Are Cherry Lane battery farmed eggs (which are the kind of eggs Jophiel is getting for 99 cents)? In the past year, I’ve seen a dozen large or extra large eggs as low as $0.69 and $0.79 cents a dozen, respectively. About a buck a dozen right now is about right. Anywhere from $0.99-$1.29/lb for the cheapie grocery store eggs.
This is from their website:
[quote]
Naturally Nested, Laid by Uncaged Hens
Naturally Nested eggs are produced by hens that are free to roam within our newly remodeled cage-free houses. A 100 percent vegetarian diet is fed to our cage-free chickens, and as with all of our chickens, Cherry Lane[sup]®[/sup] takes special care to ensure these animals are naturally treated without hormones, stimulants, or steroids. To further our responsibility toward managing all of our chickens with the highest level of welfare, Cherry Lane is proud to be a part of the United Egg Producers Certification program to show our compliance with United Egg Producer’s Animal Husbandry Guidelines.
[ul][li]Locally Produced and Distributed[/li][li]No Cages[/li][li]No Hormones[/li][li]No Stimulants[/li][li]No Steroids[/li][li]All Vegetarian Diet[/li][li]No Animal Fats or By-Products[/li][li]Carton Made from 100% Recycled Content[/li][li]Hen Welfare – UEP Certified[/li][li]Naturally Nested hens are laid by uncaged hens[/ul][/li][/quote]
So it looks like they’re not ‘battery-farmed’ in the sense that I think of the term.
I can’t remember the last time I saw eggs that cheap. ISTR seeing eggs for $1.99/doz. several years ago. 
Yeah, the cheap grocery-brand white eggs are about a buck a dozen. The fancy organic eggs from Happy Acres Chick Heaven are around $3-$5 a dozen depending on brand and how happy the chickens were. There’s also battery-produced brown eggs that cost in between – I guess the fact that they’re brown makes them worth an extra buck over the whites to someone. My wife used to buy some ‘organic’ eggs from Land of Lakes that came in elaborate plastic packaging. That always amused me that the eggs were supposedly earth-friendly but the packaging much worse than the cheap paperboard cartons. On my own, I get whatever quasi-organic eggs are on sale. Left to my own devices, I’d just eat the cheap ones but my wife is convinced that they’re inferior.
The farm eggs are sold for $3.50 a dozen out of a cooler next to an unattended pencil box that does duty as a cash box. She puts them in salvaged paperboard cartons.
I thought the best eggs were free range, where the chickens were eating all sorts of bugs and stuff, not just corn. Is that not the case? Or does the “good feed” contain bug-equivalent stuff?
Yeah, I was just at the store, and checked, and it was $0.89/dz large eggs, $1.09 extra large, $1.19 jumbo (Hamilton Eggs). Cheap brown eggs were $1.29/dz large (but of a different brand, Dutch Farms. I believe their white eggs are actually the same price.) The most expensive were $5.99/dz, some cage-free organic hippie eggs. I didn’t get the name, though.
This is why I avoid them. I see these nasty birds eating bugs, dead mice and each other’s shit all day. I’ll just get the nice, clean white ones from the store, thank you very much!
Also, the fresh ones have very thick shells that are hard to crack, and usually get some little pieces in with the egg. And we’ve already established what is on those shells.
Jeez, I hate chickens.
Ideally, you feed the chickens good feed that includes plenty of protein, and let them range freely enough that they can scratch for bugs and mice and such.
Chickens eat mice?
Chickens eat everything they can get their beaks on. And the last time we saw a mouse in Mom’s coop, the hens all fought over who would get to eat the delicacy.
Do they pick it apart, or are they able to swallow it hole like a bird of prey?
Well, round here, Pipsi the Cat usually dispatches the mouse, leaving it at or around the back door. Said chickens find and eat it. It always involves a “Catch Me If You Can” scrum, where the birds all fight over the diseased carcass, until one of them is *Victorious!, *and gets to eat it. Lots of pecking and bits tossed about.
Nature is a fucking disgusting thing.
As much as I am fond of my dogs, I don’t let them anywhere near my mouth. They find the mouse first, often. And worse things.
OK, we have raised backyard chickens for a few years and probably had about 30 total (goddamned 'coons and bobcat).
Store bought eggs are watery. You crack it into the fry pan and it just oozes all over. A backyard chicken egg cracked into a fry pay is much thicker, doesn’t ooze all over the place, and kinda stays in a smaller circle.
Our chickens eat well. They are serious garbage disposals. Pretty much anything (excepting chicken meat, which would be an abomination) gets pecked away until it’s gone. Leftover oxtail, check; watermelon, check; crab, check; grains used in beer making mash, check; egg shells, check; any kind of bug, check; any kind of worm, joyous check; will take your entire backyard down to dirt, check; leftover anything, check.
Egg size depends on the type of chicken. We have a range of 5 different I’m not sure what all these days. Bobcat survivors is one way to describe them. Anyhoo, yesterday I got a chicken egg that’s bigger than a jumbo egg. The eggs are pretty small the first couple months of laying and then get bigger.
I haven’t actually done a blind triangle test, but pretty sure one can tell the difference. Certainly, the look and feel of a non commercial chicken is better.
IMHO, it is refrigeration that kills eggs. I used to get eggs at a farm that just provided a few extras to their friends, and none ever got refrigerated. They keep quite well for a long time. In South America, also, I bought my eggs at the neighborhood tienda, and they had never been refrigerated, just a basketful sitting out on the counter, buy them by the piece and they wrap them in newspaper and you carry them home carefully, and we never put them in the fridge at home. They were wonderful.
You should, and make sure to do the bit where you put food coloring in so you are judging only by taste, not by color. Despite what everyone in this thread says, I’d be astonished if anyone can really tell the difference.
People tend to forget that birds are tiny, feathery, descendants of dinosaurs. The meat-eating ones.
That’s definitely another difference I’ve noticed. Maybe it has to do with the age of the eggs or something but, like I said above, it’s like the difference between a flabby bicep and a toned one. The good farm eggs I’ve had are much tauter and keep their shape on the pan.
If the Serious Eats guys say there’s no difference, I guess I’m inclined to believe them, but texturally and psychologically (visually) I notice a difference in at least some farmed eggs that enhances the eating experience for me. Like I said, some taste the same to me as store bought eggs, some don’t.
From what I’ve read, the texture difference is more a matter of freshness than farm vs. mass-produced. Fresh eggs have whites that tend to stay together more.
Color-wise, definitely a difference. That said, color does not equal taste.
We go through a LOT of eggs here - easily 3 dozen a week - and for a long time I bought only farm eggs, either fresh from the farmer’s market, from farmers I personally know, or from the local co-op. But I’d occasionally grab a carton from the grocery store, and I gradually realized I can’t tell the difference in taste. Given that most of our eggs are either scrambled, hard-boiled (in which case less-fresh is better), or in things (baked goods, omelets, etc), the texture/freshness thing doesn’t much matter to me. I’ll grab the happy-chicken eggs when it’s convenient because I like happy chickens and I want to support local farmers, but I don’t avoid the grocery store ones because I find them inferior.
That may be part of it. I eat my weekend eggs sunny side up so the yolk is very pronounced as opposed to being scrambled or part of a cake. Heck, even the taste-tests were mainly scrambled aside from the final one. I don’t think a sample size of one is a meaningful data set 
Anecdotally, I’ve made my wife eggs using the farm ones and she remarked, unsolicited and unknowing where they were from, that they were good eggs. Again, sample size of one and meaningless.
I did wonder about that. To me, a scrambled egg is a waste of a good fresh egg. Either over easy, sunny side up, or soft boiled. Of course, the taste testers did get the farm egg wrong in the last test, so who knows? Might have to try the taste test blindfolded, but might be a bit messy with sunny side up eggs.
I went to Trader Joe’s for lunch today, and picked up a dozen eggs. The Cherry Lane brown eggs are $2.69. The cheapest eggs (the ones I bought) are Cherry Lane Grade A Jumbo Eggs, which are white. They were $1.99/dozen.
I guess eggs are just expensive in Washington. Or else, they’re really cheap where Jophiel lives.