Ironically, you cannot choose how comfortable the human's life is for most products.
If you put the eggs up your butt at the grocery store, you can choose how uncomfortable everyone will be.
Where do you get your human eggs?
Buried in the sand like turtles, where do you get yours?
Hard as shit to find, but looking for products from worker cooperatives can help you to find free range human goods
You kind of can depending on where it was made
There are certifications out there like FairTrade and others that try to make labor less slave-like in the world. Guess you could call that a way of making human life more comfortable
In France the « bio » label (https://www.bioagricert.org/en/certification/organic-production/ab-france.html) does bot only take into account ecological properties of the product but also many metrics relative to the social quality of the company and well being of its employees.
Okay but there actually is a pretty significant difference between eggs at the store vs buying them from someone who has chickens.
There was actually an egg shortage a while ago, but lots of people who were raising chickens couldn't sell their eggs because, and I quote, "they were too rich in flavor and texture, so people didn't like them".
It was hilarious and sad that high quality eggs was just something no one ever tasted before, so they couldn't suddenly get used to the flavor.
It'd be like if you drank skim milk your whole life only to find out regular "whole" milk is actually supposed to be creamy lol
This happened to me. My mother raises hens so when there were big egg shortages, we got some from her. The yolks were so rich that their color was practically orange and they would stain anything they got on. I've never had eggs so delicious and flavorful, plus anything I baked with them came out so rich and delicious. They really were almost overpowering and a little disconcerting to get used to. I'm amazed how bad even the best store bought eggs are now.
This was my exact experience as well! One benefit of a relatively small town is a lot of people have free range hens and you can get some really tasty eggs
100%. If you break a store egg and a farm egg next to each other, especially in the spring when the chickens start having access to insects again, the farm egg is almost cartoonishly orange next to the store egg.
I had a farmer I got eggs from for years and years. I was so lucky. 50 cents a dozen from 2003-2017. I eat a lot of eggs too. My family goes through two 30 packs a week.
He told me about a month before he stopped. “I done got old, can’t do it anymore. I keep falling and if I break my hip they might as well take me out back and give me a mercy bullet.”
I asked everyone under the sun. No one I found after that was consistent. I thought I found someone a few times, they disappeared after a few months. I gave up and started buying my eggs from the store.
All things must pass. Damn though, that one hurt to lose.
During my quest to find a new source for eggs though, I found someone with duck eggs. I figured, “Ahh, an egg is an egg, right?” Wrong. Duck eggs are not very tasty. They’re fine as an additive to a cake or something, but no way will I ever eat them again. Gah.
There's a market down the street from me. They bring in Amish eggs every week and I always buy them there. The yolks are so bright and the eggs are delicious. Costs maybe 1.5x what regular eggs cost but they're so worth it
I got this from a classic boomer dad of a girlfriend, about chicken meat. He said free range chicken was “more gamy” and he preferred uh…. Chickens raised in tiny cages who can’t move around, apparently. Ok psycho.
Just because it came out of someone's back yard, doesn't mean it's high quality. So many chickens get table scraps and little else. Not everyone is suited to keeping pets, let alone livestock.
I told my American colleagues that in Denmark we get 3 consecutive weeks off during the summer, and the company is not allowed to contact us. We also get an additional 2 weeks off we can use whenever we want. Oh, and + 5 days (in hours). Again that we can use whenever.
Their jaws dropped.
Or the fact that we actually pay people to study (~1000 USD a month), instead of putting them into crippling lifelong debt.
Meanwhile my boss's boss was telling me last year that I had taken too much of our "unlimited" PTO after 2 weeks...
And I literally can't leave the office for ten minutes to go buy lunch downstairs. Gotta bring my lunch and eat it at my desk while fielding internal and external questions.
Not how comfortable their life is, how much you buy their industry's marketing spin about the option for a chicken to stand in a pool of chicken shit, hormones and antibiotics or to be forcibly laying in it for the entirety of its life.
Your options are wretched vs horrific.
Eh, there's also substandard:
The best option is to raise them yourself. But almost nobody does that, so I guess you pick how much you want to spend for the chicken to have a better life.
Where I'm from, there was a huge egg shortage for a while because ~5 years ago the government passed new laws to try and make things marginally less horrible for chickens. The entire industry decided that they were going to do... basically nothing, then the rules came into force and there was lots of winging from industry people that 5 years want enough time, and how hard it was not being able to sell all this product that they kept producing for some reason
That wasn't honest incompetence. That was a failed, organized attempt to force a repeal.
Sounds familiar, living in the Netherlands where farmers had years and subsidies to reduce reliance on livestock for the environment, then protested when the rules came into force and they hadn't used the time or subsidies to prepare.
I live in Shanghai and in all supermarkets in big cities above average neighborhood ones, you do have options for higher grade and organic eggs, fyi.
You can say anything about China and Americans will believe it, like that one story about exploding helmets
At least here in the UK, unless you directly see where that egg was laid, assume it was horrific.
Reminds me of one time I discussed egg ethics and the number system in europe with my fellow german student flatmate.
Our other flatmate was a syrien refugie and when he came in and we translated the subject he laughed - a whole lot. When he was able to speak after that epic laughter he just said "in syria its people in cages and you fight about chicken."
Reality had been checked
Yeah, it's good that we think about solving these types of problems, but I think it's healthy to be reminded that it's a privilege to be in a position to spend mental energy on it.
I mean its nothing but a marketing spin all chickens suffer harshly in the egg industry. Even a true CCP devotee wouldn't be surprised and would probably expect meaningless marketing differences to get a leg up on competition.
sure, but at least where i am, free-range chickens have a minimum of 1 sq. m. of space, which is 0.9 sq. m. more than otherwise
Unless you're a male chicken, then your range is whatever the dimensions of the Live Rooster Masher is.
Did they tell you it is the same for cows in Japan?
It is pretty fuckin creepy that it’s become a standard in all grocery stores that ‘cheap torture’ is an option at all and it’s only because of capitalism flexing that it could the choice to not be evil and we should be grateful for it with more $$
"Does it involve an egg?" - Bortus, Moclan, The Orville.
We got the "500 cigarettes" meme out of it, but that whole series is so fucking memeable.
What, are they all battery farmed in the great People's Republic of China?
I've spent a decent bit of time there on a few work trips. Never saw differentiation of eggs in supermarkets (or restaurants). Eggs be eggs.
A huge number of folks are just coming into non-poverty since the turn of the century so it would seem entirely plausible to me that chicken comfort wouldn't be a thing there just like it wasn't in the west until comparatively recently and still isn't for a huge part of the population.
Apart from that it's really very different culturally. They just view things through an entirely different (and interesting) lens.
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