OK. I was in Whole Foods today, and it was like they read my mind.
They had eggs in onesies. Actually, it was 3 for a dollar; but there they were just sitting there, in neatly arranged rows with fractional egg cartons on the side for protecting them. It was implied that you could purchase just one if you liked. If you are single and only like to eat eggs once in a while, you should immediately appreciate this. Usually, walking by the egg display in a supermarket is one of those slaps in the face for anyone who is either (A) single or (B) not a glutton. For the vast majority of Americans, married gluttony is the mass-market ideal. Now, Whole Foods is known for attempting to counter that. That they broke down the single-egg barrier didn’t surprise me. That the eggs were advertised as locally raised and cage-free was no surprise either. That they were available in brown and white was certainly no shocker. No, the real shocker was what was next to these eggs.
There were a few really large eggs. No, not “that was a big chicken” large. LARGE. Like, Six inches long maybe.
Ostrich? Nah… I thought. Who eats ostrich eggs? Emu? I’d heard they raise those in various places so that had to be it. When I got home I researched it a bit and found that emu eggs actually tend to be green in color. These were very light brown, and were thus most likely ostrich.
All I can say is… wow. Oh, and get this–they were $29.99. Thirty dollars. For an egg. OK, it’s said to be the equivalent of 20 chicken eggs but… do the math! What on God’s green Earth is going on there? Who buys those things? I mean… just… wow. I want to meet the marketing pro who sold the buyer on this. Yo! Egg wholesaler! I need you to… market my re-branded Ubuntu as a Windows alternative. Come on. This is Silicone Valley, baby. You’re obviously a genius, wasting your talents convincing the buyer that this will sell.
Then again… maybe it does sell. Probably, it sells to people who’ve never had one and want to try it once. The managers probably aren’t stupid. Maybe they even have market research indicating that if you put something really freaky in the cooler, X number of people will buy it for a really high price, and that magic number is how many they had. Then, maybe one guy will come back a month later and say “what happened to the ostrich eggs? Why aren’t they in stock more often?”. That person would, perhaps, be the quintessential Bay Area eccentric…
UPDATE, April 24 2009.
It turns out the ostrich eggs most likely come from Indian Point Ostrich Farms, LLC. They even have a link to Whole Foods on their site. Also, YouTube has videos of people opening the eggs.
It did occur to me that it might be tricky to avoid a mess. Plainly, you can’t just crack it on the edge of the bowl. A number of techniques are employed.
1. Dremel (warning the video is noisy)
2. Big Knife
3. Hammer
3. Professional Hammer (Julia Child makes it look easy)
Oh, and if you’re thinking it’d be easier to hard boil it, think again. According to some sources, you need to boild it for 1.5 hours, and wait a while for it to cool before eating. The real problem though is the eating. None of the groups in these vids are of a dozen people. That’s about how many you need if each person is going to eat the equivalent of two chicken eggs at one sitting.
