21 things about eggs lots of organic eggs

21 Things You Didn’t Know About Eggs

Gavin Wren Food Education, Writing

Eggs, beautiful eggs. We love eating them, we buy billions of them every year and all have an opinion on the best way to cook them. I’ve recently become an egg-spert on these fascinating storecupboard staples, having spent a few months researching far and wide into how the UK egg market operates on my Food Policy MSc course.

To celebrate the beautiful occasion of submitting this year’s final coursework, I want to share 21 things I discovered whilst writing my research. If you want to know more, just get in touch, there’s about 1001 things I know about eggs now.

21 Things You Didn’t Know About Eggs

1. The UK consumed nearly 12 billion eggs in 2014 and that’s increasing.
2. That’s 185 per person, per year.
3. In the 1960s, it was 250 per person, per year, but that figure slumped by the eighties.
4. 85% of UK egg consumption is produced

Free Range Eggs Box with little blue barn raised stickers

What Free Range Means and Little Blue Stickers

Gavin Wren Food Education, Writing

Have you seen those little blue stickers on the packs of eggs recently? The ones telling you that hens have been temporarily housed in barns? It’s because there’s been a bout of Avian Influenza (AI), a disease that’s bad news for the chicken population of the UK so they’re all being kept indoors to prevent it spreading and these stickers are part of that process.

A few weeks ago somebody on Twitter was questioning whether it’s right to carry on buying these eggs, if the hens are no longer free range. It’s a good question, and not a very easy one to answer. I also realised that many people might not know the difference between barn eggs and free range eggs, so I’ve written this post to spill the beans on how the 35 million UK laying hens spend their lives. After reading this, you can make a decision on