Egg Essentials

I continue to be intrigued by eggs--those little packets of incipient life! And yet they're a simple household commodity. There's been a fair bit of controversy lately about the genuineness or otherwise of the "Free Range" labelling in supermarkets. I have to confess to feeling just a bit cynical when I came across this:
In a carton of a dozen free range eggs, each a uniform warm brown colour, beautifully clean except for one little feather clinging to the top of the first one--just where it would most likely be seen when checking for cracks before popping into a shopping trolley. It's a lovely thing in its own way and at the same time as I felt a warm fuzzy pang for the mother hen, I wondered whether there's just a worker at the processing plant with a pile of perfect little feathers, dabbing one onto a representative egg in every dozen. Oh well!