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Ban On Free-Range Eggs Shutters Bed And Breakfast

Saturday, March 19th, 2011

Paul Offer gather eggs from his 75 hens twice a day, but he won't be able to serve them at his bed and breakfast any longer.

A Prince Edward Island bed and breakfast that has been operating for decades has decided to close down next year rather than stop serving eggs from its own hens because of a government order.

The Doctor’s Inn in Tyne Valley, northwest of Summerside, also operates an organic farm. Paul and Jean Offer sell their organic vegetables and free-range eggs at the Charlottetown Farmers Market, and offer the produce to customers at the Doctor’s Inn at breakfast and dinner time.

But after years of serving their own eggs, the provincial Department of Health has told them they have to stop. The department said it’s a long-standing policy that food service operations can only use federally inspected eggs.

The idea of having to buy eggs from the supermarket, rather than use their own from the 75 hens in the coop out back, was too much for the Offers. They will operate this season, and then close the business down.

“When the Department of Health came around and said, ‘No, you’re not allowed to use your own eggs, you have to use store bought ones, or inspected ones,’ we just turned around,” said Paul Offer.

“Jean and I are getting older, we just looked at one another and said, ‘OK, that’s it, we’re out of business.’”

Joe Bradley, manager of environmental health for the Department of Health, said the main issue with eggs that aren’t federally inspected is the risk of salmonella contamination.

“The problem is that there’s the potential for handling a contaminated product,” said Bradley.

“You contaminate your hands, and the hands aren’t washed. A food preparation surface may be contaminated.”

No crackdown

Bradley said the rule has been the same for close to 20 years, and there’s no crackdown.

But the Doctor’s Inn is not the only well-established business to recently learn of this rule. Six weeks ago, the By the River Bakery and Café in Hunter River was told it had to stop using free-range, uninspected eggs.

“Our work is always prevention,” said Bradley.

“Why take the chance when you have the ability to purchase a product from a government-approved source?”

Offer said he inspects all his eggs and believes they are safe. He and his wife Jean eat the eggs, and have never been sick. He has never had a complaint in many years of selling them at the Charlottetown Farmers Market.

And, in his opinion, they taste better too.

Source: CBC

Posted in Real Food | No Responses »

Black Market Egg Sales Ruffle Feathers

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

To farmers’ markets across the country they flock, foodies in search of free-range eggs fresh from the farm.

But they must move quickly because demand far outstrips supply. The eggs – laid by hens that roam free, eat bugs and live an existence that is antithetical to the life of the caged battery fowl that produce for supermarkets – sell out quickly. That is, unless you know who to ask and where to find them. Or, in some cases, the secret password.

Dawn Woodward, owner of Evelyn’s Crackers, an artisan baked-goods company in Toronto, will show up at the market at seven in the morning for farm-fresh eggs or drive an hour out of town to find them. When she’s leaving the city, she phones ahead to place an order with one of the hundreds of small farms in the country that sell pastured eggs.

“The flavour is better,” she says. “They are fresher and richer. They’re sweeter, a fuller flavour.” She prefers eggs laid by hens allowed to scratch and wander – when she can get them.

This longing for farm eggs has pushed the price of a dozen to about $5, roughly the same price you pay for organic eggs at the supermarket. In California, where alternative eggs have reached cult status and where the farmers who raise them are stars – starmers – a carton can cost $8 (U.S.). The eggs offer smaller producers a good revenue source. But this growing market for a different kind of egg is creating tension between the small farms that raise them and the egg marketing board that has helped to develop the mainstream egg industry in Canada and its large chicken farms.

This tension now is putting the future supply of this sought-after product in question as what some call the “egg police” crack down on the grey market.

“It’s a huge issue,” says Tom Henry, a Vancouver Island farmer and editor of the magazine Small Farm Canada. “The right to sell eggs is the small-farm equivalent of the right to bear arms.”

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Posted in Dietary Industrial Complex | No Responses »

Spent Laying Hens Fed to Schoolkids

Monday, December 21st, 2009

The meat is stringier, tougher and generally speaking less appealing than the tender meat we have come to expect from conventional broiler chickens. That hasn’t stopped the USDA from using the National School Lunch Program to get rid of some of the 100 million egg-laying hens culled each year.

The egg industry needs to find new markets to “dispose” of spent hens as more mainstream customers drop off because of the notoriously low quality. The primary options include pet food, cattle feed, composting — and schools.

Meat that is no longer good enough for KFC and Campbell Soup is being fed to our children, hidden in salads and chicken “burgers”.

Because the hens from the egg factories are often restricted to tiny cages, stacked from floor to ceiling, they are exposed to high levels of fecal dust and subject to heavy stress. This may account for the higher levels of salmonella infection and osteoporosis which leads to bone splinters in their meat.

USDA Allows Meat In Schools that Doesn’t Meet Fast Food Chains’ Standards (Huffington Post)

Fast-food safety rules trump those for school lunches (USA Today)

Posted in Factory Farming | No Responses »