Part the first: Is it possible to breed for hens that produce ONLY jumbo-sized eggs?
Part the second: If it is possible, WHY THE FUCK HASN’T IT BEEN DONE?
BONUS THIRD PART: If it HAS been done, WHY THE FUCK HAVE NON-JUMBO-EGG-LAYING HENS BEEN BRED OUT OF EXISTENCE YET?
I see, because you prefer jumbo eggs, everyone must prefer them. Or if not everyone must still only have access to them because you prefer them.
Some chickens lay larger eggs some lay eggs more frequently. Some are better for eating, som less so (where do you think all the males go)
I once knew more about this years ago. Chickens have been selected for egg (layers) or meat (broilers) production. Off the top of my head, laying jumbo-size only eggs might decrease the number of eggs a hen lays in a clutch (A clutch is a group of eggs laid by a hen on consecutive days. After laying a clutch, a hen has a rest period of about a day or more and then lays another clutch). So, it might come down to “would you want 6 jumbo-size eggs or a dozen regular-size eggs?” The hen needs to take in resources from the environment and convert them into the egg: shell, yolk, white, membranes, etc… and she can only do so much.
The keywords “chicken layer genetics egg size” returns some links you may be interested in.
I buy large eggs, never extra large or jumbo, and by switching from jumbo to large I eat 30% fewer calories as far as my egg consumption goes. If I only ate one egg a month it wouldn’t matter, but I eat eggs every morning. I don’t miss jumbo eggs, my mother bought them when I was a kid because she thought they were better, but bigger isn’t necessarily better.
If I remember correctly from growing up on a chicken farm, the really big double yolk eggs tended to come from young chickens. Jumbo single yolk eggs were pretty rare. The vast majority were large (24 oz. per dozen).
Young chickens lay smaller eggs when they start laying than they will when they’re older. So there are always going to be some smaller eggs produced.
Larger eggs require larger chickens – not only are larger chickens more likely to lay larger eggs, but you don’t want tto breed that out of them, because a small chicken trying to pass a large egg, especially with the frequency with which a modern laying hen is expected to do so, is likely to run into problems. Larger chickens require more feed and more housing space.
There appears to be market for eggs of various sizes. Not everybody wants a jumbo egg. IME jumbos are often double yolks, and I’d rather have single yolks as I can never quite figure out whether to consider a double yolked egg as one egg or two.
Double yolked eggs are often not shaped in such a way that they will fit into the carton. They don’t have small ends. We didn’t get that many that were anything other than large. Neighbors bought the ones that weren’t, because it wasn’t worth it to sell the few medium or extra larges to stores or distributors.
I just read somewhere that the majority of recipes are based on large eggs. If you use different sized eggs, you’ll get results that are off.
Why would anybody bother with that when you can farm ostriches instead?
As a parallel question: Do you ever see white hen’s eggs for sale? When I was a kid, brown eggs were more expensive than white but they were both on sale. I do know that the only difference is the colour.
well here for about a decade you could get a dozen of large eggs for .99 a dozen because there was a glut but what happened is the “no antibiotics in meat” crowd gained ground so farmers quit giving them to the chickens …
right in time for a bird flu epidemic and in 2 years millions of birds were dead worldwide due to either dying from it or being destroyed from infection ending the glut and raising prices that are just now evening out …
The difference is that brown eggs taste better because they cost more.
Of course, the fact that the vast majority of those chickens were kept in the most squalid conditions imaginable had nothing to do with it. I am no supporter of PETA, and I am certainly not a vegetarian, but I would prefer that the animals that produce my food are kept in decent accommodation and die as humanely as possible.
Bird flu is a viral disease and antibiotics would have done diddly to keep those birds from getting it or dying from it.
That’s why I prefer free-range eggs. I don’t buy the ones that are kept in the tight clamshell-type containers. The eggs I buy come in shoe box type containers so they can roll around to their heart’s content. They definitely taste better.
I have kept laying hens for thirty years or so. Chickens are not machines, they are animals, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Though industrial laying breeds have been manipulated genetically to lay very large eggs in huge quantities night and day for a year (they are not allowed to sleep, roost, or even walk) without any let up and then be ground up for dogfood, for the previous thousands of years chickens have been domesticated, this was not so. My hens are not atypical for a homestead flock – they are dual-purpose (decent carcass on a cockerel, old hens are stewable), lay seasonally, and continue to lay well for about five seasons before they begin to taper off. Like other female animals, they are born with all the eggs they are going to lay. Industrial measures force hens to squeeze them all out ten times as fast as natural.
Jumbo eggs, I suspect, are at the far edge of the cost-benefit ratio the chicken is capable of, genetically.
Learn to like duck eggs. They’re bigger.
My mom has chickens (not exactly free-range, but they’ve got a big enclosure to move around in), and their eggs range from Large on the small end to Extra-Jumbo on the large end (she once got a single egg that weighed four ounces). She can’t find cartons big enough for the largest ones. How many she gets varies from hen to hen, and with their age and the weather, but it’s generally somewhere between one a day and one every two days.
I suspect that most factory chickens are bred almost exclusively for laying frequency, with very little regard to anything else. Most customers, if they’re buying eggs, are just looking for “a dozen”, and grab the first dozen they see off the shelf. So it makes sense to crank out that dozen as quickly as possible, since that’s what customers are looking for. Some people, of course, will still look specifically for eggs of a particular size, but the natural variation in size is probably enough to meet that demand.
Color of eggshells has nothing to do with flavor or nutrition; it has to do with the breed of the chickens.
What the chickens are eating most definitely affects flavor of eggs and can affect nutrition. It can also change the color of the yolk, though not of the shell.
Whether the chickens get to run around in a sufficiently large area affects the flavor and texture of the meat; what they’re eating can also affect it. “Free-range” is a somewhat blurry term, however. “Pasture raised” may be a little better. Knowing the producer is better yet, but not practical for everybody. – “cage free” means no small cages, but it doesn’t mean there’s any outdoor access, and it doesn’t mean there’s not crowding inside a large barn space.
Places selling brown eggs for more than white eggs are basing their charges on the assumed ignorance of their customers. In some areas, for some years, white eggs were the factory-produced standard because the breed that produced the most eggs on the least feed lays white eggs, and brown eggs were only produced on small farms that were more likely to be letting the chickens run around outside and partially feed themselves; that, I think, is where the impression came from that brown eggs were better. However the factory producers figured out there was enough of a price premium for brown eggs for it to be worth it to some of them to keep brown-egg-laying chickens instead; so brown eggs may now also be factory eggs.
Yeah, what’s up with this “no antibiotics, EVER!” nonsense? What if the cow, pig, or chicken gets an infection? Are they just supposed to ignore it?
Some farmers will euthanize the animal as a precaution. Most will simply provide antibiotics to the ill animal, probably move it to a different barn or different facility and then sell it as a standard super market variety with no “NO ANTIBIOTICS” label.