This Will Change How You Think About Eggs

You can still serve them for breakfast…you’ll just appreciate them more when you do.

When think about eggs, you probably picture the pastel cartons in the refrigerator section of the grocery store. Pay a few bucks and you can take home a dozen for baking, frying or scrambling. Eggs are a food that spans centuries, continents and cultures. We tend to think of eggs as their end use, which is as an ingredient. But it’s just not fair to think of them in such simplistic terms.

Eggs come from birds. Female birds make them, molecule by molecule, calorie by calorie. They are tiny self-contained spaceships, carrying bird babies into existence. They are engineering miracles, with perfect symmetry and geometry that balances structure with function.

If you start to think of an egg as an important part of an ecosystem instead of an item on your shopping list, you realize that they are much more interesting and complex. Yes, they are cheap, delicious, and nutritious and but they are also represent a key evolutionary step that allowed life to leave the ocean and start reproducing on land!

Read on, and the next time you whip up a breakfast scrambler, you’ll have more to think about than which type of cheese you’re going to melt on top!

An Egg is a Bird’s Pregnant Belly

While mammals get pregnant and carry around a heavy, sagging uterus until our ankles are swollen and our skin is stretched to the point of no return, birds just outsource the whole thing to an egg.

It’s true, a fertilized egg is like a detachable pregnant belly.

Inside is everything a baby bird needs to grow from a tiny bundle of cells into the cute, fluffy chicks everyone loves at easter time.

When I was pregnant with my kids, I was starving all the time. This was because a lot of my calories were being diverted away from my body and into my babies’ bodies so they could grow things like eyes and spines.

A bird has to collect all that extra nutrition in advance. Her body takes a whole bunch of calories from her food and stores them in the part of the egg known as the yolk. As she prepares to lay the egg, the yolk gets coated in albumen, also known as egg white, and the whole thing gets wrapped up in a calcified shell before it exits her body.

If she has had sex recently (or not that recently, as some birds can store sperm for a month or more) and the egg is fertile, once it leaves her body, the tiny embryo inside starts to grow into a chick.

If she has not had sex, and there are no sperm in her body, she lays the egg anyway. Yes, this means that an egg is similar to a bird’s period. Some birds lay only one or two eggs a year while others, like domesticated chickens, lay more than 200 per year. The only difference between a fertilized egg and an unfertilized egg is that the former has a DNA from a sperm cell inside and the latter does not.

The eggs you buy in the grocery store are unfertilized unless labelled otherwise. This is because most of the time, chicken farms don’t bother keep roosters around. Chaste chickens are sexless and sperm free, but can still roll out egg after egg after egg.

Life on the inside

The growing baby bird has the equivalent of an umbilical cord that connects it to the egg yolk. Energy passes from the yolk into the bird, which means that as the days pass, the yolk gets smaller and the chick gets bigger.

Just before hatching, a baby bird absorbs the last little bit if the egg yolk into its belly just before hatching. These last few calories give it just enough energy to hatch and then survive for a bit before needing to eat real food in the outside world. In fact, if you ever get the chance to see a fresh-hatched bird, look at it’s belly and you’ll see a little yellow pouch showing right through its skin. That’s the remainder of the yolk.

When you think of eggs in these terms, it makes sense that they are a nutritious source of proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals.

What’s amazing about baby birds is that they enter the world all by themselves. In chickens, it only takes 21 days for an embryo to grow into a fully formed chick that is ready to enter the world. Complete with a nervous system, bones, muscles and feathers, the chick uses its ‘egg tooth’, which is a sharp little point on the tip of its beak, to poke a hole in the end of the shell.

The chick then methodically works its way around the egg, cutting off the top and wriggling its way out. Hatching from an egg is survival of the fittest in action. Baby birds that are too weak to crack the shell and make it out are too weak to survive for long anyway. The strong birds that make an easy escape will go on to pass on their genes and have strong healthy babies

An egg is a perfect package

Ever heard the phrase ‘walking on eggshells’? It’s used to describe times when you working hard not to offend anybody or do any damage.

It’s not a great phrase, because the shape and structure of eggs gives them surprising strength under the right circumstances.

In fact, I dare you to try this right now: get an egg from the fridge and hold it in your palm. Squeeze it with your four fingers so your thumb is pointing away from you. You can’t break it. Rotate the egg and hold it lengthwise between your thumb and forefinger. You can’t break it.

And yet, a tiny 20 gram chick has the strength to pierce it from the inside out!

It’s not just the strength of an egg that’s remarkable. There’s a reason eggs aren’t spherical. On one hand, a sphere has the lowest surface area-to-volume ratio of all shapes. It would take less calcium and fewer resources to produce a round egg.

But the problem with a spherical egg is that it will roll away, just like a marble. Which is why many birds lay eggs that are pointed on one end. Take the egg you tried to crush earlier and roll it across the table. It won’t roll away! Eggs with a pointed end just wobble around and circle back to the same spot. This evolutionary adaptation helps more babies survive because they won’t roll away from the fluffy warmth of the nest.

Evolution is awesome, and eggs are the perfect way to see it in action.

When it comes to eggs, they’re all good

Sure, whipping eggs into stiff peaks for a light, fluffy angel food cake might be a pretty new and original idea, but we’re not the first egg eaters out there. For millions of years, eggs have been on the menu of wild animals — from snakes to rodents or even other birds. Eggs have been a high protein, nutritious food source, propelling many species into their own unique ecological niche.

While some eggs, like the ones at the store are a food source, others hatch into babies, who carry on their parents’ genetic lines and grow into the next generation of birds.

And lastly, the eggs that don’t hatch or get eaten go rotten. Rotten eggs get a bad wrap, but they have a purpose too. You wouldn’t want one in your house, but in the soil, rotten eggs provide plants with valuable nutrients that allow them to grow big and healthy.

So in the end, there’s no bad egg.

Put that in your pan and fry it.

I like writing about the intersection of science, food and culture. If you like reading about these topics, consider these:

Thanks for reading. Eat local, eat well, and thank a farmer (from a distance).