Chicken Sex

We have a commercial up here in RI that says brown eggs are local eggs and local eggs are fresh. It implies there is a difference in taste. I'm pretty sure they have brown eggs everywhere and since Martha Stewart made the eggs of the Aracauna popular you might get some pale blue/green eggs if you live where people big into Martha Stewart's Living (MSL) abound. Again, I live in the woods of RI and while we have our share of the MSL crowd we have a lot of hicks (for lack of a better and equally well known word). They raise their own produce and livestock because it's how they were raised. It's also about $40 worth of gas to the nearest grocery store where things are too expensive and don't taste as good.

Eggs in the market come from places that wash them with hot water to take off the crap and then stamp them with pretty little logos and package them up and store them in a refrigerator until the market calls and places an order for 100 dozen or something like that. This means your eggs are already aged when they get to the store never mind how old they are when you finally pull them out to bake those once a year brownies. Just like human eggs lose potency as they get older so apparently do chicken eggs.

So I went on the prowl around the hick laden back roads of the sticks we call town and I found some eggs and yes they were brown. I didn't think it would be as hard to find them as it was but I wasn't as versed in egg laying as I now am. So here goes. Chickens lay one egg a day and they don't need a rooster to do it. No rooster means the eggs are not fertilized so even if you didn't eat them they would never hatch. It also mean's your eating just egg and not sperm so that thick white stringy thing you use the broken shell to pull out of the white is not what you've been thinking it was all these years! Chickens lay one egg a day, not the full nest you see in cartoons, for about three years and then you should turn them into soup. Okay I don't know if they turn them into soup or not but they're in chicken menopause and you won't be seeing any eggs unless they are the powdered kind.

I am guessing from my research that most of the previously egg laying birds around here are turned into soup because no hick I know is going to waste his/her time making croquettes. It seems the bulk of birds in this area are what is know as dual-purpose breeds, i.e. Rhode Island Reds, New Hampshires, and Plymouth Rocks. These also happen to be the breeds that lay brown eggs! Go figure! This means they get them as chicks, about 9 months later they start laying eggs, and three years after that they're soup. You may as well make the most of your investment. I admit I couldn't do it but then I'm not a real hick and I wasn't raised that way. All of my chickens came out of the freezer section at Stop and Shop and none of them were wearing their face or feathers. I'm now on a mission to make friends with a hick so I can get invited to dinner and I'll let you know if it tastes just like chicken.

There are some smaller breeds more suitable if all you want is eggs. They lay more eggs in their lifetime than the soup birds, up to 225 per year. Can you imagine giving birth 225 times in a year? There are some serious horror-moan issues there! No wonder they aren't the friendliest barnyard animals I've ever met. You'd be pretty ornery too if you were constantly PMS'ing and pregnant but never had sex!

But I digress this was about the difficulty in finding that elusive local farm fresh egg. There was a sign and no eggs at the first place we stopped and I could only see about five chicken in a small coop. So here is the deal: you don't have to have a huge yard with a flock of galine avians! All you need is a small fenced area and an enclosed roosting place. If you only have two chickens laying two eggs a day there will be on average 12-14 eggs a week. That's more than enough to satisfy the needs of an average family of four. There won't be any ticks or pest type bugs around and if you put them inside the already fenced garden not only will you not need pesticides but you won't need fertilizer either!

I have to say they were the best eggs I have had in a very long time, at least as long as it's been since the last time I published a piece here. I hope you enjoyed this tasteless tidbit and that it will hold you over until next time something runs rough shod through my brain.