A British egg in 1955 came from a hen that had been outside that morning. The hen had eaten grass, slugs, beetles, worms, and whatever the farmer's wife had thrown into the run from the kitchen. The yolk of the egg was orange, occasionally so deep an orange it looked almost red. It stood up in the pan when you cracked it. The white was thick enough that you could lift the egg by its yolk on a fingertip if you were careful and the egg was fresh enough. The hen produced perhaps 180 eggs a year. The flock was small, twelve to twenty birds, attached to the farm or the smallholding or the back garden. Eggs were seasonal, abundant in spring and summer, scarce in autumn, almost absent in winter. A British family in 1955 ate eggs when the hens were laying and ate something else when they weren't. A British egg in 2026 comes, in the overwhelming majority of cases, from a barn of 16,000 birds confined under artificial light at carefully controlled temperature, fed a formulated diet of soy, wheat, and synthetic vitamins, producing 320 eggs a year per hen by extending the lay through the winter dark months. The yolk is yellow because the feed contains a synthetic carotenoid called canthaxanthin, dosed to produce the colour the consumer expects. The yolk does not stand up in the pan. It collapses under its own weight, spreading thin across the surface like a slow puddle. The pasture-raised egg contains roughly three times the omega-3, twice the vitamin E, considerably more vitamin A and D, and more folate than the commodity egg. The peer-reviewed literature has been saying this for twenty years. The egg has been the standard breakfast protein on the British plate for four hundred years. The modern egg looks like the old egg, costs roughly the same, and delivers approximately a third of the nutrition. The British shopper, examining the box at Tesco, has no way of knowing this. "Free range" means the hen had access to a door that was theoretically open at some point during her productive life. A pasture-raised egg from a small producer at the farmers' market costs approximately 50p. A commodity egg from Tesco costs approximately 25p. The price difference is the entire reason the system exists. Find a small producer. Pay 50p. The yolk will tell you what an egg used to be.