Ah, spring! You know it’s here when drugstore shelves fill up with marshmallow eggs and pink Peeps. But few people realize that real chicken eggs used to be as seasonal as their candy imitators. Even fewer know that the egg was once a speculative tool as controversial as credit default swaps are today.
“Not even a quant, at first glance, can tell a good egg from a bad one.”
The egg’s seasonality made evolutionary sense, since chicks hatched in spring stood the best chance of survival. It also made sense to eat, paint, roll, and otherwise revel in eggs when they were most abundant and cheapest. In mid-19th century New York, there were 72 times more eggs arriving on markets in May than in January. But people didn’t eat them only in spring. Instead they used varnish, butter, and liquid solutions such as waterglass to keep eggs edible for several months. Some methods claimed to keep them “fresh” for up to two years.
For generations, people kept eggs in their barns and cellars. With the invention of mechanical refrigeration in the late 19th century, storage became a major industry. By 1904, the United States had more than 600 refrigerated warehouses, most of them in cities and many of them several stories tall. Boston’s famous Quincy Market had cold-storage space for 150 million eggs.
Early cold storage suffered from uneven temperatures and bad circulation. Quincy Market’s discovery of eggs with a “fruity flavor” (blamed on apples in the next chamber) was typical of the industry’s technical difficulties. These contributed to the persistent price gap between cold-storage eggs and those few marketed as “strictly fresh” in fall and winter.
The source of controversy, however, was not the technology so much as how it could be used to deceive and cheat consumers. Unscrupulous merchants stored eggs without candling them, then blamed the rotted ones on the warehouses’ faulty refrigeration. Grocers bought cheap warehoused eggs and sold the best as “fresh” and the rest as “storage” (which added, of course, to the latter’s bad rep).
Eventually, the cold storage industry tightened up its quality standards. But this didn’t address the widespread belief that the industry encouraged immoral speculation. The merchants, known as “egg gamblers,” bought cheap in spring in order to sell dear in winter. It was speculation, of course, but was it immoral?
When food prices skyrocketed from 1909 to 1910, merchants’ claim that they helped make off-season eggs more affordable did not hold much water. Instead, newspapers charged them with hoarding and price-fixing.
Word spread of an “egg trust.” Several states passed laws mandating labeling and time limits on cold-stored foods. A similar bill reached the U.S. Senate. In the winters of 1912 and 1913, the New York Housewives’ League and other women’s groups organized egg boycotts and “trust-busting” discount egg sales.
Once World War I started, Americans had bigger things to worry about; but the stigma attached to cold storage eggs persisted into the 1940′s. The problem was that the egg’s opacity made it all too convenient a vehicle for deception — rather like some of our modern investment tools. Not even a quant, at first glance, can tell a good egg from a bad one.
What put an end to egg gambling? That’s the subject of the next post.
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This is one reason why you don’t see Grade B eggs anymore. The older an egg gets, the more it will be downgraded.
Modern refrigeration and chicken farming allow for fresh eggs to be laid all year round.
I found this out while researching what a ‘poulet’ was. (FWIW, it’s a young hen that lays a lot of eggs. A hen is an older female chicken and has drastically reduced egg production.)
Easter’s symbols of rebirth, eggs, chicks, baby rabbits, lambs and the like are simple enough to understand in the Christian tradition but I’m always surprised when people fail to understand that it is much more than that. Eggs and baby animals were some of the very first fresh food that pre-industrial populations would have after a long winter, and would in many cases be the only food available. Spring was known as the “staving time” for most of man’s history (in temperate climates) because much of the previous year’s harvest and stores would have been consumed by March and April. Thus, as soon as you could begin to move around outdoors in the daylight you’d begin looking for eggs and game to supplement your diet. Thus the Easter tradition of egg hunting is more mimicry of our starving ancestors than many would like to think.
This is also why ham is the expected meal for Easter lunch. The salted, smoked, cured ham would be one of the last items left in the larder.
Hmm, poulet is actually the French word for chicken- specifically the meat or possibly a male chicken (poule for female, coq for rooster). A “pullet” is an American word for a female chicken < 1 year. They become hens after that.
Will you be discussing the sustainability issues with “farmed chickens” (transportation, fossil fuel use, disease, jobs, feed, concentration of ag businesses)?
several years ago while serving with the Canadian Air Force in the very high arctic, all our eggs arrived dipped in wax to preserve them and make them a little less delicate for travel.
Pasturized Eggs in the Shell are now available for those of us who love our eggs Sunny Side Up without having to worry about the risk of Samonella the whole time while eating them. It also allows great tableside theatrical standards as Caesar Salad and Steak Tartar.
When I was eight years old, in 1947, my parents rented a house (we were in College Park, a suburb of Atlanta, that year – I was an Army brat) that had a chicken coop with a fenced yard in back of it. My father bought a dozen chickens, with the arrangement that if I took care of the chickens, I could sell whatever eggs my mother didn’t cook for breakfast.
I sold all the eggs I had to the neighbors, very readily. My mother only let me charge market price, so I vividly remember the price of eggs that season – anywhere from 70 cents to $1.05 a dozen.
What mystifies me is that, more than 60 years later, that’s still about the basic price of eggs. Yet we’ve had about eightfold inflation since then. And how much increase in the suffering of the chickens who produce those cheap-cheeps?
One of the things I have noticed, at least here in Seattle, is that a lot of people are starting to raise chickens in their backyard.
I buy fresh organic free-range eggs from one of my students every week that she and her brother raise in their backyard.
I get great-tasting eggs and they get some spending money and small-business experience.