There they sit in the supermarket cooler. White eggs in one carton. Brown eggs in another. And somehow the brown ones can look just a little more wholesome—more rustic, perhaps, as though they were gathered that morning from beneath a contented hen scratching around behind a red barn.
But is there really a difference?
Back in August 1982, I had an opportunity to ask someone who ought to know. His name was Monroe Cappel Babcock, and by then he had spent most of his life thinking about chickens.
Eggshells come in an assortment of colors, but appearance tells us surprisingly little about what is inside.
I interviewed Babcock near Ithaca for RFD, a radio program I produced and syndicated at the time. The four-part interview aired August 16 through 19 on 43 radio stations across New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Listening to that recording again more than four decades later, I was reminded that Babcock was not a man burdened by excessive modesty.
A Cocky Chicken Expert
His interest in poultry began as a boy.
Babcock was born in Fredonia, New York, in 1907. His father operated a poultry breeding farm and hatchery, and Monroe began breeding chickens himself when he was only 12.Reading about them became part of his education, too. Babcock recalled that his mother worried he would never learn to read unless he read poultry magazines. Apparently it worked. By the time he arrived at Cornell to study poultry husbandry and breeding, he believed he already knew quite a bit.
“I was very cocky,” he told me.In fact, he remembered believing he knew more about chickens than most of his fellow students—and, in some respects, more than some of his professors.That sounds like youthful boasting until you hear the rest of the story.
Babcock joined Cornell’s poultry judging team and recalled taking the top score in competition, winning, as he put it, “all the medals—the whole shebang.”He graduated from Cornell in 1931 and became involved with New York’s Record of Performance and Certification program for poultry breeders.
Then, in 1935, he decided to go into business for himself.With $2,500 from his father, Babcock opened a hatchery in a leased building in Ithaca.In his first year, he sold 111,000 chicks.
Building a Better Layer
In 1937, Babcock moved his operation to a farm and increasingly concentrated on breeding chickens to do one particular thing exceptionally well: Lay eggs. His specialty became the White Leghorn, a relatively small bird that could convert feed into eggs with remarkable efficiency.
Beginning in 1938, Babcock entered his birds in egg-laying tests. His Leghorns eventually established a world record, and the Babcock strain became one of the leading commercial laying strains in the United States and Canada.
The business grew along with the reputation of his birds. Babcock breeding stock eventually went around the world.He was still plainly proud of those White Leghorns when we talked in 1982. But there was something else I wanted to know. What about those brown eggs?
Brown or White?
Babcock acknowledged that brown-egg chickens were becoming increasingly efficient. But when it came to the egg itself, he wasn’t inclined to attach any special virtue to a brown shell.
There was, however, a practical difference in the egg business of his day. Eggs were “candled”—examined before a strong light so graders could see inside the shell and identify defects. Babcock explained that blood spots and meat spots could be more difficult to detect through a brown shell than through a white one.Then I asked why some people preferred brown eggs while others preferred white.
That’s when the conversation became especially interesting. “There is only one reason a woman thinks she wants brown eggs,” Babcock told me. “Her mother preferred them.” And why had her mother preferred them? Her mother had. And before that, her grandmother.
Babcock believed these preferences had been handed down through generations. He even connected some of them to European traditions: families whose ancestors came from one region might favor brown eggs, while those from another preferred white. “So it’s folklore,” I said. That, essentially, was Babcock’s point. The preference wasn’t necessarily inside the egg. It was inside us.
The Backyard Chicken
There was another reason brown eggs became associated with the traditional farmyard. The old White Leghorns, Babcock recalled, weren’t necessarily the sort of chickens a family wanted wandering around the yard. “They fly like pheasants,” he said of the more nervous Leghorns of earlier years.
Babcock had deliberately bred his own birds to be quieter and calmer. The heavier brown-egg breeds were different. Rhode Island Reds and Barred Rocks could become almost members of the family. “To them chickens were pets,” Babcock said of people who kept small flocks. They would come up and eat from your hand. Kneel down and one might hop onto your back. And, of course, they laid eggs.
There was one other advantage to those big birds. Eventually, you could eat them. Babcock remembered hens weighing eight or nine pounds. When their laying days were finished, they could be sold or cooked at home—often slowly, as a fricassee. By 1982, he observed, many younger homemakers wouldn’t even know how to cook such a bird.
The chicken had changed. So had America.
From Barnyard to Industry
After World War II, the rapidly growing broiler industry transformed poultry production. Instead of keeping one type of chicken to provide both eggs and meat, breeders increasingly produced specialized birds—some extraordinarily efficient at laying eggs and others extraordinarily efficient at becoming dinner. Babcock marveled at the scale and speed of the modern broiler industry. Chickens that once grew slowly around a farmyard could reach market size in roughly seven weeks. His own contribution was primarily on the egg side of that transformation.
Babcock Poultry expanded far beyond Ithaca, with operations elsewhere in the United States and overseas. By his recollection, the business eventually reached annual sales of about $20 million. He sold the company in 1977, five years before our conversation. But retirement hadn’t diminished his interest in chickens. Not remotely.
Was Babcock Right?
Forty-four years later, modern science hasn’t done much to disturb the basic answer Monroe Babcock gave me. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the breed of the hen determines shell color and that nutrient levels are not significantly different between white and brown eggs. Shell color itself isn’t a factor in USDA egg quality grades.
Even Babcock’s observation about candling has held up. Current USDA guidance notes that brown eggs are more difficult to classify for interior quality and that small blood or meat spots are harder to detect through a brown shell. So brown isn’t better. Neither is white. At least not simply because of the color of the shell.
So, Which Egg?
More than four decades have passed since I sat down with Monroe Babcock. Egg cartons have changed. Poultry farming has changed. Supermarkets now confront us with choices Babcock and his generation could scarcely have squeezed onto a carton: cage-free, free-range, organic, pasture-raised, omega-3 enriched—and, of course, brown or white. Yet that wonderfully simple question remains. Which should we choose?Perhaps Monroe Babcock gave me the answer back in 1982.
Before deciding, we might want to ask ourselves whether we’re choosing the egg—or remembering our grandmother.
And for the record, whether your breakfast came in a white shell or a brown one, the chicken probably doesn’t care. Neither, I suspect, would Monroe Babcock.
Sources / Working Notes
Primary source: Jerry Reed interview with Monroe Cappel Babcock, RFD Network, broadcast August 16–19, 1982.
Historical background: Babcock Poultry, “Our Heritage / History.”
Modern egg-color and nutrition check: U.S. Department of Agriculture / FSIS guidance on brown versus white eggs.
Candling check: USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Egg Grading Manual.
Illustration plan: basket of white/brown eggs under title; Babcock Farms emblem at “A Cocky Chicken Expert”; Jerry Reed chicken photograph at “The Backyard Chicken.”