Eggs
No five words in the cursed Twittersphere enrage me more than these: All eggs taste the same. Except, maybe, these five words: All eggs are the same.
This is a chic thing to say among coastal know-nothings, who live pitiable lives in a concrete desert where the eggs are stale and a human’s worth is judged by how impossible they are to cook for.
The main reason this drives me into a rage is that it’s so self-evidently untrue. Fresh farmers’ market eggs are as different from bottom-shelf grocery store eggs as ripe farmers’ market Brandywines are from ketchup.
James Beard Award–winning chef Tim McKee raises his own backyard chickens in Stillwater. So I ask him if he thought all eggs tasted the same. He laughs incredulously before responding, “They most certainly do not! Though I will say I’m not sure everyone will be able to taste the difference. Because the first thing you notice is that it’s not just better flavor, but better texture.”
McKee explains that he’s been keeping backyard chickens for some eight years. “And ever since,” he adds, “I have been doing various not-very-scientific experiments. Like I’ve noticed that after a good rain in the spring, the eggs are oranger and taste even better. I assume it has to do with eating bugs and worms and things. I actually did an experiment of buying them nightcrawlers. A couple days later, what do you know, the eggs were oranger.”
But that better taste, McKee has found, hits a peak. The best flavor comes between two and ten days after he gathers the eggs. Then it falls off. And that’s when all eggs start tasting the same.
Between his gig with seafood wholesaler The Fish Guys and acting as head chef at Octo Fishbar, McKee would seem to be at sea raising poultry. “This all started because my sister thought it would be cute to get the kids baby chicks for Easter,” he explains. “But maybe she didn’t think it 100 percent through. Like, then what? I’m probably on my fourth flock now, and I’m more of an egg snob than I would have guessed possible. Have you ever been to Wales? The eggs are just fantastic. I mean, they’re really unbelievable.”
I have not been to Wales. I have, however, been to the chair in front of my desk, where I monitor the horror show that is the unbelievably huge, corner-cutting monstrosity of American mega egg farms. Maybe you’ve seen the same coverage of a predatory, bleak, and cynical industry.
In Iowa, the father and son behind the depressingly named Quality Egg were sentenced to prison in 2017 for sickening 56,000 people (leaving some permanently injured). They’d been shipping eggs with false processing and expiration dates and bribing a USDA inspector in order to do it.
In Minnesota, Sparboe Farms lost accounts with McDonald’s and Target after videos surfaced of workers gruesomely abusing animals.
We don’t have time or space to list all the other mega-egg crimes and infractions: recruiting and exploiting undocumented workers from Guatemala and Honduras; using under-the-table child labor; dosing their flocks with unnecessary antibiotics and putting us all at risk for antibiotic-resistant diseases; unimaginable pollution.
Still want to tell me that all eggs are the same?
Meanwhile, near Duluth, the company Locally Laid has been experimenting with egg production at scale, in the most principled and delicious way possible. Since Locally Laid started in 2014, its farmers have been raising the birds outside, on pasture.
Now, a word about “cage free.” Cage free is better than raising a chicken in a wire container hardly bigger than a milk carton. But cage free often merely means a bigger indoor pen. Pasture means the birds walk around in clover and near trees. And the pasture also serves as habitat for chickadees and bumblebees and all the other things that need a place to live. Pasture is the gold standard. (The Humane Society maintains a detailed and helpful primer on what all the words on an egg carton mean—and don’t mean.)
Locally Laid operates eight barns. Jason and Lucie Amundsen run the original barn, and Amish families maintain the rest. Those seven Amish barns use zero electricity: Abundant doors and vents allow the chickens to survive all winter without any human-provided heat. Locally Laid, in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, plants native tree species to reforest northern Minnesota. They’ve planted 9,000 trees so far.
“We are as local as you get,” says co-owner Jason Amundsen. “Working with the Amish community in Pine County, we’ve been able to drive local dollars into what are traditionally lower-income counties.”
The only hitch, says Lucie Amundsen, comes when she talks to college kids about what she’s doing with her life and the superior taste of local eggs. “They’ll kind of tilt their heads like curious dogs if I talk about this yolk flavor,” she says. “They just don’t know that good egg flavor. I find myself saying, ‘yellow?’ It’s such an elemental flavor. I can’t even describe it other than being rich and the pertinent flavor of an egg.”
Craving that taste myself, I fried up two Locally Laid eggs for breakfast this morning. You can find them at a lot of local co-ops and grocery stores, including Kowalski’s. These eggs cost twice what you’ll pay for mega-farm eggs, coming in around $5 a dozen, or 40 cents per egg.
My 80 cents’ worth of eggs sat with their bright orange yolks high in the pan. (Stale yolks lie nearly flat when cracked open.) And they revealed the kind of rich flavor you can only get when you open yourself up to the evidence of your palate, your heart, and your head. No matter what some naïve or deranged people might claim, they did not taste the same.
