The eggs files

A new app gauges the happiness of the chooks who laid the eggs in most supermarket cartons.

As a primary producer and self-sufficiency zealot, it came as quite a shock last Sunday night to find I needed to buy in to the ugly system that is big-retailer egg supply in this country. But I needed eggs. And at 5pm in my town, which is typical of so many around the nation, it was Down Down or nothing.

By way of explanation, a perfect storm has hit the hen house, my manipulated polyglot society of eight hens of five different breeds (all living in perfect harmony, I might add). At least three relatively recent arrivals at Chez Coq Lethlean don't seem to have reached what poultry buffs refer to as "point of lay" — that is, the necessary maturity to start laying.

Another three seem to have gone on to a generous superannuation scheme and retired from the laying game altogether. They should be playing lawn bowls and canasta.

I know what some of you are thinking, but, no, they will not be going anywhere near the stock pot, not with names like Buffy and Trinny.

Which leaves two to do the heavy lifting, and it seems to be the time of year when nature and demand conspire to move in opposite directions. They are either off the lay, or dropping their googy bundles somewhere other than the designated zone. In any case, there was no making egg pasta without buying eggs. It was the first time I'd done so in three years.

Given my druthers, I would have visited my local independent grocer, who stocks a local brand, Real Eggs. I've actually been to the property where these eggs are produced; chook conditions don't get better. But it was the grocer's Sabbath and he was probably watching footy on the box, not selling real free-range eggs.

So I was forced to tackle the ugly truth of the commercial egg industry head-on and buy from the Down Down a carton sold as "free range" — a definition that might work for someone who believes, for example, Donald Trump to be a moderate individual, or ISIS a misunderstood group of patriots, but not one that works for me.

Or Choice, for that matter.

Horrified by a recent meeting of consumer affairs ministers at which it was decided that a definition of up to 10,000 birds per hectare was fine for a national standard for free-range eggs (Choice backs the CSIRO's recommended 1500 birds per hectare), the consumer group developed an app for smartphones called CluckAR, which filters egg packaging through its own, more realistic, criteria. Scan the packaging and the app rates the product on its free-range-o-meter.

Results range from "too many to count" (fail) through to "this is like Chook Hilton" (pass, as in true free range).

It adds a certain level of welcome digital disruption to the supermarket trip. It also provides the facility to email Choice an image of packaging the app doesn't recognise, although that didn't seem to work so well when I tried it. The person at Choice who checks the egg-carton pictures must have been laid off.

Needless to say, none of the eggs at Down Down got a Choice pass; I purchased with a heavy heart and made a wonderful new dish called guilt-ridden pasta.

I won't do it again.