the incredible edible egg

Remember that old egg industry commercial, aired, I always assumed, to promote the consumption of chicken eggs?

I have changed just about everything about my eating choices so I know I could go totally vegetarian and, even, vegan were I to conclude it would be the most healthy path for me.  I eat very little animal flesh. I eat some wild salmon once a week for the Omega 3 and, who am I kidding, its deliciousness. About once a month, I get a dairy-free, organic chicken burrito. 

I eat eggs several times a week because I love eggs. Good ones.

I spent a year living in Bogota, Colombia in the early seventies. Among the many people I met, I met an American couple in which the guy had been sent to Colombia to build an egg production facility for his family's major agribusiness back in the states, somewhere in the South. It was going to be one of those tightly caged chicken operations.  The gal was uncomfortable living in Colombia and dread the point in time when her husband got the facility up and running and they would move to the rural location so he could closely manage it.   She invited me and my boyfriend to go camping with her and her husband so we could check out the chicken cage site.

Camping was not very common in Colombia at that time.  And the trip was going to take us to places with no stores.  She and I planned that trip, going so far as to buy all the food we thought we'd need for a week because we assumed we would have trouble buying food where we were headed. And the trip was going to take a week because the roads in rural Colombia were nothing like roads in America. Traveling up and down the sides of a series of Andes mountains, snaking along dirt trails along the edge of said mountains made such travel slow going.

She and her husband had tents. They had lots of money, I thought. I had enough money. I had a job in Colombia at the time and was self-supporting. Rafa was a deadbeat and I was covering his expenses. That was the plan.

At the last minute, Rafa refused to go. The gal wanted me to go anyway. I had never met her husband. And Rafa had gotten paranoid that the couple were CIA.  Even if they were, I reasoned, so what?  We weren't going to be doing anything sketchy. Just go camping.

Rafa probably just didn't want to go. He probably came up with that CIA shit to intimidate me. Rafa, as all men I have been attracted to have been, was abusive.  But that's a story for another day. This tale is about the incredible egg.

I lived for several months, paying the same as other college students, in a rooming house Rafa's mom ran. The universities didn't have dorms. Students either lived in such rooming houses, and pretty much all female students who did not live at home lived in such boarding houses because it was a much more conservative country than America and single women did not live alone. Sure a few outliers got apartments but it was fairly unusual for Colombia girls whose parents could pay for them to go to college (no financial for college in that country so basically only children of the oligarchy went to college then) to live without an adult chaperon.

Maruja, Rafa's mother, was the chaperon.

Anyway, we didn't take that camping trip and I lost touch with the couple who were going to be resopnsible for making thousands of eggs a day, shipping them to the U.S., increasing the guy's father's company's profit margins with the lower costs of doing business in Colombia. Good bye American rich folks!

In Maruja's boarding house, every day for breakfast, which was included in the money I paid to live there, I was served one egg cooked in tiny little pans that were just big enough for one egg. The maid, and all Colombian households I interacted with had maids, even poor households, although Maruja was not poor. I think she made a good living with her boarding house.

The maid would cover all the burners on the stove, and it had six burners, with these tiny pans, grease under the egg and, using some tongs, lift the tiny pan off the burner when she deemed it cooked and plopped the whole pan with the egg onto a plate.

Along with that one fried egg, I was given two, small round rolls, approximately like crusty french bread.  There was always butter and jam on the table but I mostly used the rolls to sop up my egg yolk.  It was simple, inexpensive for the rooming house to provide and I got to know eggs.

Growing up, we never had eggs served in our house. My father loathed eggs. the only time eggs were used in my childhood family was when someone was baking a cake.  Dad insisted he was allergic but he didn't have to be. In those days, a man could arbitrarily set any rules he wished in his house and all obeyed.  My dad wasn't quite a controlling bully but he was a product of his time. He didn't care if his wife and children might like eggs. Since he couldn't stand them, they could not be in the house. He aid just the smell of them cooking sickened him.

I didn't really believe my dad was allergic to eggs until my daughter turned out to be allergic to eggs. And how I discovered she was allergic to eggs is another story for another time.

Eating eggs, savoring the runny deliciousness of a runny egg yolk was a new experience for me. I returned to the states in love with eggs.

Soon after my return, I visited my grandmother in South Dakota. She served eggs. My dad almost never went on our trips to visit my maternal grandparents so eggs were not banned at grandma's.

On my first morning at grandma's during my first visit after being out of the country a long time, I asked her to give me an over easy egg and, of course, she did.

I had even brought a couple of those small egg pans to give to her and she had cooked my egg in one of them.

Eagerly, I took a piece of toast, dipped it in the egg yolk and immediately spit it out.

Now spitting out food was the kind of thing that would have disturbed my grandmother. She was very particular about table manners. And so was I. My mom was and she was strict with her children about table behavior.

I did not give the act of spitting out the egg any thought. It was instinctive. After a year of eating a fried, runny egg yolk almost daily, I was taken aback by the bitter chemical taste in grandma's egg.  I realized, as soon as I spit it out, that eggs in Colombia had been raised differently. I also made the connection to the way corporate agriculture was changing food production in other parts of the world. After I had spit out that egg, I realized American eggs were mostly produced in massive egg barns and fed chemical laden feed. And this was 1974, when the organic food movement was not quite registered in my consciousness.

I apologized to my grandmother. I had a bowl of chemical laden cereal. And grandma didn't serve me any more eggs.

I backed off from eggs again.

Until it became possible to buy pastured, organic-feed eggs.

The taste difference between the cheap, grocery store chain eggs and pastured chicken's eggs is huge.

A good egg is expensive, compared to the mass produced chemical crap ones but it is so awesome.

I haven't eaten a mass produced egg in years. I eat eggs several times a week. And every time I do, I enjoy my egg every bit as much as I do every single time.

Such a small pleasure.

So what about veganism?  Eggs are animal product. Eggs are supposed to become chickens but not all eggs are fertilized with chicken sperm. Eggs seem like a natural food source to me.  I could give them up but I don't want to. I am unpersuaded it is wrong to eat eggs from pastured chickens that lead ordinary chicken lives.