You Are What You Eat

Walking down the grocery store aisle towards the eggs, you arrive at your destination only to be greeted with a plethora of decisions to be made. White eggs? Brown? Cage-free? Organic? Pasture raised? Vegetarian-diet fed? Or just the regular store eggs? In the coming articles we will go over exactly what all these labels actually mean. For today, we shall focus on the first one: White or Brown?

In general, people think of the brown egg as the poster-child for healthy, farm-fresh eggs.

However, under the shell there really is no difference between a white egg and a brown egg, or even the blue and green eggs you may have seen for sale at some farms. Shell color is actually dependent on what breed of chicken laid the egg. Just like a mockingbird will lay a different colored egg than a robin, different chickens lay different colored eggs. If fed the same diet, both a white-egg laying hen and a brown-egg laying hen will be nutritionally equal. The secret to finding healthier eggs is really dependent on what the hen is eating.

If you want to see the evidence of an eggs’ nutrition, check out the yolk. A hen fed, corn, seeds, or scratch grains will produce pale yellow color yolks. Hens that are allowed to forage outside and eat plants, bugs, and whatever else they find are going to lay eggs with yolks that are much darker – closer to a deep orange. The reason for this is that the yolk is nutritionally denser. We have observed this even with our own hens. You can have the exact same breed of chicken, one in a coop and one out free-ranging all day, and the eggs will have two totally different colors of yolks and tastes.

One question remains though…what was Dr. Seuss feeding his hen that she laid those green eggs to go with his ham?

To learn even more and get hands-on experience, join us at Grace Heritage Ranch for our Saturday morning tours. We are located just 30 minutes northeast of Harlingen, TX near Santa Monica. Please visit us at www.GraceHeritageRanch.com or www.Facebook.com/VisitGHR. For a recorded message, please call 1-855-447-8687. We offer both public and private tours.