Naturalpath

he course of running our b&b, 'Ive eaten alot of scrambled eggs. I've gone dozens of articles and scoured the e internet to find the perfect recipe and method to create what - for all appearances - would seem like the easiest dish in the world to make.

Eggs are little packages of goodness. And they are cheap. Or used to be, before eggs stopped being “eggs” and became “cage free,” “organic,” “antibiotic free,” “fed a vegetarian diet,” and the like. The egg is no longer an egg, but a choice. And eating eggs is no longer just about taste or health, but about food purity and animal rights as well.

Eggs come from chickens, not cartons. But in the grocery store I, too, pause at the egg case in frustration. What do all the labels really mean? Which eggs should I buy, and for which reasons?

Conventional egg production, otherwise known as the battery system, crams as many as six chickens into a cage at a time, leaving each bird with less personal space than a sheet of ordinary notebook paper. Critics say the battery system causes the spread of disease, requires the painful debeaking of birds, and restricts natural bird behaviors, such as dusting or nesting.

I didn’t want to buy eggs from these birds, but wasn’t sure how to figure out which eggs came from which birds. So, after talking to farmers, poultry scientists, and a physician, I put together the following guide to egg-carton terminology.
Brown eggs

Brown eggs come from chickens with brown feathers, and white eggs come from chickens with white feathers. The color of the shell indicates nothing about the egg’s nutritional profile, taste, or the manner in which the laying hen was raised.
Natural

“Natural” sounds swell, but the label is unregulated and lacks meaning.
Vegetarian / Vegetarian diet

This label indicates that no animal by-products, such as beef tallow or chicken feathers, are in the chickens’ feed. And “vegetarian” sure sounds healthy. But chickens are natural omnivores who like to spend time outside digging for protein in the form of insects and worms, so the “vegetarian” label is really just another way of saying that the hens can’t go outside.

Still, an all-vegetarian diet is nutritionally possible for chickens with the addition of synthetic vitamin B-12.

Sustaining Yourself

"Heartburn is an increasingly common problem in our culture facing probably 50 percent of the population.

Recently my mother in law (who seems to have an opinion on just about everything I do, by the way) commented to me (and not for the first time) that my husband and I must have lots of money because we always seem to buy whatever we want at the grocery store without considering the cost. Sorry Mom-in-law, but we don’t have a fortune tucked away under the mattress. We simply have decided that what we eat is a priority in our lives, and from a financial standpoint, we consider it a good investment in the future.

  This observation really has nothing to do with becoming pretty strict vegetarians a year and a half ago. Even when we ate meat, the weekly supermarket run ate up a pretty good chunk of our paycheck. I would say that today the amount we spend is about the same as before the change in diet.

I would have liked to think that giving up animal products would ultimately be cheaper, but that hasn’t been the case yet. A lot of my acquaintances over the past year or so have commented that they were sure it would be much more expensive to be a veg*n, but that hasn’t been the case either.

A food craving is not just hunger, rather it is an intense desire to eat a particular food. We tend to crave certain foods more than others. Research has shown that chocolate tops the list of favorites followed by pizza, salty foods such as potato chips and french fries, then sweets, bread, high-protein and fatty foods.  Food cravings are also dictated by the time of day, with late afternoon or early evening being the prime period when the "must have" feeling kicks in.