I Ate an Egg

Sometimes its irritating living alone.  I wanted an egg for dinner this evening but I couldn't buy just one.  Oh no, I had to buy a dozen of the little ovoid bastards.  Fortunately one of them was broken so I only have ten surplus to requirements eggs.  The eggs were apparently free range although I have my doubts about exactly how free the ranging involved was.  After all you need to be able to find where the chickens have left the eggs.

Mind you the egg packet did its best to convince you that these eggs had been handed up voluntarily by chickens out of a simple sense of gratitude for living in heaven on earth.  "Just as nature intended" was one line.  Because I'm sure that nature really intended chickens to hang around in someone else's backyard so that the owners could more conveniently feast on their unborn children.  The word "traditional" was tossed in as well.  Traditional is really a winner when you're promoting pretty much anything.  This is despite the fact that traditional basically means dirty, ignorant, disease ridden and wretched.

Nothing is more indicative of how far the human race has come than our ability to look back on the endless litany of misery, hardship and desperation which makes up the bulk of human existence and sigh with nostalgia.  That's before we get on to the chickens.  Everywhere there are chickens, crapping, spreading diseases, dropping feathers and running in front of carts, vans and cars so that impressionable children will get their little hearts broken.  Frankly I think it was a good thing when we gathered together these egg spawning filth bags and stuffed them into warehouses out of everyone's way.

But that wasn't good enough was it.  Barely had the last child died of chicken pox when people were sighing for the days when you couldn't get out of bed without treading on a damn chicken.  Suddenly free range was the rage.  Claims were made that the eggs tasted better which was obviously the most transparent propaganda put out by people who suddenly felt the nation couldn't survive another minute without being up to its hips in chickens.

Not that we actually got free range chickens.  Considering the number of chickens required to keep the world in eggs we'd probably need another planet to keep them all on for them to be properly free range.  So what we get is something hovering midway between battery farming (cruel) and genuine free range (messy, dirty, chicken ridden hell).  The chickens get enough space to dream of genuine freedom without ever attaining it while we gain just sufficient opportunities to tread in chicken shit to convince ourselves that we're being genuinely traditional.

Personally I think chickens in battery farms would be happier to surrender their eggs simply so that their children don't have to grow up in such an environment.  Free range chickens probably sob as we take their eggs mourning the loss of chickenly potential as we sweep up another generation and take them off to become bacon and egg mcmuffins.  I hope proponents of free range eggs are feeling appropriately bad about themselves.