There are few things on Earth as perfect as an egg. As Vladimir Nabokov wrote in the single most appetising parenthesis in western literature, a soft-boiled egg with buttered toast is “(the most delicious meal known to man)”. With the cost of living crisis worsening, there are few cheaper sources of nutrition, too. The egg is egalitarian and utilitarian. To my mind, there is no reason for Deliveroo to exist when you can prepare a three-egg omelette in 30 seconds.
From a farmer’s perspective, eggs are equally miraculous, since they arrive on the production line as neatly and uniformly as Model T Fords – which is far from the case with bacon, tomatoes or milk. “Really, you just need a room, a grader, some hens, and you’re away,” says Paddy Bourns, an organic egg farmer at Cackleberry Farm in Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire. “You can sell them anywhere because they’re ready-packed in their shells. You could drive down the road now, pick up some eggs, put them in a box and sell them out of your gate. There are not many products you can do that with.”
