Grandpap farmers who let chickens be chickens back in the day would cackle over the latest on the egg front. The once-maligned egg is regaining esteem among some nutritionists, and more grocery shoppers are choosing eggs that harken to the farm of old while paying more for them than Grandpap ever could have imagined.

	Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette photos Ron Eichner collects eggs from his free range Hy-Line Chickens. The more than 1700 chickens have full run of the pens at Eichner Farms in the North Hills. Click photo for larger image.

Today, Palm Sunday, launches the single biggest week of egg buying. Last year, U.S shoppers bought 45 percent more eggs, on average, the week before Easter than in any other week, the American Egg Board reports.

When considering eggs for baking or to dye and hide next Sunday, more challenges exist, should you accept them.

There are the everyday varieties, and then there are the not-so-ordinary eggs to consider, many following a trend toward concern for the chicken's environment, what it is fed and how naturally it is allowed to live while supplying offspring.

Even if you are not egg savvy, you may have noticed the $3-plus cartons in your market. The most common of these brands in the super-sized Giant Eagles and Whole Foods Market in East Liberty are organics, omega-3 and cage-free eggs.

Here are a few distinctions: You could be a cage-free chicken but be elbow-to-elbow, so to speak, with other chickens. Crowding has long been a natural-foods no-no. You could be called a free-range chicken with a range inside four walls. Conditions within four walls vary. You could be pecking happily in a vast room with lots of sunlight and a porous wire floor for your droppings or bumping into other chickens on a solid floor.

Pasture-fed chickens might wander with abandon on a field that has been certified organic or on a field that has been sprayed with pesticides. You cannot be labeled organic unless you meet USDA standards that were passed in 2002, banning pesticides, antibiotics and hormones.

Eichner Farms chickens get on with their business of egg-making. Click photo for larger image.

Of the omega-3 eggs, some are organic, some are not. Omega-3 is a fatty acid found in algae, some fish oils and flaxseed and considered good for the heart.

This trend in eggs comes at a time when the egg in general has been let off the hook as the threat to blood cholesterol it was once believed to be. Yet many nutritionists say there are other foods that give you the good things the egg gives you without adding as much cholesterol to your daily intake.

The American Heart Association's position is that eggs are rich in protein, B vitamins and iron but their cholesterol content of 213 milligrams per yolk does not fall far short of the 300 maximum recommended per day.

Judy Dodd, a registered dietitian and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, says there is no difference in the cholesterol content of organic eggs and conventional eggs.

"Omega-3 fatty acids have demonstrated cardio-protective benefits in clinical trials," Dodd said, but "the emphasis in the trials was on fish and nuts."

Jen McAllister, a Chatham College graduate who is studying the history of eggs in baking for the American Egg Board, said she would choose fish and flaxseed to get her daily omega-3s, but, as a professional baker, she cannot live without eggs. She gets hers from a market in New York City, where she lives, from a farmer whose practices she knows because she has grilled him about them: "I believe that a good egg is worth finding these things out," she said. "I remember watching KDKA showing lines of people at the store with eggs, milk and bread," before a snowstorm. The staples are important enough to stock up on for an emergency, she said, "but people don't think they're worth paying much for."

The overriding factor for most shoppers is and always has been price.

All of Ron Eichner's eggs are not in one basket. Click photo for larger image.

At the Camp Horne Road Giant Eagle, Reni McKissic, of Sewickley, surveyed the variety of eggs and said, "At that price, no way would I buy them. Eggs have gotten expensive enough as it is."

At the Parkway Center Giant Eagle, dairyman Brian Campbell said he went through only one case, or 15 dozen, of the Horizon Organics a week. "It's demographics," he said. "Seniors aren't paying $3.29 for eggs. They aren't buying organic, either."

But a growing number of Pittsburgh-area shoppers are going that route. Retail sales of organic foods jumped 34.5 percent at what are considered conventional supermarkets -- Foodland, Giant Eagle and Shop 'n Save -- in the Pittsburgh region in the past 52 weeks, reports SPINS, a San Francisco-based data source on natural products.

Joy Rotoni, of Marblehead, Mass., founder of foodies.com, "a playful site for serious food lovers," swears by organic eggs. "When you crack a free-range egg into a frying pan, the white doesn't run all over the pan the way a standard egg white will do."

She also believes they are better for her daughter. "I am suspicious that hormones pumped into our meat and dairy products are culprits in the recent trend toward younger pubescence. She'll be a teenager soon enough."

The small farm or farmers' market may have the best of both worlds: An old-fashioned egg for the price of, or even less than, conventional eggs.

Jeanne Bojarski, of Franklin Park, was choosing a Giant Eagle dozen the other day at the Camp Horne Road store, though she said she rarely bought supermarket eggs, preferring the eggs at Eichner's Farms in McCandless: "They are so much bigger."

Eichner sells jumbo eggs for $1.65. Conventional dozens have recently been selling at supermarkets for about $1.75. Barry Leicher, an egg producer in Chicora, sells at $1.35 a dozen at his farm and $1.90 through the Penn's Corner Farm Alliance market on Saturdays in the Strip District, from spring to Thanksgiving.

Neither his nor Eichner's is an organic farm, but they describe their small farms as throwbacks.

Eichner keeps his chickens inside, on wire-mesh flooring, with natural lighting, to control their diet and protect them from predators, but said his practices rejected what he calls "the greed that is the driving force behind everything."

A chicken normally lays an egg every 24 hours, but the mass-production farms, he said, "fool a chicken to lay a second egg within less than 24 hours. The chicken thinks it just got 10 hours of rest. It just wears them out. They have no windows, they're in cages." Lighting is controlled to hasten the chicken's cycle. "You throw off their equilibrium. It's like an interrogation room."

The humane developments in the egg industry are "kind of like reinventing the wheel," Leicher said. "If you go back to when our grandfathers were alive, they were doing the same things I'm doing today."

Besides corn, soy beans, wheat, calcium, vitamins A, D and E, selenium and flaxseed, Leicher said, his chickens "get bugs and grubs. They get to roam. They get sun. A fly is protein, and that benefits you."

Eichner said he wondered how many people in this country know what a really good egg is supposed to taste like. "I would love to invite more people to try a farm fresh egg. More people who understand the difference might force the big boys to change.

"The Lord above created a lot of neat things, but people want to tweak nature. Well, you don't speed a day up. Just let the day be 24 hours and let a chicken do what it's designed to do."