one imperfect egg

Today is my birthday. This morning, a hen settled into a nook behind the lilac tree, below the kitchen window, built a nest around her, and laid an egg into it. One perfect, milk chocolate-brown egg, with a fluorescent orange yolk.

I can't remember the last time I was so excited.


When I told my dad that we were getting chickens, he asked what our neighbors thought about that. The truth is that we didn't precisely tell our neighbors. We'd only moved in a week before and we didn't know anybody. It seemed like a bad idea to bring over a plate of cookies with the message that we're going to be housing animals whose shit is notoriously stinky and who may or may not be crowing at 4 am, hope you don't mind. Of course, it turns out their shit isn't so bad as long as you keep composting it, and the hens are quieter than a barking dog (we're surrounded on all sides by those) or even a meowing cat – certainly a horny cat is louder than our hens' irritable morning cooing.

At the time, my dad suggested that we promise eggs to our neighbors to placate their concerns. I thought that was a great idea, but he was joking. “Eggs are less than a dollar a dozen,” he laughed, “and they're all the same size and color. Plus, you don't have to worry about double yolks or blood spots.” His message was that our eggs are undesirable in comparison.

All the same size and color? I guess that's true. The backyard eggs we've been buying for a year come in all sizes, shapes, and colors – green, blue, a whole palette of brown, speckled. Some are almost round while others are elongated. Some are small, some are monsters. All of them have that incredibly bright orange yolk, several shades darker than anything I've seen from a grocery store. I have yet to see a blood spot, meat spot, or double yolk, but our eggs are different – that's for sure.

(not edited for color)

Admittedly, I have a strong prejudice in favor of food that is not so easily mechanized. I view tomato bunches that are uniformly red with suspicion. That just doesn't happen on the plant - most tomatoes don't ripen all at the same time. Despite its relative impossibility, those tomatoes that come on a stem are the ones most heavily marketed as “ripe.” To my eye, they look freakish. They're all red like that because they were picked green and gassed into submission, which means that they'll be watery and sour inside, not exploding with good and proper sweetness like a true summer tomato.

Eggs that are all the same size, color, texture, and shape look so weird to me now. And I have to believe that the eggs coming from my hens are what's actually normal – not neat rows of endless white that could be measured in sameness to the millimeter. A stem of tomatoes at various stages of ripeness is what's actually normal. When you garden, or have a strong focus on the food produced by small farmers, you come to realize what's sold as normal in a supermarket is really pretty bizarre. Like eggs in the winter. Blueberries in the autumn. Citrus in the spring. Acorn squash in the summer. Broccoli heads that are all the same density. Potatoes that never sprout. “Atlantic” salmon.

(Jeremy with his wounds, earned while building the coop)

Nature is messy, but to walk through any standard supermarket would have you believe that we've conquered the nature of nature. You don't have to reserve heavy meat-eating for particular times of the year. You don't have to wait for Nantucket scallops. You don't have to find a substitute for tomatoes. You can have anything you want and it will always be the size, shape, and color that you expect. You might even be concerned to find an unusual variation, like orange cauliflower, or an egg with a green shell. In a mechanized, industrialized food system, uniformity isn't what's suspicious. But it should be.