**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

I tend to buy the highest quality free range eggs available... but the options are limited and obviously they're not fresh off the farm.

I hate to bring this up, but there's a few different labels that get put on eggs and they are not synonymous.

Pastured chicken eggs are the gold standard. This means that the chickens live in a pasture (perhaps with a coop to offer protection from predators) and they mostly eat bugs, as they want to do. They are usually given chicken feed to supplement their diet of bugs, but they rarely eat the feed, 'cause they're fat on bugs. These chickens are making what most people consider to be the most tasty and least smelly eggs.

Organic is a meaningless label. Plenty of stuff that is bad for chickens to eat and which affects the flavor of their eggs is under the banner of organic. Ignore it, and generally distrust any company trying to sell you eggs with this emotive, but factless, label.

Free range is also a misnomer. It means the chickens are kept in a warehouse-type farm which has a door out to a 15' x 15' plot which the chickens never use or explore. There is no real way of knowing what they're being fed. That said, if the egg seller isn't bragging about vegetarian-fed chickens, then there's a high likelihood that the chickens are being fed chicken, not to mention plenty of other waste "foods" which are discarded or unusable for other purposes. The food a hen eats has can have a dramatic effect on the smell and flavor of her eggs.

Even the vegetarian fed label is misleading, because the farmer is bragging about not letting the chickens eat bugs, which is what chickens want to eat, after all.

To be clear... I don't care about the living conditions of a beast which has been selectively bread for centuries to be delicious on my plate. A super-market egg is still a delicious food to me. The idea that chickens live in "unnatural conditions" in warehouses is perfectly fine with me. My palate is not refined enough to even be bothered by eating a month-old egg.

What is "natural" anyway? If humans are beings in nature, then the things humans do are natural.


***
Curse you for making me curious about this stuff.

I don't think I overcook eggs. I boil them for six minutes, ideally I want a solid albumen and a runny yolk. It's just that after I've eaten, I go to wash up, and the kitchen stinks of eggs. It's not actually my breakfast that smells, it's the kitchen. And it never smells nice, even though my eggs always taste great.

... dead rat behind the cabinets?

Some other reason your kitchen actually always smells and it's only when you're cooking that the smell seems less repugnant?

Some chemical reaction between your cooking ingredients / utensils and your cleaning products?

You make eggy farts in the kitchen after you've eaten the eggs and you've made a false correlation between the smell and your kitchen?

I certainly don't eat eggs that float.

Use 1 Tbsp of salt per cup of cold water to test this... or so I read on the internet today when I wanted to know what you were talking about with floating eggs.