Eggzactly . . .

This past weekend I happened to be tuned in to eggs. There are several reasons for this:

Whenever I’ve forgotten to defrost something for dinner, I usually resort to eggs. This happened last week. Hubby loves it when I add cheese and fresh mushrooms, zucchini, and dill, and my oldest son will eat eggs in nearly any way, shape or form, while youngest son likes them plain. Since I’ve started Weight Watchers (as it seems I do every January!) eggs have once again become one of my best friends.

I also watched a silly old Bob Hope movie—well actually I watched only part of it while I was folding laundry, and I can’t even recall the title. But I saw enough to watch him accidentally run a grocery cart into a display bin of eggs. I found myself wondering why, even in the dark ages of the 1960s, any grocer would display loose eggs outside a refrigerator case… Which was why, perhaps, I didn’t watch any more of the movie. It was just too contrived for a visual laugh (note to self: readers don’t like contrived scenes any more than movie viewers do).

Then my husband read a news story to me about a disgruntled group of Chinese shoppers who were anxious to purchase the Apple iPhone 4S only to learn they’d already sold out. Eggs were thrown in protest. Without minimizing the seriousness of a riot, my husband just looked at me point blank and said “Who carries eggs around with them so they’d be handy to throw at an Apple Store? Does one friend say to another ‘Let’s go get our iPhones. And hey, don’t forget the eggs.”?

Which naturally led us to wonder how many other ways eggs have been involved in history. According to Wikipedia, egging has long been an unfortunate protest practice all over the world, mainly because eggs are cheap and they can do damage. Halloween, when it was solely a night of mischief, was a time when cars got soaped or egged. I also recall reading about traveling acting troupes who used to have rotten eggs or vegetables pelted at them if the performance didn’t meet expectations.

So . . . do certain kinds of people just carry eggs around in their pockets, or what? Hmmm… Personally, I’d rather be pied. If someone’s going to throw something at me, I’d rather lick that off my face than a raw egg. Preferably blueberry, if you please.

Then there are the phrases “egg on” and “egg on your face” and “lay an egg.” One site I checked said the “egg on your face” phrase might harken back to the days poor actors were pelted with raw eggs. It also said the phrase “egg on” didn’t necessarily trace back to being motivated to move if someone’s about to lob an egg your way, although that may very well be true. It actually goes back to a Norse word “eggja” meaning to incite, stimulate or provoke. In this sense eggja also derived the word “edge” as in to “edge someone out.” To “lay an egg” is obviously something we all want to avoid — a flop or failure. If it’s used in sport team terms, that’s been traced back to an egg being the shape of a zero . . . in other words, they didn’t score.

Did you know egg shells contain pores that allow oxygen in and carbon dioxide out?
Egg production in the US — 75 billion per year — only accounts for 10 percent of the world’s total. China produces the most eggs (390 billion, about half the world’s supply). And turkeys lay eggs, too, but because turkey moms (is that a real term?) have stronger maternal instincts than chickens, those eggs are harder to collect. Turkeys take up more room to nest anyway, so they’re just not economical to use. Those are just a couple of interesting facts I learned from a list of 12 Extraordinary Egg Facts.

And this, no doubt, is more than you ever wanted to know about eggs. But I do hope you have an egg-straordinary week!

A P.S. To Last Week’s Readers: I’m so egg-cited! I bought the dress! So now I’m walking on clouds . . . until the bill comes in, when I’ll be walking on egg shells.