ILLUSTRATION: BRYAN GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations.
The humble egg poses its own twist on the classic conundrum. Which came first, the mere real thing or the metaphors? For a small grocery item, an ordinary sight in fridges the world over, eggs carry a lot of symbolic payload. They are so layered with meanings and resonances, so constricted and commodified, that the simple breakfast staple can seem almost too good to eat.
Almost but not quite. Canadians consume about eight billion eggs a year, and globally some 180 per person are cracked, fried, boiled, poached, scrambled, coddled, buttered, separated, devilled, chopped, beaten and eaten raw. Eggs are far more than the uneasy suspension of yolk and white, the product of terminated chicks. In our current geopolitical moment, they are at once a scarce luxury good, symbol of consumer anxiety, index of market mood, election totem, tariff-war weapon and unexploded virus bomb.
Eggy associations go back a long way, indeed embrace a range as large as the universe. The ancient Greek Orphics conceived the universe as an egg, with the act of creation a cosmic cracking of its shell. Versions of the same image occur in multiple origin accounts from Zoroastrian to Hindu and beyond, all condensed in the Latin slogan omne vivum ex ovo: all life is egg-born. The idea is comforting; we humans, too, understand that our lives begin with fertilized ova clusters.
Sometimes the cosmic egg births a serpent, not a child. Or, to update the references, we might draw a line from the far-out embryonic Star Child of the final sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to the earthbound, albeit off-world, face-grabbing, body-raping parasites who launch from eggs in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Like a brain in a skull, you don’t know what living goo lurks inside the orb until you crack the protective carapace.
The shape itself is alluring, structurally sound against vertical force. Its resemblance to the figure zero in turn provides terms for nil scores in tennis (l’oeuf is love), cricket (duck, duck’s egg), and football or hockey (goose egg). The contents are viewed as sticky or solid, but always valuable. You can get egg on your face or be the last one who is a rotten egg. You should be a good egg, but don’t ever put all your eggs in one basket. You have to break some to make an omelette – Machiavelli for brunch. Be careful of those who egg you on or make you walk on eggshells.
There is a prize goose somewhere who lays golden eggs, there are sly Easter eggs hidden in video games as well as living rooms, and some people save up a nest egg for retirement. Albert Brooks, in Lost in America, confronts his spouse, played by Julie Hagerty, who has gambled away their life savings and so violated “the nest egg principle” of fiscal prudence. He is so fully enraged that he forbids her ever to use the words nest and egg again. “You’re out in the forest, you can point: ‘The bird lives in a round stick.’ And, and, and – you have things over easy with toast!”
We do eat them that way. Also with bacon or ham, especially the green ones; and on muffins with hollandaise sauce – extra yolks plus butter and mustard – in dishes named Benedict, Florentine and Charlotte. The runny yolk offers a reliable money shot in television food shows – but also an acute salmonella risk. Eggs are good alone, but better with meaty buddies.
Industry legend reports that Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and a pioneering psy-ops ad man, fabricated the protein and fat double-dose of what Bertie Wooster calls “the old eggs and b.” It was a 1920s effort to boost bacon sales for the Beech-Nut Packing Co. of New York’s Mohawk Valley. The combination of eggs and meat has meanwhile proved durable at all times of day. Contemporary egg-lobby campaigns favour exhortations and challenges: “Get cracking,” one insists, like a hectoring gym teacher. “Eggs for dinner isn’t weird,” another scolds, “you’re weird for thinking it’s weird.” Sure, okay. The bottom line is that eggs are a cheap form of nutrients and animal protein – or they were cheap until the supply chain went sideways.
Everything from a tepid Egg McMuffin to a vast English fry-up, adding beans, sausage, black pudding, chips and tomato, starts from the dubious foundation of eggs plus pork. But eggs also find their way on top of ramen noodles, suspended in rich Asian broth, curried in bhurji and stewed in shakshouka. (The Chinese eat the most eggs on earth, about 40 per cent of the global total, but Japan boasts the highest per capita consumption rate: about 320 a year.) On this shore, New Jersey’s state sandwich is not the hoagie or the grinder but instead a combination of egg, cheese, and “Taylor ham,” otherwise known as pork roll, and jealously tied to the locale, like bourbon in Louisiana or claret in Bordeaux.
A meal like that sets you up for the day. You can fast-track by drinking them raw (Sylvester Stallone as Rocky famously downs three in training – a performance performed on stage at pep rallies by the jocks in my high school); or by eating a few dozen hard-boiled ones for a bet (Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke memorably downs 50). Neither course is recommended by health authorities or anyone conscious of cholesterol. John Cusack’s hitman-for-hire in Gross Pointe Blank opts for the healthy choice in a tense diner standoff with rival Dan Aykroyd: whole-grain pancakes and an egg-white omelette.
“Hard-boiled” has lost is currency as an adjective of praise, even for hitmen, but you can find it applied to Hemingway characters or Raymond Chandler anti-heroes. Soft-boiled eggs, meanwhile, excite as much controversy as the ideal dry martini. Scientists recently determined that the time needed for a perfect boiled egg was 32 minutes, surely a conclusion only an egghead could approve.
Egghead was a Batman villain, for those keeping score, played by Vincent Price in the campy 1960s Adam West television series. His super-intelligence was signalled by his absurdly elevated forehead – cousin to the “butt heads” of the original Star Trek and to Saturday Night Live’s visiting-alien Coneheads, who ate fried eggs with beer six-packs. Price’s Egghead sported a natty white-and-yellow suit and delivered a flow of eggscruciating verbal plays on the fact that many English words start with the Latin prefix ex, nothing to do with eggs.
Egghead is another almost outmoded epithet, a gentle jibe at fragile, out-of-touch high-brows. “Wonderful!” my editor here said when I pitched the present cackleberry confab. “An egg essay from an egghead.” The teasing cuts both ways, of course: more than one commentator has styled the current state of public discourse as a battle between eggheads and boneheads – not forgetting that sometimes the former is also the latter.
Dismissive labels are satisfying to toss around, but they only reinforce the dangerous idea that political conviction is no more than veiled ideological defences of status. The true enemy in our conviction-addicted world is not each other but our own selfish desires. If we hope to address issues of fair distribution of resources, including the goods of public health, we have to crack the hard shell of certainty. The hard reality of the egg as a commodity, produced and consumed within a larger network of health regulations, supply chains and individual effort, offers a microcosm of our co-dependent world. The big cosmologies of myth are the political realism of today.
Eggs are suddenly scarce in some markets, their purchase limited for the first time since wartime rationing and austerity. The Denny’s and Waffle House restaurant chains have levied surcharges on their famously affordable breakfast orders, and American grocery shelves have yawned empty of cartons. Inflation and disease doubled prices in some places, tilting election rhetoric even though sane people know that no president has the power to control such things. Now there are additional suspicions of monopoly price-fixing even as threatened cross-border tariffs, offered as bolsters to national interest, function in reality as sharply regressive levies, shifting the tax burden onto poor and middle-class consumers.
Canadian egg producers may be short-term winners in that particular tussle, but the eggs themselves post transnational hazards. Avian flu – H5N1 – can track into our food chain by way of chickens, cattle and their products. Some 150 million chickens have already been culled. Current estimates consider the risk of human infection low, but there have been enough reported cases already that the spectre of a full-scale pandemic – one that would dwarf the global damage of COVID – has to be taken seriously.
ILLUSTRATION: BRYAN GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
I doubt if eliminating eggs from the human diet is feasible in the near term, any more than a less destructive American economic policy is likely, though there are good arguments for both. Plant-based diets and global co-operation are likely the only sustainable human future. Moreover, the conditions of egg production – battery farms, but also free-run and free-range – are ethically questionable. Could we simply stop eating them? (We’d have to forgo chicken too.)
Right now the egg retains its comfort-food hold over us, but is also revealed as a contested luxury item, a hot conflict commodity like coffee, liquor, chocolate, silk or tobacco once were. For context we might think of the grail-life status of eggs in wartime: the dozen eggs sought by youngsters Lev and Kolya in David Benioff’s 2008 novel City of Thieves, the eggs carefully preserved in the turret of Brad Pitt’s Sherman tank in Fury. Even better, recall two black market eggs that feature in Second World War stories.
In James Clavell’s novel King Rat, a cynical American corporal – played with smarmy malice by George Segal in the 1965 film adaptation – uses his control of food to dominate the Japanese POW camp where he is fenced in with many higher-ranking British officers. His key power move: offering a precious fried egg as a blandishment for obedience. (“Not bad,” comments one suborned minion, meaning in fact “bloody marvellous.”) Other starving but stiff-lipped officers are driven form the barracks, unable to stand the delicious cooking smells. This is what happens when norms of decent behaviour are overrun by scarcity, a Lord of the Flies for grown-ups. The King’s blithe manipulations of the dire situation feel like a blueprint for success in the current regime of pelf-politics.
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 makes the wartime state-of-nature endgame funny rather than evil, but contraband eggs appear there too. In Mike Nichols’s excellent 1970 film version, the camp black-market genius, mess officer Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder, is played by a baby-faced Jon Voight. He appears without warning, brandishing a pristine egg ready for frying “in real butter.” Milo’s schemes range into the creation of an extra-national syndicate run on bribes and purchased fealty, eventually leasing out the bomber squadron’s own B-25 planes in for-profit missions on both sides of the conflict.
These stories, works of the 1960s taking sad stock of mid-century America, retain a sense of moral outrage. King and Milo are fictional outliers, satirized or condemned. But they just take Mafioso-style con-man capitalism to its logical conclusion. The egg is a bargaining chip of the night in which all markets are black, all soldiers mercenaries, and all executive orders self-serving.
For now, the egg is still, its price rising and viruses proliferating. But the ground has shifted; reality has overtaken fiction. The shell of our liberal-democratic complacency has cracked; the nest egg of good will is gone. We’re at existential war, fellow prisoners. King Minderbinder and his anti-vax, anti-regulation syndicate are on the move.