Do organic eggs taste differently from regular eggs and why should we pay the price?

Organic eggs will have a richer taste than the eggs you buy at your local supermarket. The yolks will likely be dark orange rather than yellow and stand up taught, like a ball, in my experience.

Lest we forget, chickens are birds and naturally feed on bugs and seeds. Organic eggs will come from chickens raised like birds, rather than chickens raised like egg manufacturers. That, in and of itself, is, in my opinion, reason enough to seek out organic eggs and pay the price they are asking.
Fortunately, I live in the sticks and I get organic eggs free from friends that have chickens. Failing that, I’ll pay $3 a dozen for eggs from chickens, versus eggs from the store (70¢ at Walmart yesterday, I noticed).

I paid $1.71 for a dozen lately. I’d like to try the organic ones and hope the chickens honestly didn’t suffer.

I believe that the main difference is that the organic chicken had less antibiotics, hormones, and hopefully a ‘better’ life than non organic…

Either way. Sucks to be low on the food chain, and taste great. I hope /think chickens are pretty stupid. Hope they don’t really suffer in either case. But it is what it is. Either I kill it and eat it, or someone else kills it and I eat it. I fish a lot. I’m the one who kills them and eats them. Most of my meat comes from a grocery store though .

I’ll spare you the details, but I once clicked on a link that showed how eggs are factory farmed. I wish it’d been a computer virus instead.

I’m shamed to admit that, in desperation of finishing a recipe, I have purchased around 2–3 dozen eggs from the grocery store in the 10 years since.
Last week the local market had eggs for 39¢ a dozen, and I couldn’t force myself to stoop that low.

^^^^^^ Thirty nine cents ?? Why were they so cheap?? @MrGrimm888 I thought organic chickens were not given less drugs but none.

I do not know, @Aster.
There was a limit of 2 dozen @ 39¢.
I forget how much eggs are at Aldi, but I know Walmart was 70¢ a dozen.

Wow. Seventy cents. I need a second refrigerator.

Aster. If an animal requires medication, it will receive it. Most large animal farms dole it out in the feed, because any animal living in such close, unhygienic circumstances is susceptible to disease. The antibiotics help. But long term they are not good for the animal, or the animal eating it. And the overuse of these antibiotics raises the bacteria’s, and disease’s , and viruses immunity to an otherwise useful medication. The overuse of these antibiotics could, in theory, give birth to a pathogen or bacteria that is resistant to common treatment. The results could be cataclysmic.
But, in an animal farm, it is cheaper to be proactive, than reactive. So they pump them full of antibiotics. Cheaper than killing off thousands and cleaning everything after a mass endemic….Not my favorite subject of discussion….

I find that they taste better (richer), the shells are more robust, and the hens have very likely been raised and treated much more humanely. If you think about it, one egg is a serving of protein for an average sized adult. At the farmers markets, I am more than willing to pay the extra. Even 6 dollars a dozen comes out to 50 cents per serving. Not a bad price when you break it down.

The overuse of antibiotics in farming already has resulted in bacteria that are resistant to common treatments. There’s even some bacteria out there that are resistant to all treatment (some strains of TB for example).

That is the cost of cheap food.

Despite larger, yellower yolks, I detect very little, if any, difference in taste. Perhaps I need a tastebud transplant.

You would pay the prize gladly, I think, if you had ever been unfortunate enough to see chickens stuffed into cages so small their bones are sometimes broken from the pressure.

Smart or not, their pain receptors work fine.

@Pachy

If the organic eggs to which you refer were purchased from a grocery store (rather than from the farmer who is raising the chickens) There may very well be little discernible difference.

But if you can find a farm near you which has chickens you can see visibly walking around the farmyard and pecking and eating as chickens normally do, I would be flat out amazed if you couldn’t taste and see the difference.

When Martha Stewart still had her program on air, you could see the dramatic difference in the deep orange color of the eggs she used when cooking.

From time to time she would film segments featuring her chickens and what she fed them in addition to their grazing. All of her vegetable scraps went to the chickens, for example.

And knowing how persnickety Martha is to do everything just perfectly, I’m sure those chickens had a great life :)

Anyone who wants to try locating nearby farmers raising pastured chickens, just put your zip code into the website below.
This is for USA, not sure if it applies to Canada as well. Check the fine print.
.
.
www.localharvest.org
.
.

The eggs we sell at our local farmer’s market are “soy-free”
They do have a different taste..a smoother taste and they
fly off our table for $5.00 doz. We even have customers
who will pay in advance to be sure and get our eggs the
following week! We grind all our own feed for all our animals
on our farm with out soy because it is an inflammatory and
messes with your estrogen. All our laying hens are on pasture
all day exercising and eating bugs and put up at night. Our eggs
are delicious and talked about at the market!

Respectfully @MooCows, if soy “messes with your estrogen”, how did Asians evolve?
From soy sauce to tofu, soy bland, tasteless rubbery SOY seems to be a major part of the national Japanese diet.

@MooCows

If you lived within driving distance from me, I’d definitely be getting my eggs from you and making sure I reserved some in advance each week.

And I’ll bet they taste terrific.

“Organic” is a term subject to federal law. The law is written to protect the corporations, not the customers. In practical terms, “organic” does not mean anything, “free range” does not mean anything, none of the advertising terms mean anything. “Small”, “medium”, and “large” are defined, and “grade” refers to how pretty the eggs are.

If you get a chance to raise the chickens yourself and be sure they get to eat bugs and weeds, then you will have a noticeable difference in eggs. Not before.

@SmartAZ Yep, we have 22 free ranging, bug eating, weed eating hens here and our eggs are delicious. I have kept chickens for 20 years and store bought eggs are like store bought tomatoes. Pale, flat tasting and artificially raised. You are correct, these labels mean nothing, other than to lure in the consumers that don’t know any better.
” Free range” might mean no cages, but 200 chickens on a dirt lot the size of your living room and devoid of forage is not much better than caged.

But you know as well as I do, @Coloma, all you have to do is crack one egg to know whether it was laid in torture or tenderness.
:-)