Dirty, filthy eggs

Lest you think the eggs you buy in the store drop from a hen’s oviduct looking white as the driven snow, they don’t. Oftentimes, freshly laid eggs enter this world covered in muckety-muck: dirt, poop (or what is referred to as “poo de poulet”), and sometimes, mysteriously, yolk.

Dirty, nasty eggs that I always have to clean. Where's Jake?

Jake says I probably shouldn’t show these pictures. He says they will make people lose their appetite for eggs. But I am an egg realist. I think it’s important to show eggs in their natural state before they become cleaned up and sanitized. It’s a little like watching a chicken get slaughtered for meat versus  selecting a cellophane-wrapped package of Perdue cutlets from the grocery store. One is disturbing and bloody, the other is sanitized and sterile. The former forces you to acknowledge the messy business that is “farm-to-table eating,” the other allows you to remain many lengths removed, like at a McDonalds counter, ordering McNuggets or an Egg McMuffin.  But both sets of poultry/eggs started out equally grody.

I should clarify that eggs don’t always come out looking gross. It’s only in inclement weather, when hens’ feet become crusted in all sorts of ick.

The essential issue is that that hens are notorious followers. If one lays in a particular nesting box, they all want to lay in that nesting box. We have 8 nesting boxes, but our hens only lay in 2. That’s 28 pairs of muck-covered feet trampling on a clutch of eggs. Sometimes an egg will crack under the weight of the feet, and the hens, little scavengers that they are, will eat their own eggs! Filthy cannibals! This is why you have to collect eggs on a daily basis, to reduce the odds your hens will turn that day’s yield into a breakfast buffet.

To clean eggs, rinse/scrape them with a warm rag or sponge. It’s not fun. It takes awhile. But it’s necessary work. (I have a rag in my house called “the poop sponge.”) It’s not recommended to submerge them in water because water supposedly soaks into the shell and ruins the insides….at least that’s what everyone tells me.

If you look closely at this picture, you will also notice a streak of red. It’s blood.  HOW does blood get on eggs? I was stumped until I noticed one of the hens had a nasty bloody gash on her head. I think it means a rumble went down in the laying box; one hen battered another and blood got all over the eggs. Nice, huh? It’s farm-to-table eating at its finest.

This is NOT a Martha Stewart rare breed speckled egg; it's an egg covered in yolk, poo and blood.

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