Rainbow Eggs

Ok, so everybody knows I've been on this "know where your food comes from", "eat happy animals", "buy local" etc food kick over the last...year really. And it's been pretty great. The kids get excited to go to the farm, I get warm fuzzies about helping to support a local family (that goes to my church even!) and we eat animals that were well cared for, ate what they are supposed to eat and had plenty of recess and friends to play with. (and for the record, I have zero ethical issue with eating animals. I do not (no matter what my hubby says) think that "animals are people too" (thank you Mr. Morra)....but I DO think that by being put "in charge" of the animals of the earth, we must take care of them and not abuse them)

Back to happy animals.....

So the girls have gotten a kick out of being closer to our food....being involved in picking it out and knowing where it comes from. But there's been a recent additional thought running through my head lately.

After getting eggs from a farm for the last year, I've noticed that eggs come in alllll shapes, sizes, colors and even textures. It's pretty fun to open a carton of eggs and have pink, green, blue ish, and brown. Some have freckles, some are pointy and some look like runofthemill brown eggs you have to take a second mortgage on your house to pay for in the store.

But here's the difference: Even the organic, free-range, brown eggs in the store are allllll exactly the same shape and size. We pay extra for "happy" eggs from the store....but what happens to the funky pointed ones or the ones with freckles or the ones that are just a little bigger or a little smaller? Are they pitched? Are they sold as "odd bulk" at some store I've never been to?

Anyone who knows me knows that waste, particularly food waste drives me a little batty. I'm known to collect food scraps at other people's houses and bring them back for our green cone...just so they won't go into the garbage....yet producers of "happy" brown eggs don't think we can handle a carton of eggs that doesn't look all the same...and just like the last carton we bought.

It just bothers me to think about the amount of waste still happening even when you're paying extra for "better" food.