I have seen no difference in egg production or in the health of the flock. But in their hearts, are the hens happier without a mate, or would they like a strutting husband with a bright red comb? Me, I like the calm, conventual feel of a roosterless flock. But I can't deny that there is something missing: the excitement, the drama and (in the case of roosters especially) the sheer danger of the male presence. The question is, is it worth it?

The New Girls

Went to a "chicken swap" and got four new hens today-- seven-week-old pullets, two Rhode Island Reds and two Barred Rocks, all bright-eyed and fully feathered. The Reds are a deep, brownish red; the Rocks are black-and-white striped all over, and when their red combs grow out, they'll look like Parisian apaches. (We did not get the handsome pair of mated geese that I craved, or the handful of day-old baby ducks--all yellow down, with those adorable tiny duck beaks--that I came within inches of grabbing.)

There is nothing more charming than a seven-week-old pullet, with her big yellow feet and her tiny head and her Audrey Hepburn eyes. My little lot are clever and inquisitive. Even after the traumas of the morning--being transported inside a cardboard box by their old owner, and in a large dog crate deeply bedded with hay by us--they figured out the feeder and waterer we had set out for them right away. Despite the helpless-sounding peeping that they keep up, they already know a lot about being a chicken.

Why add to our existing flock of four? With hens, you have to think ahead. Our older hens are Buff Orpingtons, a heritage breed, which means that they aren't exactly egg-laying machines. They are now a year old, and due to molt in the fall, at which time they will stop laying for a while, and when they start again they will do so at a slower rate. (Besides, one of them may be turning into a rooster, as I explained here ). If all goes as planned, however, the new girls will come of age just as the days grow shorter, and will be in their laying prime in the depths of winter.

For now the new quartet are sequestered in the old goat room, separated from the older hens' quarters by a screen door so they can see and, most importantly, be seen by the Buffies. This way, when I release the pullets in a week or so, the Buffies won't kill them, which they would certainly have done if I had put them all together this morning. Chickens have a dark side, you know.

In other chicken developments, today we set up the portable fence, and released the Buffies into the lawn to gorge on the new grass and the newly-hatched bugs. Every year about this time the hens grow so desperate for fresh greens that they stick their heads out through the bottom holes of the fence to get at the lawn grass, and make a bare swath of earth the exact length of their necks all around their pen.

The sky was bright blue when we got the temporary fence set up, and the Buffies, finally released to their summer pasture, looked like golden balls on the bright green grass. In the shed, the pullets, having eaten and drunk, collapsed into a heap and fell asleep. A big tom turkey came out of the woods and ushered his dun-colored mate into the side field, as if he were taking her to a restaurant. And that made me think, should I get a rooster for my flock?

An Egg, An Egg!

It is a perfect oval (what else?), tinted the lightest pinkish beige. I brought it in the house tonight and put it reverentially in the fridge. And heaved a sigh of relief that my hens—Do, Re, Mi, and Fa—are not sterile.

It's been almost three months since we brought Do et al. home as well-grown pullets, with the expectation that they would begin to lay within a month or so. They lived in their summer quarters—a portable coop inside a movable fence—and grew tall and broad and sleek on grass and bugs and laying mash.

These hens are Buff Orpingtons, large, golden, matronly-looking birds with a calm and friendly disposition. As summer faded into fall and no eggs appeared in the nest, I moved them into their winter quarters—a room adjacent to the goat room—hoping that they would feel more snug and cozy and would begin to lay.

That was a month ago. The hens got fatter and more gorgeous in a Gibson-Girl sort of way. They made lots of hen noises, ones that sounded to me like the egg-laying kind. Still, no eggs in the nest. Maybe, I thought, they are laying under the shed. That would truly be a disaster, as there is no way I could crawl under there looking for eggs. As a test, I confined them to their room for 24 hours. But the nest remained empty.

During this three-month egg drought, I was reduced to buying eggs in the supermarket. I would stand in front of the shelves of egg cartons and despair. There were the run-of-the-mill jumbo-sized eggs that sold for a pittance...if you didn't count the price paid by the hens, confined in a cage, barely kept alive by medicated feed, and spent by 18 months of age.

There were “all natural” brown eggs in nice transparent cartons. These cost more, but offered no guarantees as to the hens' quality of life. Neither did the even more expensive organic eggs: you can feed a hen manna straight from heaven and still keep her in a cage.

I opted for “cage free ” eggs, which means that the hens—hundreds of them—are kept loose in a building. There is not much more square-foot per bird space in these arrangements than there is in cages, but at least the hens can walk around and peck each other, which they do—wouldn't you if you had to live your life in a metro station at rush hour? For all I know these birds are fed ground-up rats—but at least they're not in cages.

Every time I cracked an egg for an omelette I thought of those hundreds, those thousands of hens milling around in their buildings, and the ear-splitting noise, and the smell....We didn't eat many eggs these last few months.

But now those days are over: one of our girls has reached puberty, and the others will soon follow. And if I know young hens, they will lay like a house on fire through the coldest, darkest days of winter, thankful for our leftovers and keeping everybody's spirits up with their companionable clucking.

Come over some time, and I'll make you an omelette.