The Importance of Free Range Eggs

The advertisers and sign makers in England are having a love affair with the Free-Range Egg.  Every food store, restaurant, and even the snack shacks have signage and advertising touting their use of only free-range eggs.  Seems reasonable enough, and ethically more responsible than eggs from an assembly-line style egg factory, agreed?  So, when we go to the supermarket to buy our eggs, we decide we too will be ethically responsible and we will buy free range eggs, even if they cost more than “cooped up” eggs (feel free to groan at that one).

In the egg aisle in the supermarket, there are at least 10 different brands of eggs and they come is several different quantities.  However, there is one characteristic in which they do not differ – they are ALL free range eggs.  It appears that the only eggs you can buy in England are free range eggs.  This gives us reason to ponder, “Why does everyone advertise that they only use free range eggs, when these eggs are, in fact, the only kind of eggs you can buy?”  Seems that the marketing funds might be better spent promoting other points.  Saying “We only use free range eggs” is kind of like saying “We only serve food on days that end with ‘day’ or on days on which it rains in England.”

To address our concerns over this (and by “our”, we mean “Jon’s”), Jon cornered a group of 5 Brits at a client luncheon and asked them to explain.  After a lively and informative discussion, we have learned that you can buy the other kind of eggs at Tesco, but they are only a few pence cheaper than free range; and purchasing these eggs supports the newer member countries of the EU (which, in most circles in England, is considered bad form).  We also learned that there is no such thing as non-free-range pork – apparently the pigs here are very smart and will always un-cage themselves to roam freely anyway, so the farmers don’t bother trying to cage them.  We don’t make this stuff up, we just report what we learn…

So, the importance of “free range” is somewhat of a non-event here.  Makes you wonder why a restaurant even bothers printing it on the menu.  At any rate, we have personally improved the lives of many chickens in England – of the eggs we have eaten in England, all have been of the free range ilk.  What we are looking for now is that rogue restaurant that puts out the sign saying “We serve only mass production egg farm eggs that are harvested inhumanely (and please try our veal too)”.  That would be noteworthy.

The bottom line is this: In England, free-range eggs are just not all they are cracked up to be.