Egg Moon

Regular readers will recall that I’ve been working my way through Full Moon Feast’s moon cycles, starting with Hunger Moon and following up with Sap Moon. Now we’re on to Egg Moon, which seems quite fitting with Passover and Easter having just past us by. Eggs represent the springtime (and fertility), partially due to the fact that hens produce more eggs in the spring due to pituitary gland stimulation brought on by increased sunlight. This occurs, of course, when chicken are raised on farms rather than kept in factories–but more on that in a bit.

Eggs are particularly meaningful to me because they’re what I turned to when I had terrible health problems from a vegan diet. Some do better on a plant-based diet than others, and I was pretty malnourished and finally sought help when my hair started falling out. An acupuncturist, an herbalist and a medical doctor all told me to start eating meat again, and I decided to listen. However, I really didn’t know how to cook with meat yet. I was also completing an internship at an environmental magazine with housing provided, and my coworkers were all either vegan or vegetarian. And so I started eating eggs, a gateway food to get me back on track. Eggs represented renewal and life for me in a way that was more literal than symbolic as a substantial part of my journey back to health.

A big reason why I’d decided to go vegan in the first place was after seeing photographs and videotapes of rooms so crammed with chickens that the word overcrowding would be an understatement. These poor creatures have no room to move, and no access to sunlight or the outdoors. They are pumped full of antibiotics to prevent outer manifestations of disease, have their beaks cut off to prevent pecking (as birds in distress are wont to do), are subject to artificial lighting (so they think it’s always summer and lay more eggs), are deprived of food (also to increase production) and, of course, are overbred. To add insult to injury, these miserably confined animals are forced to lay in their own filth.

I’m well aware that we all have to make our own decisions, and the way we spend money is one of our most personal choices. I personally choose to buy eggs from chicken raised in farms rather than factories, preferably farms that I can visit. Chicken that I’ll find able to eat greens and even bugs and snails in open pasture, healthy chicken wandering outdoors with their beaks intact. As Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm and many others have demonstrated, chicken can work really well in a farm environment when they hang out on fields cows previously grazed on. They eat bugs and scratching through cattle droppings to sanitize the pasture. And, as per usual, not only are eggs from farms more ethical to eat, they are also far more nutritious with a good balance of fatty acids. Eggs are incredibly nutritious, with protein, A+D vitamins, chemicals such as lutine (essential for eye health) and choline (essential for brain health). Although eggs are high in cholesterol, it’s been shown that blood cholesterol levels aren’t really affected by cholesterol intake.

I will readily admit to eating properly sourced eggs raw. Why? Because I think the chances of getting salmonella from healthy eggs is much lower than from factory eggs, and because I know that it’s possible to eat an egg with salmonella without getting sick. But, again, we all have to make our own decisions on that one. I eat raw eggs in smoothies, hardboiled eggs in salads and added to chicken broth for egg drop soup. I eat them scrambled with chicken and avocados, or with tomatoes and garlic, or with spinach and mushrooms. I eat eggs in quiches and souffles, fried, poached or deviled. I’m still perfecting the art of the omelet, and hope to experiment with frittatas this Egg Moon. And of course, there’s more than just chicken eggs to play with. I can go on a mad treasure hunt for goose eggs, duck eggs and even salmon eggs, to name just a few.

And if anybody at the grocery store says anything about my massive egg purchases, I can direct them to this hilarious article by Tony Gentilcore–and so can you!

How are you eating your eggs these days? Let me know in the comments.