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Comment by huehehue | Hacker News Reader

There's at least a third explanation as well, which is the fact that eggs from farmer Tom down the road are likely to taste 1000x better than the egg-inspired food product in a McGriddle.

I can't imagine many people are thinking "Screw local farmers, I want Tyson Chicken Nuggets!". That might be a bad example but the point is that cost is probably the bigger factor here, not politics or lifestyle or even taste.

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I’m not disagreeing with the trust of your comment, but despite popular belief, McDonalds does use real eggs.[1,2] Though there’s no doubt that an egg from a chicken who has walked around, eating bits of grass and bugs, will taste better and have a better nutritional profile.

[1] https://yourquestions.mcdonalds.ca/answer/does-your-egg-mcmu... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/27/are-mcdonalds-eggs-real-fast...

It does, but only the McMuffin sandwiches really taste like it. The others use the folded egg that they get premade and frozen.

The folded eggs used to be made from fresh eggs. Did this change?

It must have, if they were. It's still made from eggs, they just make a bunch of liquid egg and then make it into these shapes and freeze them & ship to restaurants. The scrambled eggs in the big breakfast weren't frozen, though. They could made with the sort-of-real liquid egg stuff or just fresh eggs, I'm not sure.

Strange... We used to have a blender for both scrambled eggs and folded eggs. Crack the eggs in, blend them smooth as silk and Bob's your uncle.

They microwave them though, eggs are good when they're cooked a in a bunch of fat with herbs and spices.

Yes, but only a small/unknown brand can successfully hide the fact that it's been cooked in a bunch of fat and properly salted/spiced. Once the brand becomes big enough, people are forced to confront the fact that the good food is good on account of being unhealthy.

Eggs are insanely cheap. I’m not sure why anyone would bother to fake them.

Perhaps surprisingly, fake eggs do exist.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/06/how-to-make-a-rotten-egg...

To economize other costs on the supply chain and to standardize quality

This plus spoilage, durability & logistics costs. (which you might be already including).

>> there’s no doubt

There is very much doubt about that. Stanford (IIRC) did a study and no one could tell the difference.

i would also add to "taste" and "nutritional profile", (3) the well being of the chicken, (4) the well being of the factory workers who tend to them, and (5) the impact on the environment where the non-industrial chickens are raised. the more dimensions one considers in the multivariate optimization, the more McD's starts to lose value (geometrically, even).

> better than the egg-inspired food product in a McGriddle.

People always use this as an insult, but how cool would it be if fast/processed food providers had actually found a way to make eggs/chicken/beef/etc artificially? It's been an area of active research with decades of failed attempts to show for it. Achieving fast-food level quality would be a huge step forward.

The secret to fast-food "quality" is the same as any other restaurant: fat, sugar and salt.

Egg synthysizers exist and they're shaped exactly like chickens.

Now do it without a nervous system that can experience suffering

and without losing 90% (or was it 99%?) of the input energy to heat.

I think egg production by chickens is actually more efficient than that. If I'm reading Figure 1 in the following link correctly, it looks like modern farms are about 17% efficient for calories of food fed to the chickens to calories of eggs produced: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...

For comparison (from the same figure) pork is 9%, chickens raised for meat are 13%, cow production of milk is 17%, and cows raised for beef are 3% efficient.

You are confusing a recipe that you don't like with an ingredient that you don't like.

You seem to be implying all eggs taste the same, which is not true.

Eh, at least one test seemed to show that there wasn't a noticeable difference: http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/08/what-are-the-best-eggs-ca...

There's a massive difference in taste, and an objective measure that correlates well with this - namely, the thickness of the collagen sheath just underneath the shell (eggs being single cells.) It's an excellent correlate of the overall health and nutritional value of the egg. If the egg can't even protect itself from breakage well, the rest of the egg isn't ideal, either.

>There's a massive difference in taste

You feel that way, but all evidence says otherwise.

>and an objective measure that correlates well with this - namely, the thickness of the collagen sheath just underneath the shell

Measuring that is objective, but there is no evidence it correlates with taste at all.

>(eggs being single cells.)

I honestly don't know how to say this nicely. You expect people to take your pseudo-scientific nonsense seriously when posting things like this that clearly show you don't know the most basic facts on the subject? A bird egg is not a single cell. The ovum is a single cell, and is a tiny spec on the surface of the yolk. The yolk, the white and the membranes are all not part of the single cell ovum.

>It's an excellent correlate of the overall health and nutritional value of the egg.

Show us the evidence. That is an easily proven objective claim, so where's the evidence?

Next you'll be saying that all carrots taste the same. Or wheat (my grandfather was an elevator operator - it doesn't at all according to his account, due principally to local soil conditions - different geology.)

Science isn't whatever meets your expectations. While the egg isn't functioning as one big working cell, it's not made of cells, it is what became of just one cell. More here if you want the discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ry2ug/are_chick...

As for what healthy eggs looked like, I'm guessing you haven't spent much time on a farm. The fragile, rather sickly eggs you're so used to buying now were unknown on farms fifty years ago, when I was younger.

> The yolk, the white and the membranes are all not part of the single cell ovum.

Do these contribute additional cells to the egg that must be counted?

There is a huge difference in taste between different types of chicken feed. The same chicken will produce thick, dark orange, bitter yolks with one type and lighter yolks with another, in both cases free to roam and eat bugs and grass.

So any taste test that doesn't find a difference between eggs isn't testing the right eggs.

I can taste the difference.

Did you do a double blind study?

You don't have to blind a study when the effect size is big enough (the classic example is the ridiculousness of a double-blind test of the use of parachutes). See my other comment for how easily egg flavor can be altered.

He's right to be distrustful. People are terrible at taste tests. If you ask people how something tastes, they will tend to tell you what they think they're expected to taste rather than what they actually do.

There's plenty of scientific evidence for this based on wine studies[1], but on a personal level, the tongue map myth[2] is the one that gets me. It was taught in science class as true, and we did (non-blind) experiments to measure the effect, but we failed to conclude the effect didn't exist.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map

People are terrible at taste tests.

True, but after being served backyard vs. store eggs without being told which is which, or which feed type was in use, or that anything had changed at all, and still noticing a difference, I am confident that it is possible for the flavor of eggs to vary.

+1 for "food product". i use that more accurate term frequently.

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