Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I didn’t know much about the differences. The busy packaging wasn’t much help and the company’s Web site implies a lot of overlap. Cage free? Sounds good. But what about the Certified Organic Eggs (“if you are concerned about man made chemicals in your diet and animal welfare”)? What’s the difference between “cage free” and “free roaming,” a lifestyle the organic chickens apparently enjoy? The Omega-3 eggs are bulked up with fatty acids, antioxidants, and Vitamin E, and so are the Vegetarian eggs. Yet the others are all brown, so why are the O-3s white? And what is a vegetarian egg anyway? Why can’t they just create one Super Egg with all these admirable qualities?
Cage-free fans are concerned about beak trimming and, obviously, cages. Simple enough. So are lacto ovo vegetarians, but they’re also working with a modified diet, so the company makes sure those eggs get some Omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin E, the same stuff that goes into the Omega-3 eggs. This is where it gets confusing, and a little strange. Brunnquell says the “nutrition” shoppers who buy those tend to prefer a white egg. “It’s probably in my opinion subconscious,” he says. “For us its a matter of which chicken we would feed to lay the egg.” The organic egg seems to come closest to my fantasy Super Egg and Brunnquell didn’t seem to disagree. “The issue is cost,” he said. Organic feed is alot more expensive, which is why those eggs generally retail for forty to fifty cents a dozen more than the others.
