Chicken and egg facts

Eggs are the snack food or quick meal that only contains one ingredient: eggs! No sugar or carbs, and the least expensive source of high-quality protein with 6 grams for a few cents. Protein helps keep your mind and body going strong all day.

Egg yolks aren't future baby chickens – they are the food source for growing chick embryos. In the last hours before hatching, a chick absorbs the remaining yolk into it's body to keep fed for the first few days of life. Yolks are good for you too; with choline, lutein, Vitamin B, D and other important vitamins and essential amino acids.

The squiggly white line connected to the egg yolk is called the “chalazae” and helps keep the yolk centered. Eggs are formed from the inside out, starting with a yolk that grows larger as it travels through the oviduct, eventually adding the whites or “albumen”, then the shell comes last. When the egg is laid it is 105f. As it cools, the liquid contracts forming an air pocket on the large end. Eggs are laid large end first.

Nearly 200 breeds of chickens exist in the world. Some are bred for meat qualities while most are bred for egg laying. Eggs come in a wide range of colors from green, blue, and pink to white, brown, and even black. Shell color depends on breed as well as individual chicken and doesn't affect nutrition. Yolk color is affected by the hen's diet and thus may indicate nutrition. Cloudy egg whites also indicate a very fresh egg.

There are roughly 300 million egg-laying hens in the United States, producing 75 billion eggs a year, or 25 billion chickens laying 1.2 trillion eggs world-wide. There are more chickens on the planet than any other kind of bird and more chickens than people. In 1918, the United States government put out a publication asking families to keep two chickens per person in their back yards as part of their civic duty.

Spin an egg to tell if it's hard boiled or not: raw eggs wobble while it is possible to get hard-boiled eggs to spin on end. By putting eggs in a bowl of water, you can judge their freshness – fresh eggs sink while old eggs float. Eggs that are a little older and brought to room temperature are easier to peel than fresh eggs after hard-boiling.

Young hens lay more eggs, but older hens lay on average larger eggs. Young hens just starting to lay are more likely to lay enormous double-yolked eggs and other anomalies. The color of a hen's legs can indicate if she's laying eggs; bright colored legs mean she's not laying and dull colored legs show more nutrients are going to eggs.

Roosters don't cause a hen to lay eggs, light does. Hens, like humans, don't need a male to ovulate. Without a rooster, unfertilized eggs won't hatch, but will still be laid every 24-26 hours.

Roosters play an important roll in flock dynamics, not only by continuing the life cycle with regular new chicks in the flock, but also by watching out for predators and leading the flock in foraging for food. Roosters also dance for their hens called “tidbitting”. Without a rooster, a hen will sometimes stop laying and begin to crow along with other rooster characteristics.

When fertilized eggs are laid, they don't start developing until the hen starts sitting on them over night called “brooding”. All the eggs begin developing at once whether they were laid two weeks ago or that day. After 3 weeks of diligent incubating under a mama hen, the eggs will all hatch within a day or two of each other.

Hens are attentive and protective mothers; Jesus is said to have compared a hen's love for her chicks to God's love for humans, and ancient Romans gave the complement, “you were raised by a hen.”

The egg shape of a small end and large end is a development to keep eggs from rolling away. The angle of point varies by bird species; cliff-nesting birds having very pointy eggs.

The world record for eating hard-boiled eggs is held by a woman named Sonya Thomas for eating 65 eggs in under 7 minutes.