Abroad - White Chicken Eggs

[josaphine32]

HI, Can anyone tell me why when you are abroad that when you see chicken eggs they are so white, not brown or speckled, and are the chickens all white.

sorry but this has been really bugging me.

Thanks
jo

[spudqueen]

I know that in the US white eggs are thought to be healthier (there is actually no difference) so all the eggs you see for sale in the supermarkets are white. Presumably the hens that lay this are bred because they lay white eggs, or all the brown ones go to the food trade.

[mallam]

Apparently if the eggs are all white the chickens are indeed all white. And brown eggs are laid by brown chickens. There is no nutritional difference, but brown eggs LOOK so much healthier, don't they? The Americans are of course loopy.

In Japan I soon discovered brown eggs are called 'red eggs'. The original colour system has been supplemented with plenty of colourful words, but expressions like that stick. I suspect it was the same with the redskins, which was apparetnly their name for themselves,, but which is now so unPC that there is a ridiculous fuss about the Redskins baseball team!

[Graham-W]

There is even a chicken that lays BLUE eggs. It's called an araucanas if you are interested in googling it. The blue colour goes all the way through the shell so the shell is blue on the inside as well.

[josaphine32]

Year i understand what you are saying but I keep Silky Bantams (white so called chickens ) and there eggs are no where near as white as the ones that we saw at our resturant. also are the hens white?

[mallam]

Sounds suspiciously as if they might be bleached to make them dazzlingly white enough for the above-mentioned loopos. The bleaching of white bread was for much the same reasons.

And white rice. Then they found the talc used was giving statistically eye-popping numbers of Japanese stomach cancer.
These fads are a constant nightmare. You can't argue that no one eats the shell, as of course it is permeable to whatever they throw at it in the interests of the faddists' craving for snow-white 'purity'.