Size, weight and price of eggs

I was just thinking ...
Here on Oahu Hawaii USA, there's got to be as many feral chickens as there are people!
:giggle:
I'm seeing loads of chicks and I'm wondering:
Where do they nest?
There's free eggs to be found here somewhere, right?
Funny (kinda-sorta) story - we were driving home to the condo one afternoon and you have to go down one-way side streets to get here. We make this corner and here's this young kid, chasing some hens, he caught one and wrung it's neck right there and then... "here Mom, I got dinner!"
:thankyou:
I made mention of this to DH and he was so grossed out... "ACK! Why would you do that?"
Moi: free food, have you seen the prices here lately?
Yup, I said, stew that baby and that would probably feed a family of five easily, rice, veg from the garden, you're good.
 
I remember as a kid my nan (grandmother) used to sometimes get duck eggs and cook them for us :hungry:😋
My mother would be having kittens - 'where did you get them', 'they could have salmonella' etc etc etc ... she'd just go on and on lol
With the key word here being "cook" lol. Cmon mom, she wasn't making raw egg smoothies!
 
I was thinking about animal welfare really. Its something I do care about. Standards in the UK are quite high.
That, and I also care about some kind of consistency in size. Any…I’ll say “published,” for lack of a better word…recipe in the US that uses eggs considers eggs graded as large as the standard, and yes…put two medium eggs in a cake recipe, and you’ll get inconsistent results.

Of course, one could say, “Well then, just add a third medium egg!” - the problem with that is, if I’ve got a carton or tray of randomly-sized eggs, then I’ll always be hunting and sorting through them for this one or that one, thinking, “Is this more medium or more large? Let me get the scale…” - it’s so much simpler to look at a carton and know, “These 12 eggs are all within the range for large. Right. Moving on.”

It’s not a big deal when making an omelette, but it is when you’re baking something.
 
one needs to separate the "gotta' be humane" from "disease factors"
there is zip comma zero relationship between wild/free range/domestic/caged chickens, and the incidence of salmonella in the eggs of forgoing mentioned birds . . . .

in fact, given the "controlled access" of NOT free range/wild/etc. birds, one can make a rather seriously big case of "controlled bird environments" are less susceptible to "disease"

the European approach to vaccinate the laying hens is uber-super-ultra superior to the "I-can't-believer-they're that stupid" USA approach.
a hen lays ~six eggs per week; has an economically viable 'life span' of 24 months.
that's 6x52x24 = 7,488 eggs - vaccinated for $0.25 per hen or $0.0003 per egg vs. $x/dozen 'refrigerated' - with an iffy outcome....

do not do the math, you'll get really mad at USDA . . .
 
That, and I also care about some kind of consistency in size. Any…I’ll say “published,” for lack of a better word…recipe in the US that uses eggs considers eggs graded as large as the standard, and yes…put two medium eggs in a cake recipe, and you’ll get inconsistent results.

Of course, one could say, “Well then, just add a third medium egg!” - the problem with that is, if I’ve got a carton or tray of randomly-sized eggs, then I’ll always be hunting and sorting through them for this one or that one, thinking, “Is this more medium or more large? Let me get the scale…” - it’s so much simpler to look at a carton and know, “These 12 eggs are all within the range for large. Right. Moving on.”

It’s not a big deal when making an omelette, but it is when you’re baking something.
When egg prices were ridiculously high I used adjustable eggs... 😅
1000031502.jpg
 
there is a +/- tolerance to an individual egg when grade to US/EU/Au size descriptions...
US vs, EU - not outrageous. different, okay, but why?
why Australia felt it necessary to come up with their own weight-to-name . . . .
different and there is no why . . .

in USA, not only must the weight per egg "fit" - but also the weight per master case.
the theory appears to be to prevent whole dozen-pkgs on the utlra-light size to fall into the "normal range' of size . . .being from xx grams to yy grams.

folks, you can't make this stuff up. USDA establishes guidelines which are thence incorporated into "LAW"
 
I was thinking about animal welfare really. Its something I do care about
When about 70% of Venezuelans are living in extreme poverty, unfortunately, I think animal welfare is the last thing on their minds.
Farmers, especially commercial farmers, were probably brought up using American standards, given the huge influx of US citizens during the petrol boom of the 60s, 70s and 80s, so it's not really a huge worry. I think the chicks are well-treated and many of them, possibly, just run around in an enclosure on the farms.
 
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