Alternatives to factory-farmed Easter eggs:

• Hollow plastic eggs – these have the advantage of being reusable, and they can be filled with treats or messages. Great for Easter egg hunts.
  
• Dark chocolate eggs.
• Ask an egg-eating friend to save some empty shells for you.
  
• Organic free-range eggs. These involve much less cruelty.

On Sunday, April 8, 2007, Newmindspace, an "urban arts collective,"  hide thousands of plastic eggs for a public Easter Egg Hunt on Bloor Street between Yonge and Bathurst. Each egg contained fortune-cookie-style messages like "Unscramble me."

An article about the event in NOW Magazine, questioned the sustainability of using plastic eggs over real ones. Newmindspace sent a letter to NOW saying in part: "To suggest we replace plastic eggs with real chicken eggs is, frankly, absurd. ...would it be better to grow food for the chickens, ship it by truck to an abusive factory farm, alternatively feed and starve the chickens to force them into a laying cycle, then ship the eggs to Toronto, boil them all, and hide them on Bloor Street?"

More information

• Vegan egg substitutes for baking and making savoury dishes. 

• The plight of egg-laying chickens in Canada: 98% of Canada's 26 million egg laying hens are kept in battery cages. Four or more hens are crowded into an area measuring just sixteen inches wide. The cages are stacked in tiers and lined up in rows in huge sheds. The hens are crowded so tightly, that they cannot even stretch their wings or legs....  What do the organic and free range egg labels mean? Alternatives to standard egg production methods are being used in Canada to a small degree. While these are an improvement, they are by no means free of cruelty. ...