Are eggs on your mind?  ‘Tis the season!  Eggs will be hatching soon at the Minnesota Zoo’s Wells Fargo Family Farm.  Eggs laid by the Zoo’s chickens are incubated and hatched under the careful eye of our farm keepers.  Don’t miss seeing these young chicks in the chicken barn during Farm Babies.

Before hitting the dairy aisle, it’s also a good time to consider that age old question: what comes first—the chicken or the [sustainable] egg? With rising populations and dwindling natural resources, today’s consumers are thankfully concerned about sustainable food production—producing enough food to keep pace with demand while reversing and preventing environmental degradation.  Seems simple enough, but not all sustainable foods are alike.  What exactly is a sustainable egg, for example?

Eggs produced commercially in the United States are the result of many sustainable practices, although addressing waste from poultry farms remains a challenge.  In the past 50 years the egg industry has made tremendous advances in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing water usage, and improving feed efficiency (which means fewer acres of corn and soybeans dedicated to chicken feed).

But we’ve also learned more about chicken health and happiness over this period, and new advancements have popped up to ensure we’re not putting the egg before the chicken, so to speak.  Many eggs are now labeled ‘organic,’ ‘cage-free,’ ‘free-range,’ ‘pasture-raised,’ or ‘grass fed’ because egg producers recognize the importance of animal health and welfare to maintaining high yields in the long term.  What hasn’t caught up is consistent labeling.  Without regulation, these labels can be somewhat misleading because the criteria for any given label may be quite different from one production facility to another.  Until we have consistent labeling, your best bet may be to do your own research to determine the level of sustainability of the eggs you buy.

Egg-stra Fun Facts

• Don’t throw them out! Eggs are often good for three to five weeks after the date stamped on the box.  That’s because sell-by, best-by, and best-before dates on food packages are used by manufacturers to indicate when a food tastes best, not when it is no longer safe to eat.
• To refrigerate or not to refrigerate? In many European countries, eggs are not found in the refrigerated dairy aisle of the supermarket, but on a shelf next to the bread and pasta.  How can this be?  When food scientists discovered the link between eggs and salmonella, two basic approaches were developed to address the problem: in the United States, eggs are washed and refrigerated to prevent the growth of the bacteria.  In Europe, chickens are vaccinated against salmonella so washing and refrigeration are unnecessary.  While both methods work equally well to prevent egg-borne illnesses, refrigeration has an added benefit of increasing shelf life.
• An egg in the cupboard is good for about 21 days, while an egg in the refrigerator can remain fresh for up to 50 days.