What's the Difference Between Brown and White Eggs?

[Back when refrigeration was bad…]

There was a good market for reliably fresh eggs. Such eggs needed a short distribution chain so there wasn’t time for anything bad to happen between farm and consumer. The solution was to raise them on farms close to town. Land close to town is expensive, so the tendency was to crowd the hens and use breeds that tolerated crowding well. This was usually the White Leghorn, which was everybody’s favorite chicken for non-free-range uses, including coops on sailing ships. Leghorns lay white eggs.
So white eggs quickly came to mean “fancy eggs,” while brown eggs meant, “plain old farm eggs.” If you lived in farm country, where it’s easy to obtain fresh eggs because of the short distribution path, you’d eat brown eggs and wonder why anybody ever bothered with those sissy white eggs. If you lived in a big city, it would be just the opposite.

Source: plamondon.com

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