Food Blog

Spar and Centra, two names I’m not truly familiar with but will have to get used to if I want to buy my own food while in Ireland. These are two of the more popular markets you will find in Ireland. These stores remind me a lot of IGA’s in America; they are small but have essentially everything you need without the variation of brands. One type of food in particular caught my eye, the eggs. They were on the shelves! My first thought was that they accidentally put them there while the workers were making room for them in the fridges. There was so many boxes of them though and they were organized so I really had to think about it to myself. Suddenly a worker walks by so I decide to ask, “excuse me MS, are these eggs still good to eat, they are warm and on the shelve?” She looked at me with a more puzzled look than I was probably giving off and said, “the eggs do not go in the fridge, they go on the shelves” and then she just walked away. It was then I realized that common food storage in America is not the same everywhere in the world.

I decided to buy the eggs regardless of how they were stored because I love to have my two over easy in the morning; however, it prompted me to do some research when I got back to the Hostel. I did not realize how Irish eggs were mostly farmed locally while eggs in supermarkets in America were farmed on bigger corporate farms, with upwards of 3,000 chickens laying eggs each and every day. After reading this fun fact I decided to look at the box holding my eggs I just purchased for 2 euro. It read “freshly laid by hens with freedom to roam freely on organic pastures”

This made me think about egg cartons I see in stop & shop and how I tend to buy the 30 pack of eggs each week, it made me realize that there was no way the farmers in America let their chickens roam free each and every day to feed the United States population. I began to realize that the eggs I buy in America aren’t the same quality I’d be able to get in Ireland because the chickens in America weren’t treated the same. This made me think about where else I could buy eggs from that the animals were treated better and it made me think about the Farmers Market on Metacom Ave in Bristol, RI. When I get back to America, I’m only getting locally farmed eggs!