The Egg Is a Miracle
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Consider the egg. What does it look like? What does it taste like? Where does it come from? Maybe you’re thinking tautologically: An egg is egg-shaped, tastes eggy, and comes from egg-laying hens. They make for great breakfasts and cost more than they used to at the grocery store.
That would be underselling things. The ubiquity of this hard-shelled organic vessel that so many of us fry, scramble, boil, poach, and crack into other foods is nothing short of a miracle. Eggs are “fragile, messy, spoilable ovals,” my colleague Annie Lowrey noted this week—yet they can also withstand, at least in one scientific experiment, 250 pounds if cushioned. They owe their taste to “a living, lively organic soil full of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes,” one egg farmer told Corby Kummer in 2000. (“My own conclusion is that feed is the chief influence on flavor, followed by the condition of the ‘layers,’” Kummer writes.)
Christopher Columbus brought what we recognize today as the oval-laying chicken to the Americas in 1493. But most eggs in the bird world aren’t even, well, egg-shaped, Ed Yong reported in 2017. Today’s reading list encourages you to reconsider the humble egg.
On Eggs
It’s Weird That Eggs Were Ever Cheap
What were we thinking, buying so many of these fragile, messy, remarkable ovals?
By Annie Lowrey
Now that doctors are letting us eat eggs again, farmers are working to make eggs taste like they used to.
By Corby Kummer
Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer. (From 2017)
A new study points to a surprising reason for the varied shape of bird eggs—and shows that most eggs aren’t actually egg-shaped.
By Ed Yong
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
- What does a robot with a soul sound like?
- Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule.
- Six older books that deserve to be popular today
P.S.
We recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world.
Peter van Dorsten of Raleigh, North Carolina, writes: “I took these photos on an afternoon visit to Pacaya National Park in Guatemala. Upon reaching the top of the active volcano, we roasted marshmallows from the heat rising from the ground and I watched tourists climbing to get closer to the red hot rocks and steam emanating above us.”
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— Shan Wang