Quote Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey View Post
I hate to bring this up, but there's a few different labels that get put on eggs and they are not synonymous.

Pastured chicken eggs are the gold standard. This means that the chickens live in a pasture (perhaps with a coop to offer protection from predators) and they mostly eat bugs, as they want to do. They are usually given chicken feed to supplement their diet of bugs, but they rarely eat the feed, 'cause they're fat on bugs. These chickens are making what most people consider to be the most tasty and least smelly eggs.
having difficulty believing that , sounds more like propaganda put out by the animal welfare lobby, given the choice most chickens ill happily easily accessible food .

Organic is a meaningless label. Plenty of stuff that is bad for chickens to eat and which affects the flavor of their eggs is under the banner of organic. Ignore it, and generally distrust any company trying to sell you eggs with this emotive, but factless, label
only difference with organic is that the feedstuffs that they are fed on a predominantly organic , so more likely to have slightly mouldy feed and aflatoxins depressing animal performance , since the organic cereals won't have been sprayed to stop the moulds and fungii growing on the crops.

Free range is also a misnomer. It means the chickens are kept in a warehouse-type farm which has a door out to a 15' x 15' plot which the chickens never use or explore. There is no real way of knowing what they're being fed. That said, if the egg seller isn't bragging about vegetarian-fed chickens, then there's a high likelihood that the chickens are being fed chicken, not to mention plenty of other waste "foods" which are discarded or unusable for other purposes. The food a hen eats has can have a dramatic effect on the smell and flavor of her eggs.
There's a difference between the US and europe here . Meat and bone meal is banned from use in europe in animal feedstuffs as a result of BSE. in fact , feathers from uk chicken slaughterhouses are processed to remove the protein ( rich protein source) and then exported to the US to be used to feed mink.