I find the free range eggs tasting marginally better than the cheapest Tesco/Asda/Morrisons Value eggs. They have a nicer colour of the yolks and a tiny bit more flavour. But if you ask me, it's definitely not worth a 4x increase in price.
The taste difference might not be worth the price, but to my mind the difference in how the hens are treated more than makes up for it.
I think that both Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have done programs that have covered how poultry is farmed, but which ever one it was that I watched it definitely left me with the lasting belief that I don't want to eat eggs or chicken that isn't free range.
I don't know what a free range egg is. Is that a designation for premium eggs at the market, or your way of saying "eggs we sourced directly from a farm"?
[Following up: the answer appears to be "it's a designation for premium eggs at the supermarket".]
In the UK, 'free-range' is a legal designation, as opposed to battery-farmed. To call eggs or poultry free-range, certain standards must be met - not very high standards, but enough to exclude stacked-cage-based methods. We also have various other marks defined by other bodies: some companies (e.g. Marks & Spencer, a supermarket chain) define an in-house standard, some are defined by charities (e.g. the RSPCA, a bird conservancy), and so on.
A free range egg is an egg from a chicken that was allowed "free range" of a farm habitat for at least X hours each day (as opposed to being kept in a cage the entire time). A free range chicken usually, but not always, gets better feedstock and usually does not receive antibiotics or hormones.
Organic eggs are by definition free range eggs (in the US at least), but the reverse is not necessarily true.
It depends on the country but in the UK it basically means the chickens are not caged and have access to an outside area and it puts a limit on how many birds you can have per square metre
I don't know if it's a EU norm but in France eggs are marked with a sequence starting with [0-3]FR, with 0 being the best quality i.e. free range eggs, and 3 meaning battery eggs.
Funnily enough, where I am, you can't buy eggs in a supermarket that aren't free-range or better. Demand for eggs from caged hens just dropped completely, and now you can't get them.
Are you in Europe? This isn't entirely a demand issue as such; the EU has introduced regulations (relating to cage size, treatment etc) which make battery farming of chickens a less attractive proposition for producers, especially for egg production. The production cost difference is now small enough that, given that there _is_ a bit more demand for free-range, it's not really worth it, at least for eggs to be sold commercially.
Or more likely, all farmers increased the size of the cages or connected them with the outside so they can now class them as free range, even though the conditions have not improved that much?
No,it's not. "Outside" could mean an equally small space,just outside of building. Sure,it's better,but it's no where near the real "free range" where chickens are just free to go wherever they like. It's more about space that they get rather than whatever they are outside or not.
