Let's start by understanding what an egg is. An egg is the ovum of a hen. When it is fertilized, it comes out through the bird's cloaca—which is the same place where it defecates. After incubating it in its nest, a chick hatches.

In a natural environment, a hen produces about 10-15 eggs a year, mainly to reproduce. But in an industrial setting, chickens have been genetically modified and forced to produce up to 300 eggs a year, often resulting in cloacal prolapse and uterine damage.

But let's go back a bit—the poultry industry needs chickens. To breed them, semen is manually extracted from roosters and then put into syringes that are roughly inserted into the hen. Once the fertilized egg is deposited, the hatcheries take it away from the mother hens, preventing them from incubating their own chicks, putting them in trays that heat them for 20-30 days, until they hatch.

From there, the newborns go to conveyor belts to be manually selected. Hatcheries determine the sex of animals as soon as they’re born. If a male chicken is born a rooster, it’s considered useless since it cannot lay eggs. What do breeders do? They kill them. They throw them into a shredder. They are literally thrown alive into a machine that butchers them, breaking them down to create products like chicken nuggets, ham, or sausages. It is estimated that each year, 6 billion male chickens are killed in this way.

If the newborn is a hen, it’s put in a cage with several others to be fattened. These cages are overcrowded and chickens are forced to lay eggs, in many cases never having touched the ground or seen natural light. But before that happens, their beaks are cut off with a laser or a hot blade, to prevent them from pecking at each other. These cages are rudimentary and do not provide healthy conditions for the animals. Beneath them, mounds of dung and falling feathers pile up, a sign of nutritional deficiencies and poor health.

The vast majority of chickens are fed with processed kibble meals, made primarily from genetically modified ingredients and fish bycatch, the result of whatever is left from trawling fishing. In addition, this food is full of hormones and antibiotics that cause them to grow excessively, often tripling their weight in just a couple of weeks, their legs too weak to support them.

Since eggs are the ovum of the hen, it is basically an encapsulated estrogen pump. Ingesting hormones from other animals is bad for your health and can promote the formation of cancer cells. When it comes to cooking, there are several alternatives. Scrambled tofu is practically the same as scrambled eggs. If you need to bake, consider substituting bananas, applesauce, or flaxseed dissolved in water for the egg—excellent substitutes used in vegan baking and pastry.

We invite you to think about the poor chickens and chicks that died every morning so that we could have an omelet for breakfast, and opt for another menu. We swear that it's easier than you think!