On egg shells

How many times have I done this before? I wondered.

I was cracking eggs on the edge of my skillet and watching the whites spill onto the heated Teflon surface. Four make an omelet, and I was on number two. The white sizzled, congealed, and gave off a pleasant if familiar aroma.

The next one, egg three, cracked in my hand. That's weird, I thought. Part of the white spilled short of the skillet's edge and left a small, clear puddle on the stove top.

There's not much that surprises me about eggs anymore. Over the last five years I reckon I've gone through literally thousands of them. It all started back when I was getting serious about my health -- after the high blood pressure diagnosis at age 25 -- and a book I'd been reading called egg whites a "nutritional bargain" (source). And indeed, when you did the math egg whites were pretty damned cheap. At around 10 cents each, you could make a proteinaceous meal for about 50 cents from four egg whites cooked up and placed between slices of bread. That's what I was making this morning.

I watched the white from egg three run on the skillet surface until it met the other two whites. The egg shell, still in my right hand and ensconcing the yolk, felt paper-thin.

Occasionally I still got the heebie jeebies thinking about eggs as unfertilized chicken embryos, and the thought sometimes pushed me to buy eggs at Whole Foods Market, at 20 cents each supposedly the product of cage-free hens. And while I never really tasted a difference -- I considered myself an egg connoisseur by now -- one thing was evidently clear: it took more effort to crack an organic egg.

What did this mean? I wondered. I cracked the fourth egg and slid the white in the skillet.

While the omelet cooked, I looked up "thin egg shells" on Google. One site had an agenda -- to debunk the dangers of DDT -- but at least it went through the trouble of citing sources. This was good.

For the curious, the possible reasons an egg shell might be thin include: the presence of oil, lead, and/or mercury, age of the bird, size of the bird, exposure to stress, dehydration, temperature extremes, insufficient light, and/or human intrusion, and lack of calcium and/or phosphorous.

Hmmm.

Poultry happiness seems to have been left off the list.

Was 20 cents too much to pay for an egg? A book on ethical agriculture I'd read a month ago posed the question. Why did I feel $3.50 was an acceptable price for a few drops of coffee plus an ounce of heated milk while $2.40 for a dozen eggs was a fleecing?

I returned to the stove, folded the whites up, and rolled them into the new high-fiber flat bread I was trying out. And then I decided to stop thinking so much.