Shorty

This is a short one, but this is important for perspective.

My mother has two of her own chickens. She keeps them in her yard and they eat what insects they can find in the green grass under their claws. She occasionally tosses in some seed, worms that she she finds on the walkway when it rains and the odd handful of corn when she feels like feeding them for fun. They aren't crammed into cages, beaks chopped off so they can't hurt any of the others, never to see the sun, and fed cracked corn which is not part of their natural diet. All in all these chickies have a pretty respectable diet, certainly as chickens go. She loves them because she has always loved chickens (and her kids gave them to her). In return for a happy chicken life, they give her each one egg a day for a total of over a dozen a week! Not a bad gig, huh?

Recently one of her hens laid a behemoth double-yolker that my mom passed onto me. The picture here is of this double-yolker next to a single-yolker that I bought from the grocer. Keep in mind that the single is an Omega-3 happy, cage-free, organic feed chicken egg. STILL note the difference!

And you thought the difference between real and organic-but-still-commercially-grown wasn't that great, uh huh! The yellow to orange color of the egg yolk is created by carotenoids, the same you would find in carrots (lutein and zeaxanthin to be exact). Commercially produced eggs are made yellow by adding synthesized carotenoids to the chicken feed. The deep orange color of my mother's chicken's egg is caused by carotenoids that are naturally occuring in this bird's diet as well as it's exposure to real sunlight. Eggs from free-range chickens have been shown to have higher levels of Folic acid, Vitamin B12, and Omega-3 fatty acids!

It's amazing what kind of nutritional difference occurs when an animal is permitted to eat what it would eat on it's own time in it's own real environment. Think about that and then think about what you are eating. Is it food that you are eating or is it just merely edible?