For centuries, none of this was a problem, because nobody was trying to transport these fragile, messy, spoilable ovals long distances. Many American families never bought eggs. Chickens were ubiquitous on farms and homesteads—easy to raise, quick to reproduce, and free to fatten, given that the omnivorous birds are adept foragers and happy consumers of table scraps. Ranchers and growers would sell their “farmwives’ surplus” from April to July, when laying peaked.
Around the turn of the 20th century, as the supply chain started to transform, so did the chicken and the egg. Selective breeding cleaved the broiler bird from the laying hen, the former specialized to grow fat thighs and breasts, the latter specialized to pump out eggs. Chicken farming became an industry of its own, and egg farming another.
Specialized farmers moved their flocks indoors, reducing mortality rates. They figured out that lighting their barns spurred the birds into laying more eggs, and into laying them year-round. One farmer who rigged up a 50-watt bulb noted that his hens were “cackling and behaving in liveliest fashion,” laying eggs at all hours, as recounted in Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History. Farmers started to lift hens off the floor on wire-mesh systems, making barns easier to muck out and tamping down infection.
A spate of agricultural innovations helped move the newfound bounty to market. Multiple inventors came up with the egg carton early in the 20th century, meaning farmers no longer had to use baskets and crates. Conveyor belts, incubators, sandblasters for cleaning, and egg-grading machines for measuring helped commoditize the product. The nascent industry piggybacked on innovations in the meatpacking industry. Companies transporting sides of beef in refrigerated trucks and warehouses began accepting eggs too.
Even so, customers preferred fresh, local eggs to faraway, cold-stored ones well into the 20th century. Eggs were not routinely “candled” to check for spoilage, meaning a home cook never knew what cracking one open would bring, Freidberg writes. For a while, dehydrated powdered eggs became popular. The American military bought millions of pounds to feed soldiers during World War II. Bakeries started using frozen whites and processed frozen yolks. Analysts figured that consumers would opt for these stable products too. “The shell egg is fading in importance,” a member of the American Warehousemen’s Association concluded in 1941. It did not fade in importance. Advances in chicken-rearing, sanitation, shipping, and packaging, as well as advertising, brought consumers around. By the 1960s, many Americans were eating commodity eggs, rather than ones produced by local farmers or hens in backyard hutches.
Industrialization made eggs cheap. But it came with a cost, particularly for the animals that produced them.