organic or locally-grown white eggs ?

[i-leonardo.livejournal.com]

i'm having no joy finding organic or locally-grown white eggs, can anybody point me in the right direction ?  the white eggs at the local stores all seem to be industrially farmed and, my pangs of first-world yuppie guilt about battery farming entirely aside, the shells are so fragile they break if i look at them funny.  speaking of which, pointers to a decent optometrist wouldn't suck, either (but the eggs are more important).

thanks!

Comments

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

Why is the color of the eggshells so important to you?

[magid.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the original poster, but for me, it means that it's much less likely that there are blood spots inside, since it's easier to candle white eggs. That makes it less likely I'll have to discard some for kosher reasons.

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

I didn't know you could find blood spots without breaking them open! That's nice, since it means you could potentially give them away to someone else.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

They do it this way at the factory too, but as someone pointed out above, the brown eggs are more likely to have blood spots even after they've been factory-candled because the process just isn't as accurate.

That said, I've probably eaten a half dozen brown, local eggs a week on average for my entire life (I'm 28) and I think I've encountered a blood spot once, so the risk just doesn't seem that high to me.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I've found blood spots a lot more than that, and noticeably more in brown eggs than white eggs (I once ditched four out of a dozen, which made me rather unhappy). Perhaps our definitions of what a blood spot is differ, or I am just much unluckier.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

While I am inclined to believe that because I do not keep Kosher I am probably less likely to be looking for them or remember them when I do see them, they are a pretty high-contrast anomaly on the egg surface and I feel like if I did see them, I'd be inclined to examine them more closely just to make sure they were what I thought they were, and I don't remember finding myself doing that at all.

Of course it is also true that I do not turn the yolks over to look for blood spots so I may have missed a few that way.

At any rate I think I can safely say that the rate of blood spots in the Whole Foods store brand extra large organic eggs that I buy is lower than the local average for brown eggs. :-)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Sorry, not what I meant: at the farm/factory/whatever, there's a process of candling, to weed out eggs with blood spots. This is more effective when the eggs are white. Once they make it to my kitchen, the way I find the blood spots is by breaking them and looking at them, at which point they're ditched if they have any.

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

Hmm! I didn't know that egg-producing places checked them for blood spots. What do they do with the ones that have them?