WHAT ABOUT THEM EGGS?

We're all focused on eggs right now.

Salmonella has been found in thousands of egg cartons across the country. Here, just to get it out of the way, are the carton numbers to avoid: P1026. P1413. P1946. P1720. P1942. If you have any of those, take them back.

Now that that's out of the way, what about them eggs? My fb friend Andrew Murphy shared a really interesting MSN.com article recently that talks about the way most eggs are harvested - from caged chickens living in an area about the size of a sheet of copy paper. Apparently, though, chickens allowed to forage for bugs and the like - free range chickens - turn out to be much healthier and their eggs are healthier for us, too. Why am I not surprised?

A quote from the article:

"When you put four or five chickens in tiny cages, they can't engage in normal chicken behavior—pecking in the dirt, dusting. If they're in a cage, they can't do any of these things," explains chicken expert Gail Damerow, author of the classic Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (Storey, 2010). (She hasn't purchased a store-bought egg since 1982.) "The pressure of the wire cages against their feet causes infections, their feathers rub off on the side of the cages. Basically, they're just totally frustrated. They've got nothing to do. They can't run around and eat flies and take dust baths. They just sit and lay eggs—what kind of life is that?" One result of all that stress and cruelty is that confined birds' eggs contain less nutrition than eggs from hens with room to roam."

Charming. But read the article. There's a lot of real information in it too. Well, enough from me. Here's the link: http://health.msn.com/health-topics/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100262707>1=31036.

And, thank you Andrew!