The egg is touted as Nature’s perfect food by its advertisers, “The Incredible, Edible Egg,” it is called. And they are right. It is the perfect food...for the chicken embryo. It has to be perfect, as the chicken embryo needs an all-in-one, highly efficient complete food since its ability to forage for a variety of foods is exceptionally limited. Same as the human placenta must be an all-in-one smorgasbord for the human embryo. Eventually, though, we all become mobile and no longer must rely on a single food source. Although this logic is somehow lost on humans as Americans ingest an aggregate of 300 eggs, in essence placenta’s of another species, per year.
It’s true that the order and proportion of the amino acids makes egg protein 94 percent usable by the body, more than any other “food” consumed.” So one could conclude the egg is the perfect food. But again, not for us. One would have to bet that Mother Nature wouldn’t have risked the extinction of our species by creating one perfect food, placing it in a chicken egg, and hiding it under a hen where we might never find it.
Maybe a new advertising campaign is in order. Might we call it, The Detestable, Dispensable Egg?