Just in time for Easter, Egg But has gone all eggy. Be warned though, this is no quick peek while the boss isn’t looking post. It demands attention. It’s more of a magazine, only it’s printed on one long piece of none existent piece of paper. I suggest you print it off, take it home and sit and read it with a lovely cup of tea and a dippy egg.

Origins of Easter.

You all know about the Christian version of the celebration of Easter, so I don’t need to tell you about that. I also probably don’t really need to ramble on about the over commercialisation of Easter and the ridiculous amount of chocolate eggs that appear on sale soon after Christmas. Instead I’ll talk about what we used to do before Christian times, the original origin of Easter.

Eastre was the goddess of spring and fertility. A month equivalent to April was named after her and feasts were held throughout the month to honour her. At the first full moon after the vernal equinox (which is today!) there would be a special celebration. Eggs, a symbol of fertility and nature reborn, were painted brightly to represent the sunlight of spring and were given as gifts or used in egg rolling games. Another symbol of Eastre was the notoriously fertile hare. It is all sounding quite familiar isn’t it? As Christian missionaries worked to eliminate the pagan beliefs and traditions the festival and it’s symbols were taken over.

This year I suggest that rather than just using Easter as an excuse to eat poor quality, over-priced, over-packaged chocolate eggs (with meat in them), we should all remember that we are actually taking part in an ancient pagan festival. Go for a walk in a park or stand in the middle of a field and think about new life and the fertility this festival celebrates. Invite some friends to come with you and have your own Eastre festival. Roll eggs down hills, smile in the sunshine and celebrate the renewal of life.

If you are really addicted to the chocolate and just can’t do without why not make your own “Eastre Eggs” to give to people. Now that would be fun wouldn’t it?

Bigger is Better?

What sparked off this chain of eggy thoughts was not, as you may imagine, Easter. In fact it was instead an article I stumbled across about the size of eggs you should be buying.

I’d always thought that the bigger the egg the better. Small eggs were surely a sign that the chickens were having such a hard time locked away in little boxes that they couldn’t even manage to make proper eggs.

Then I read this article which said in fact it can be painful for the chicken to lay a larger egg and blood spots are often seen on the shells of big eggs.

Now I just can’t get the image of a chicken squeezing and squarking out of my head!

Evil supermarkets pay more for larger eggs so farmers are currently being encouraged to selectively breed larger egg laying hens regardless of the distress it may cause. Poor chickens. And bad me. I’m sorry chickens, I won’t do it again.

But still, I’m a little puzzled. When I looked after some chickens for a little while last summer their eggs varied in size, but overall I would say they were definitely large. I don’t know how you’d tell, but they seemed pretty happy. I assumed then they were laying large eggs because they were happy, which is exactly the opposite of what the article says.

What to do , what to do?

Maybe someone needs to make a chicken EEG machine. And then write a book about it. “The Chicken and the EEG”.

Organic? Free Range? What to Buy

I try not to shop in supermarkets. Now is not the time for a full on rant about their evil ways, for now I’ll just say I’m almost certain the world would be a better place without them. You can read more reasons why, specifically relating to the biggest nastiest beast of them all on the Tescopoly website.

I did go to a supermarket once though and the range of eggs they sell is insane. Organic, free-range, barn eggs, caged eggs, battery hens, corn fed chicken, freedom chicken. Each has a different price and related standards of welfare. But does anyone really know what they are buying? What does it all mean? Even within each label there are different certifiers with different criteria for certification.The Soil Association has a detailed article describing some of the differences in conditions between free range and organic.

At least this labelling exists though. The EU commission may soon scrap the legislation that requires the labelling of eggs according to farming method. This is a really bad move. The way people shop in supermarkets, buying meat and other animal products in such a sanitised distant way already means that people have little real awareness of what they are buying or where from.

People need to be made more, not less aware of where their food is coming from so they can make real informed choices which would hopefully lead to a demand for improved conditions for our animals. The labelling of eggs as being from caged hens led to a decline in their sales and to remove this is surely a step backwards. There is a more info here and a link to lobby the EU against this move.

Yet while moving towards free range organic is a good thing, preferable to buying eggs you know have come from badly treated birds it strikes me that as soon as big businesses are involved the first priority necissarily moves away from the animals welfare or healthy food production and instead is simply to make money.

Organic certification is prohibitively expensive for small scale producers. There’s no way Hilda down the road with her flock of ten chickens roaming around her back yard who sells a couple of boxes of eggs a week is going to pay hundreds or thousands of pounds to get the little stamp on her box, but I know which one I would prefer to buy.

The difficulty is finding Hilda. Having lived in cities most of my life spotting one of those little signs is a rare treat only experienced on day trips to the countryside. Keeping yourself supplied with eggs this way would be all but impossible for most. Plus all that driving around searching around streets and country lanes is no way a sustainable shopping habit.

Incredible Edible Todmorden have an amazing project titled “Every Egg Matters” . As part of it they have created a map so people who have spare eggs for sale can let there whereabouts be know. It’s brilliant. This is exactly the kind of project that should be happening in towns all over the UK. Not only is it giving people access to food produced locally in small flocks with better living conditions, but it also builds up a network of support for anyone interested in taking it a step further and keep their own chickens. Fantastic.

Keeping Your Own Chickens.

With environmental issues and peak oil meaning food security will become a major issue we should all be moving towards more local food which has less impact and gives individuals and communities more control over and awareness of their food supply.

Apart from growing some of your own fruit and vegetables, if you have the space keeping a few chickens is a great thing to do. Chickens are great recycling machines, they eat your scraps, poop them out to produce fertiliser for your garden AND they make eggs. Perfect. Infact they are better than perfect recycling machines; you get more out than you put in.

Apart from all that chickens are just brilliant! They’re so funny. Watching them leg it across the yard for scraps during my short stint as chicken keeper in Devon last year was one of the highlights of my summer.

For tips on keeping chickens on a budget, including how to build your own chicken house the Penguin book “Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps” sounds great. Originally released 1941 it has recently been republished as prices of second hand originals were going crazy due to new demand . Chickens, are definitely on their way back!

“Eggiwegs. I would like to….smash ‘em”

Probably one of my favourite lines in any book/film. It gets a mention just for that.

Knock Knock

Anyone who has made it to the end of this post deserves a treat. So here’s a joke for you. Lucky you.

Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Egbert

Egbert who?

Egbert No Bacon