The other morning when I went to feed the geese, Rosalind was nowhere in sight. Even her partner Richard didn’t charge forward with his usual hungry honk, but stood motionless near the pond. After a few moments I spotted Rosalind behind the hut out of sight. She just stood there, looking bemused. Neither she nor her mate came to eat.
Later Wayan showed me the bulge under the goose’s tail and explained that an egg was eminent. Rosalind didn’t seem to be aware of this impending event. “It’s painful the first time,” said Wayan sympathetically. I thought about the size of a goose egg and then about the size of a goose, and winced.
I checked on the geese throughout the day. She moved around very little but her expression of confusion increased. Perhaps she was beginning to realize the connection between her current discomfort and all those amorous (and noisy) encounters with Richard in their little pond.
By sunset they were both lying in adjacent piles of leaves, not having touched their dinner. The next day they were sitting somewhere else. Both ignored the snug nesting hut I had constructed for them, preferring to sit around in piles of dry bamboo leaves. They didn’t seem to a have a clue what they were doing. This went on for several days and I become concerned. How long could a goose go on without breakfast, lunch or dinner? I tried to imagine what was going on under those smooth white feathers, and how it must feel to have quite large eggs moving around inside.
Western children these days are very ignorant of where their food comes from. They open a box of supermarket eggs without a clue about the work that went into them.
When my youngest nephew learned that eggs came out of a chicken’s bottom, he was absolutely horrified. “Where do you think you came from?” enquired his mother crisply. He gave up eating them for awhile and to this day surveys his egg sandwiches rather thoughtfully.
I kept a few bantams in Vancouver many years ago, and children would come from all over the neighbourhood to hang over the fence and look at them. “Are those real chickens?” they would ask me. When the eggs started to appear, it was a revelation.
Eggs are quite miraculous. They are produced in a very businesslike way; no systems analyst could improve on this particular technology. The egg begins inside the hen as one of a string of yellow grains, graduating in size to become the egg yolk. When it’s large enough, the first yolk in line enters a passageway where it’s fertilized if the hen has been keeping company with a male. Female birds still make eggs whether they are in a relationship or not (just like us), but these eggs won’t be fertile. Many people refuse to believe this.
Assuming Richard had done his duty as proclaimed by loud, indiscreet honks from their paddock in drowsy afternoons, the fertilized egg will then have the white wrapped around it. Next it moves down the assembly line to the shell-building station. Birds need to have enough calcium in their diet, usually obtained from eating greens, to build healthy shells. When this last step is finished, the egg completes its journey to the outside world. While this is happening, all the other nascent eggs inside are lining up for their turn to be fertilized, albumined and shelled before getting laid. Which can’t be very comfortable for the egg either, when you think about it. It takes about 24 hours for the egg to go through this whole production cycle. Then half an hour after it’s laid, the next egg goes onto the assembly line.
Thirty years of accumulated research cracks the myth that eggs are bad for you. Dietary cholesterol has only a small effect on blood cholesterol. An egg a day has no measurable effect on heart disease risk in healthy people. The American Medical Journal recently reported a study that showed no relationship between egg consumption and cardiocvascular disease in a population of over 117,000 nurses and health professionals followed for between 8 and 14 years. The study found no difference in the incidence of congestive heart disease or stroke in people eating less than one egg a week and more than one egg a day, except in diabetics.
Japan, Spain and France are among the highest consumers of eggs in the industrialized world, yet have the lowest cardiovascular mortality. So there. Sunny side up, please.
Nutritionally, the egg offers a very high quality of protein and 13 essential vitamins and minerals, mostly in the yolk. Cheap, tasty, easy to prepare and self-packaged, the egg remains a prime food source. Organic is always best of course; certain agricultural chemicals are concentrated in the yolk. Lightly cooked eggs are easier to digest.
Eggs have been part of our diet and culture for thousands of years. They have been coloured, blessed and exchanged as Rite of Spring ritual long before Christianity. The French had 685 recipes for egg dishes at the time of the revolution. I will withhold from Rosalind, however, the information that the largest chicken egg ever laid was over 450 grams. Ouch.
Rosalind still hasn’t done the deed. Experts tell me it can take a week or more from the time the factory kicks into gear until the first product gets laid. It’s an eyeblink in terms of human gestation, but judging from Rosalind’s expression it must be taking forever and feeling pretty peculiar.
