Locally Laid

by Lucie B. Amundsen

  Somewhere in the middle of the coop, I came upon another class of chicken, the Untouchables—huddled together in one nesting box. Perhaps they started life smaller, or maybe they were singled out for being a slightly different color, but these skinnier birds were missing tail feathers and most had been bloodied on their stumpy rears. Their combs had been pecked down to reflect submission. Honestly, they were a little hard to look at given the scars of violence they bore, and also the awareness that I wasn’t fully a farmer, just a woman with five pampered hens in her yard.

  When I gently tossed one of these fragile, lower-caste birds out of the nesting box to expose the eggs, the rest of the micro-flock hopped out after her. I suspect they felt safer together. Having trouble cupping up the last two eggs, I decided to take off the enormous glove and grab them. They were still warm.

  Sliding over a bit, I came around to a big alpha hen lounging in her own private nesting bin. Fat, with a gorgeous red comb, she puffed up to twice her size when she saw me coming. Taking me in with her beady side eye, she produced a low growl. It was unsettling. I wondered for a moment if she was broody—that’s when a bird is in a maternal state and determined to hatch the eggs underneath her. This can happen to chickens that have never even seen a rooster but just have gotten it into their minds that those eggs are fertile anyway.

  If her eggs weren’t gathered every day, the chicken would sit on a dozen, a full clutch, determined to incubate them for twenty-one days. She’d conduct a sort of sit-in, stop laying, and become vehemently protective of her nest, lined with breast feathers plucked from her chest—like the adage “to feather one’s nest.” This provides softness but more importantly exposes her skin to better transfer her warmth and moisture directly to the egg’s surface.

  When a mother hen is on the job, she’ll leave her eggs only twice a day to quickly eat, drink, and defecate a giant broody poop, some 500 percent bigger than her normal dollop, that she’ll drop far outside her nesting box. Fortunately, the hen in front of me wasn’t in a maternal state of mind, probably just warm and comfortable, though I still appreciated the default eye protection my glasses afforded me.

  I pulled my leather glove lower on my hand and snuck it underneath her before she could peck. I gave her a little lift, maybe you could call it a goose. There was a loud squawking protest, a rude whooshing of feather tips, and then she landed with a graceless thud and walked away with her beak bouncing forward and a harassed look. It was as if to say, “Geesh, you didn’t have to get physical.”

  Chapter 13

  By the end of the afternoon, I’d hoisted eleven baskets each holding about 120 eggs into the back of our minivan, a vehicle tricked out by Jason’s cousin Jake, a licensed electrician, and Jake’s handy dad, Dan. It now sported holding racks for baskets and a wall to keep the refrigerated air in the back. I reached down and shut the back door with a pleasant clunk, leaning an extra few seconds on the van.

  I’m told there was a television show called Pimp My Ride, and I think of the Egg Van as a losing contestant. It used to be my vehicle, and I missed it. This was a surprise. While a fancy car would be wasted on me, I yearned for something practical and safe that didn’t cause a rubbernecking commotion. It’s not like I’d even wanted a minivan, but when Milo was a newborn, Jason and I succumbed to the safety ratings and the large cargo space. My hilarious friend Julee joked that we should have stickers on our vans that read I’m wearing leather pants in here to offset the mom-jeans stereotype of driving such a vehicle.

  Clearly, it wasn’t hipster, but now that Jason had taken my grocery-getter to the farm, it’d been a loss. Not so much the roomy back, though I could cram in the skis, skates, bikes—not to mention the sizable school carpool. But what I pined for, I’m embarrassed to admit, was that minivan’s undeniable claim to middle class. Nothing says “I’m a middle-income momma” like a shiny grocery-getter rolling across the parking lot. Over these past few years of declining earnings and uncertainty, it felt like our passkey into the world of “everything’s gonna be all right.”

  Now I was stuck driving Jason’s old Honda Accord. You’ve seen it—I mean, not this exact one, but it seems Japan stamped out countless of these forest-green four-doors in the late 1990s. The make and model was ubiquitous. Jason’s particular sedan had just over two hundred thousand miles on it, and I was adding to it every week with my three-hundred-mile round trip to graduate school. It wasn’t the car’s high mileage that bothered me. It was the dent.

  After the last fender-bender he’d gotten into a couple of years back, Jason elected against bodywork, given that we were likely to get a new car in the near future. There was a good-sized crater on the driver’s side, made worse by the factory-provided scratch paint over the exposed metal. It wasn’t exactly the right shade of green, turning the door into a sad banner of “I tried.” I suppose these were all sensible decisions given the age and wear of the vehicle, but there was something downright depressing about driving it that way. Like piloting a rolling flag of failure.

  From the farm, Jason drove the Egg Van some thirty-eight miles out of rural Wrenshall north on Interstate 35 through Duluth and back out into the country again, to the store where we washed and packed eggs. While it was a modest addition to the product’s carbon footprint in the big scheme of food miles, a number typically in the thousands, it was something we cared about. Our light environmental tread had quickly become part of LoLa’s growing value system, but the problem wasn’t so much the turn on the odometer as the travel itself. Highway speeds and bumpy side roads broke eggs.

  No matter how conservatively we filled baskets or what kind of insulation we’d tucked underneath them, eggs on the bottom got crushed. When I thought of all the hard work that went into creating these brown-speckled beauties, it was hard not to take the loss personally.

  I entered the egg-washing facility, a windowless room in the back of the grocery store, with confidence. Whereas Jason was most comfortable out in the field, this was definitely my turf. I asked Ian (Gail and John’s son and a member of our paid washing crew—well, they were all paid but me) to fetch yesterday’s eggs from the cooler. Jason had delivered those last evening, the final task before his fifteen-hour day ended.

  From those two days, we had just over 2,300 eggs to process, putting Locally Laid at about a 72 percent rate of laying from our flock. Our egg counts had been higher in the fall, and there might have even been a week or two in there when the girls surpassed the fabled 86 percent—the target percentage of eggs we’d listed on our business plan.

  Later, Jason would say that when it came to business planning, he pulled the rookie mistake of grossly underestimating expenses and overestimating income. Not that we consulted the plan much anymore, given how off-rail our budget had gone with unanticipated entries on the expense side. These included paying farm neighbor kids to put the chickens in their coops on the nights when Jason managed to leave before dark. Those automatic poultry doors never quite worked right. We’d also endlessly—and expensively—fiddled with the chickens’ diets, adding minerals and even, at one point, costly fishmeal, hoping for more eggs and less bird savagery—not that we saw sweeping results.

  And I was standing in our biggest unexpected monthly expense—our rented processing room—which, along with everything else, fell under the QuickBooks column, “The price of doing business.”

  I didn’t love washing eggs and to be truthful, I still don’t. Feeling disinclined to spend four to five hours under the fluorescent lights of the processing room, I had days when I’d get annoyed that we indulged in the entire egg-washing rigamarole. And by we, I mean Americans. Most people don’t know that eggs, if left dry, can be stored, unrefrigerated, for several weeks—or so the old-timers say.

  And the entirety of the European Union.

  Washing an egg scours off its natural cuticle, or bloom, an invisible, protective coating that keeps it airtight and shelf stable—and the reason why EU eggs aren’t washed at all. Though, to be
fair, the barns in those countries tend to be much smaller than the typical million-hen U.S. operations, giving them a salmonella prevention advantage.

  Salmonella is a bacterium that grows in the intestinal tract of critters, or as one book put it, “leads a predominantly host-associated lifestyle.” It’s one of the most common causes of food poisoning and can be spread when infected fecal matter on a shell contaminates the yolk when the egg is cracked open. This has been the rationale behind washing, and that makes some sense; however, the risk doesn’t end there. Salmonella can also make camp in a hen’s ovaries, infecting an egg before there’s even a shell around it. Hot water can’t help that.

  That’s why government food safety websites recommend that we thoroughly cook our eggs, killing all germs. But not all eggs are consumed that way. Even if you personally avoid dipping toast tips into a soft-boiled breakfast egg or eschew classic Caesar salad, think of the last time you made chocolate chip cookies. Did you taste-test the dough?

  To prevent transference this way, the United Kingdom requires that their laying hens get vaccinated against salmonella. And even though there’s no law requiring this in the United States, we do it. It’s less than a dime per chicken and helps me sleep at night. After starting their vaccination program in 2009, the Brits dropped their infection rate to only 1 percent in their flocks.

  In 2010, when the USDA updated its regulations and placed its faith in washing and refrigeration, some 550 million American eggs were recalled. A nationwide salmonella outbreak occurred just after the new regs rolled out.

  There are other disadvantages to relying on washing. For one, it runs through untold gallons of water and then, once bereft of their bloom, eggs require refrigeration from washroom to cold truck to chilled commercial display cases and finally, your home. Some reefer trucks, as they’re called in the biz, have two engines—one to fire the pistons and one to crank the cold, adding to a product’s diesel impact. The whole thing feels wasteful.

  While I knew my way around the washroom, I tried to avoid “running” the crew myself, a group of four typically made up of two teens and a couple of adults. The crew leader responsibilities include both quality control of eggs, which I’ll explain more in a minute, and fulfilling the orders of flats—square, open cartons holding thirty eggs and boxed for wholesale customers like the Duluth Grill, two local bakeries, and a hospital, among our earliest commercial clients. Then there were cases of our typical cartons, sporting Jason’s nontraditional slogan of Get Locally Laid, with fifteen dozen to a boxed case, headed to our local co-op and one nearby grocery store.

  I’m relatively content placing dirty eggs into the front end of the egg-washing machine, the AquaMagic V I mentioned earlier. When I first saw this narrow, eight-foot-long invention, standing at chest height on metal legs, I was reminded of The Wizard of Oz and the scene of the Tin Woodman getting scrubbed and polished by large circular brushes, a device clearly inspired by egg-washer technology.

  Here’s how it works: Dirty eggs are put on an intake ramp in a repetitive manner, one by one by one. As each is placed, the ramp doubles as a candling device, forcing light from below to illuminate shell cracks or blood spots. Cracked ones are plucked off right away, as any break in the shell is a potential inlet for bacteria. Sometimes I’d see our young helpers hesitant to throw away an otherwise good egg with the smallest of cracks.

  “You gotta think of the little kids and old folks who’ll eat these. We’re watching out for them,” I coached.

  The rejected egg made an unpleasant spleck! sound as it broke in the trash bucket.

  Eggs with blood spots also need to be tossed, but honestly, we hadn’t seen any. These red flecks that artistically contrast with a yellow yolk have nothing to do with fertilization—though it’s a really good guess. It’s actually a spot of hen’s blood, an indication of a burst blood vessel when the yolk was forming inside her body. It’s safe to eat, but Americans tend to be put off by evidence of where their food comes from. I get it.

  After the candling inspection, the egg is picked up by a plastic chain conveyor and gently tumbled inside the machine, where it’s hit with jets of hot water and pushed between two scouring brushes. That this water is significantly warmer than the egg is crucial because of the porous nature of shells. Cool water would create an internal vacuum, pulling surface bacteria into the egg, contaminating it.

  Progressing down the line, there are more hot-water jets with gauges ensuring a steady ninety-degree temp, ending with a splash of light chlorine water (fifty parts per million) to disinfect the shell, per state mandate. Then a final blast of air from a fan and the egg tumbles out of the machine onto a wide, white tray.

  The person on the exit end, the crew leader, must then pick up and examine each one and determine one of four fates. If it’s still soiled, it takes a return ride through the AquaMagic; if a hairline crack is discovered upon second inspection, it’s tossed; if it’s somewhat lumpy and unattractive, it gets put into the Ugly Box, destined for our house. We eat uglies. A perfect beauty of a brown, speckled egg wins a ride on the weigher.

  Eggs pop out of the washer one every second, leaving little time for rumination.

  Turns out, I’m not fast enough to evaluate all these factors simultaneously. Not even close. I’ve had moments resembling the classic I Love Lucy skit where Lucy and Ethel can’t keep up with their factory line wrapping chocolate confections. The pair comically stuff sweets into their mouths and hats and down their brassieres to hide their slow progress.

  These are all poor options for eggs.

  But that doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten flustered. I’ve been known to rewash perfectly clean eggs or lose my train of thought completely and drop them on the tile floor. The soft thwap can be sickening, like denting a small skull. Jason thinks of it more monetarily, like he’s throwing a quarter (a generous approximation of what we gross on each egg) into the garbage.

  Clearly, I wasn’t built for the hot seat.

  Eggs deemed clean are placed in a plastic egg container and walked over to the vintage Egomatic, our midcentury egg weigher. Eggs aren’t sized by volume but rather by mass. The metal machine has a series of brass counterweights that, once hand-calibrated, will pass an egg to a metal hand until it finds the appropriate chute for its weight and then drops it down to be packed in as a Jumbo, Extra Large, Large, Medium, Small, or Peewee. I want to state right now that while Peewee sounds like a term I’d create, it’s actually the technical classification by the USDA for any eggs collectively weighing less than eighteen ounces per carton.

  Farmers would call these pullets, small eggs from newbie egg layers, and though there’s a bit of a foodie cult fascination with them because of their concentrated eggy taste, there’s not really a market for them, mostly because of the cost of cartons. Not that an individual carton costs so much—actually it’s about fifteen cents—but rather that you must buy them in bulk and pay for them up front. That can be a five-or six-thousand-dollar outlay, not to mention the designer’s time and our time getting it state approved. Then you’d have to beg for shelf space in the grocer’s dairy case, because honestly, when was the last time you bought medium eggs? Or even saw smalls or peewees in the store? Certainly not a lot of pullet eggs in the display case either.

  The truth is most Americans do not buy anything smaller than a large, partially because recipes call for that size. I’ve wondered if that’s one of those looping problems. Americans don’t buy mediums, so American cooks don’t create recipes for them.

  Jason has solved the smaller-egg problem by selling them to restaurants for less, but not the pullet-sized ones. In addition to uglies, we also bring home tiny eggs and the rare ones so large the jumbo carton won’t close. I hate seeing those because I worry about the bird that laid it. It had to hurt.

  There would be more of those bigger-than-jumbos as the months passed, since older birds lay larger eggs. Back then, our birds were youngish, so we collected mostly mediums and larges. As th
e hens matured, we saw larger eggs. In addition to being less desirable to consumers, jumbos are fragile. Incredibly so. A chicken produces the same amount of shell covering no matter the egg size, so you can think of it as blowing up a balloon. The shell just gets thinner, more delicate, and prone to breakage.

  Packing the last cartons, I looked around at our four-member crew and oscillated between marvel and horror at how many hands these eggs were passing through. You could say it started with me that morning as I plucked them out of nest boxes and then brought them here, where they were placed into the washer, inspected, often rerun and reinspected, then put into the weigher and packed. That could be counted as nine separate touches. But the handling really started before, if you think of the moving of fences and daily recharging of feeders and waterers.

  It’s enough to make an efficiency consultant drink bourbon straight out of my work boot. And it’s one of the primary reasons that eggs produced this way are some three times as expensive as typical eggs. Sure, our feed is more costly and, unlike confinement operations, we actually need farmland—both real costs. But I can tell you the bulk of that money goes into people, paying them.

  Conventional eggs, the $1.20-per-dozens from confinement-caged operations, are often not touched at all. Like never. Once that chicken is positioned in her cage, she consumes her feed from a conveyor in front of her, depositing her egg contribution onto another belt behind her. These eggs are then motored via belt over to an egg-washing facility, where they are automatically loaded into the washer, inspected by machine, and packed a dozen at a time by an articulated arm using a suction-type technology, releasing the eggs gently into their carton with a hydraulic swoosh. These types of operations don’t have people working as much as supervising.

  In comparison, we’re positively medieval.

  After rolling our last cases into the cooler, ending a solid four-hour evening with just over two thousand clean eggs, I felt thoroughly damp and fragrant with an eggy cling. I wanted to go home, but it was time to power-wash the machine. Whatever bits the pressurized water ushered to the floor—pieces of straw, chicken droppings, an odd feather—it all had be mopped up and surfaces disinfected. The evening ended with the unglamorous tossing of the broken-egg trash bag into the Dumpster behind the store. It was hard to keep track of how many we threw out every washing session. It would fill a good-sized Hefty bag halfway. It felt like a lot.