Mar 22, 2020
This week’s guest has a brilliant way of describing his striking career change in 2008, when he went from ‘birdless flight to flightless birds’. I’ll explain!
For more than a decade, Ben Jackson had been the MD of the London Beach Store – a business he loved, because it focussed on his fascination for kite surfing, which had begun when he was 3 years old.
Then, just over a decade ago, he got involved in running his family’s farm and has never looked back. Fluffetts specialises in what it calls ‘genuinely free range eggs’ and Ben has built up encyclopaedic knowledge about every aspect of hen behaviour and egg laying.
For instance, the ‘pecking order’ really does exist and most flocks have a hard-core escape committee: birds who work out how to fly over any barrier and into the woods, never to return.
And if you’ve ever wondered why egg yolks vary in colour from pale yellow to orange or why the shells of larger eggs tend to be more brittle than those of smaller ones, Ben has the answers. Some of them will make your mind boggle.
I’ve wanted to dive deep into eggs for a long time. We consume millions of them a day across the country. But with battery farming, organic and free range, I think there is a great deal of confusion around such an everyday product. So it’s time to get myth busting and get some actual facts. Enjoy the conversation.