Love itI feel most like a caveman whenever I crack an egg: walking through a forest, spotting a nest, stealing the eggs and gobbling the nutrient-rich insides. Eggs seem primitively programmed in our brains.
But they also represent the culinary progress humans have made. I would imagine that the methods of cooking raw meat haven’t developed much since our cave days: Peel off hide, attach meat to spit, place over fire.
Eggs are different. By 2017, humans have developed more than 100 ways to cook an egg. Eggs are so fundamental that I will rarely even consider breakfast – making it or having it – without eggs.
Take it from chef and author Jacques Pepin, who told Bon Appétit magazine, “I think that the egg is probably one of the greatest foods that we can have in the kitchen, whether we cook it by itself or combine it into a soufflé or custard, or other type of thing. For me, I can’t live without eggs.”
David HolubHate itEggs are gross.
To begin on a juvenile note, chickens shit out eggs. An egg passes through the same exit on a chicken as does all its excrement.
To continue more scientifically, eggs contain so much cholesterol that they accelerate the build-up of plaque in arteries almost as much as smoking does.
Next up, holy f, the egg industry is brutal. Each year, more than 79 billion eggs are produced in the U.S. It takes more than 300 million hens producing an egg every 34 hours to keep up with demand. When an egg is hatched, male and female chicks are separated. Females have their beaks cut off with a hot blade and are sent to cramped egg-laying facilities. Males are suffocated in garbage bags, ground up, or crushed because they are don’t lay eggs and can’t be sold for meat. (Supposedly, this process may stop by 2020, when the egg industry hopes to be able to genetically modify hen fertilization to never lay male eggs.) But stopping the culling of male chicks won’t change the fact that hens live atrocious, feces- and disease-filled lives where they die and rot atop one another in standing-room-only cages, never seeing the light of day.
The only good thing about eggs is the Egg Paranoia conversation between Babs and her Mama in “Pink Flamingos.”
Patty Templeton
