By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, November 1, 1947.
“I’ll take a…” paused Jimmie Frise, studying the menu, “… I’ll take a Spanish omelette.”
“Aw, take scrambled eggs,” I protested. “Good old plain scrambled eggs.”
“Make it,” said Jimmie to the waitress, “a Creole omelette. That’s got more goo and peppers and stuff, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s hotter than the Spanish,” agreed the waitress.
“Jim!” I pleaded. “Why ruin good eggs with a lot of guck? There’s nothing in the world as good as old-fashioned scrambled eggs.”
“Creole omelette,” smiled Jim resolutely at the waitress. And she went away.
“I can’t understand,” I submitted, “why you, who were born and raised on the farm, should prefer your eggs all smothered up with tomatoes and peppers and sauces…”
“Ah,” responded Jim, “if I could get good rich country eggs, good old barnyard eggs, I’d eat ’em scrambled. I’d eat them fried, boiled, shirred or even raw. But these poor, anaemic, pallid, sissy city eggs you get – these factory eggs – these chicken ranch eggs! Why, there’s no flavor to them! I’ve got to have them doctored up.”
I laughed.
“Jim,” I scoffed, “there’s no comparison between barnyard eggs and the product of efficient and scientific modern chicken farms.”
“That’s just what I said,” agreed Jim calmly. “No comparison. The yolk in a chicken farm egg is so pale a yellow that you can hardly distinguish it from the white. The white is so fragile and jelly-like, you might as well be eating air: Neither the white nor the yellow has any flavor whatever.”
“If you call flavor,” I cried, “that heavy, cloying, gamey taste you get in the orange-colored yolk of a barnyard egg.”
Our waitress returned with our lunch. Jim’s was a plate on which a small leather-colored omelette, like an old wallet, lay floating in a sea of squishy red tomato, green peppers, red peppers, onions and dark speckles of spice.
My plate held a delicious little mound of feathery scrambled eggs, the color of palest daffodils, a sort of delicate canary.
“There!” I announced triumphantly.
“Taste them!” suggested Jim.
I tasted them.
“Taste any egg?” inquired Jim sarcastically.
As a matter of fact, they tasted slightly sweet. I sprinkled salt on them generously, and biffed the pepper shaker with my fist.
“It won’t do any good,” assured Jim, scooping up a forkful of his florid omelette. “Those are, mass production eggs. Those are factory eggs. Egg factory eggs. There isn’t anything in them but what the egg factory put in them. The mothers of those eggs were spinsters. Old maids. They lived in a chicken nunnery, hundreds of them, thousands of them. They were born in an incubator, and from the day of their birth, never ate anything but horrid artificial foods, concocted in test tubes by spectacled professors. Robot chickens, living in white-washed prisons, with artificial heat and artificial light, force-fed, pushed and shoved from within and without, toward their tragic fate. Never, never did one of those little mothers ever chase a grasshopper or pull a worm from the manure pile with glad young cries. Never did they race one another for a tidbit across the steaming barnyard. Never did they hear a rooster crow, save a mile away on some vulgar neighboring farm.”
I toyed with my scrambled eggs.
“How,” demanded Jimmie, wiping a little Creole sauce off his chin with his paper napkin, “how could the eggs of such chickens have any character, any quality, any savor? Penned in their hard, clean prison yard, they have been stuffed with scientific food, glutted with vitamins blown up with chemicals, proteins, carbohydrates.”
I took the ketchup bottle and slurped a goodly portion over my scrambled eggs.
“The only egg,” propounded Jim, “fit to eat, is a natural egg from a natural barnyard fowl. A good, round, rich egg, with a deep yellow yolk and a fine creamy white.”
I stirred the ketchup into my scrambled eggs and tasted them. They did taste better. At least, they tasted.
“I’m beginning to think,” ruminated Jim, “that science is the real enemy of mankind. A man IS What he eats. A nation IS what it eats. Look at the British and roast beef – that is, until recently. Why did they call him John Bull? Look at the Germans, who ate cabbage and fat sausages and pumpernickel! Look at the French, who ate complex, strangely-seasoned and delicate food! Look at the Italians, who ate spaghetti that was so slippery you could hardly…”
“Science,” I reminded him.
“Science,” returned Jim, “has given us force-fed beef, called baby beef, beautiful to look at but without flavor or quality. And look at those eggs! I tell you, science is stealing away the character and the quality of the human race. We are becoming anaemic, debilitated, without flavor and without character, just like what we eat. One fine day, some race of men that has escaped science will come down on us, full of blubber and beetroot, and conquer the whole earth!”
I finished my scrambled eggs and ketchup and washed it all away with a glass of tall, cold-scientific milk.
“I disagree with you,” I announced, “on every point. Most of the trouble and uneasiness in the world today is due to the rise of a better-fed, healthier, stronger and more intelligent mass of mankind. In the olden days, when the masses were kept half-starved, so they hadn’t enough energy to demand anything, the world was a cosy spot for the well-fed. But now, everybody is well fed…”
Jim detests politics, especially recent politics. He pushed back his chair and we sauntered out into the noonday streets to mingle with the downtown crowds for a few minutes’ walk in the autumn air.
“We ought,” he announced, “to have a National Hen Day, celebrated from coast to coast. A national holiday dedicated to man’s most generous friend, the chicken. In the big cities, there ought to be festivals and parades, with large floats showing giant chickens flapping their wings to greet the cheering and grateful multitudes of city slickers lining the streets. In the country, every village and every township should hold fairs on that national holiday to show, not the dead corpses of the chickens nor the heaps of pearly eggs, the vain fruits of all their labors but the living beauties, with ribbons round their necks and gilded cages in which to display the famous champions.”
“National Hen Day!” I agreed triumphantly.
“I saw some figures in the paper the other day,” said Jim. “Last year, do you know how many billion eggs Canadian hens produced?”
“Billions?” I protested. “Aw, not billions!”
“I tell you,” assured Jim, “last year the hens of Canada produced 350,000,000 DOZEN eggs!1“
“Holy…!” I gasped.
“Three hundred and fifty million DOZEN,” calculated Jimmie, “is getting on to 4,000,000,000 eggs. In Canada alone.”
“I had no idea,” I said reverently and wished I couldn’t taste the ketchup in my mouth.
“The funny part,” said Jim, “was that while 250,000,000 dozen eggs were sold off the farms to be eaten elsewhere, nearly 90,000,000 dozen were eaten right on the farms.”
“Or kept for hatching,” I suggested.”
“Not at all,” corrected Jim. “They sold 12,000,000 dozen off the farms for hatching for the egg factories. And kept only 6,000,000 dozen for hatching on the farms.”
“Those are staggering figures,” I confessed. “Did they give any figures about the chickens themselves – the poultry?”
“Yes, but only in pounds,” explained Jim. “And you can’t visualize a pound of chicken the way you can a dozen eggs. I think it was 200,000,000 pounds of chicken sold off the farm, and 65,000,000 pounds of chicken eaten on the farm…”
“Hmmm,” I submitted. “They eat pretty well on the farms!”
“Eat?” cried Jim, exhaling Creole sauce into the crisp autumn air. “You don’t know the half… Say! Do you know what I’m going to do tomorrow?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I muttered.
“I’m going to drive down,” he exclaimed, “to Uncle Abe’s farm and get a six-quart basket full of barnyard eggs! Do you want to come?”
Naturally, I went. Every time we go to Uncle Abe’s, if it isn’t a barrel of northern spies, it’s a lame back; if it isn’t a car trunk full of squash and pumpkins, it’s the hay fever from helping thresh the barley. But I went.
Uncle Abe has no use for science. He doesn’t even own a tractor. His implements all have that well-weathered, rusty and Victorian appearance that you associate with your earliest boyhood memories of farms.
And the table Aunt Hetty spreads belongs to the oldest and best tradition. We arrived at the farm just in time to be too late for the evening chores and also without any warning. But this makes difference to Aunt Hetty. She merely set two more places at the big kitchen table and went to the cupboard and put 12 tea biscuits on the plate instead of six, and added a pumpkin pie to the apple pie and the gooseberry pie that already graced the central pyramid of bounty that rose in the middle of the huge round table.
The main dish for the meal was lamb stew, with new boiled potatoes rolling in the gravy, whole carrots and whole small onions. On the side were baked squash, stewed tomatoes, baked beans, green beans and more small round potatoes to put in the stew when you ran short.
From the central pyramid, you could select sour pickles, sweet pickles, silver onions, green tomato pickles, pickled melon, pickled baby corn cobb suckers and home-made tomato butter that would lift you six inches off your chair with the first taste, it was so hot.
After we got the first famish dulled and, is the custom at farm tables, conversation started to bloom gently, Jim opened the discussion on eggs.
“We’ve come,” he announced, “for about six dozen real farm eggs. I want to show this poor, anaemic little guy what an egg should taste like.”
“Six dozen,” said Aunt Hetty, “will be just about what I’ve got in the back kitchen.”
Uncle Abe finished chewing what he had in his mouth and then sat back a little and cleared his vocal chords.
“Eggs,” he enunciated, “are the fundamental food of mankind. It may well be that while the other monkeys stuck to nuts, spiders and beetles, the man-monkey discovered that eggs were good to eat. And the whole story of the rise of man from the lower orders is due, to eggs.”
“I mean,” put in Jim, “natural, WILD eggs!”
Uncle Abe ladled another scoop of lamb stew on my plate, while the conversation rolled and rambled far and wide over the whole field of eggs. The dishes and the plates passed. The pickles went from hand to hand. At Aunt Hetty’s table, there is plenty of exercise in just passing; because if you pick anything up, there is no place to set it down again except the place it came from.
“Het,” said Uncle Abe, when all our lamb plates were polished and the pie was next in order. “All this talk about eggs has got my appetite stirred up. Before we assault the pie, how about a platter of nice light scrambled eggs?”
“Oh, no, NO, NOOOO!” I groaned.
But Aunt Hetty skipped to the stove, whisked a skillet out and cracked a dozen eggs.
Yes: I had to try them. I begged off. But Jim pushed me aside with his elbow and ladled the scrambled eggs off the platter on to my plate.
And pie. You can’t offend a woman like Aunt Hetty.
It was toward 10 o’clock when Jimmie and I, slightly bowlegged, walked out of Uncle Abe’s kitchen door into the lighted door yard where our car was parked.
Jim had a goodly pumpkin in his arms. I had the basket with six dozen eggs, as well as a handsome Hubbard squash under the other elbow.
I tossed the Hubbard squash through the open window of the car on to the back seat, and reached for the door handle.
At the same instant, with a fiendish sound, something large, wild and furious came screeching through the open window and batted me on the head as it passed. Within the car, a mad pandemonium had broken. I leaped backward, slipped and hurled the basket of eggs in a wide arc of self-defence…
“Those dang chickens!” cried Uncle Abe, bounding to my aid tip-toe through six dozen burst eggs all around …”They always roost in anybody’s car!”
Editor’s Note:
- Out of curiosity, Canada produced 915.0 million dozen eggs in 2024, up 260% since 1947. ↩︎
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