When it's salmonella imprisoned in membrane and shell. It's just about safe in there until it's cooked thoroughly to kill off all the harmful bacteria threatening the health of the nation. Or powdered to limit its dangerous power so that it can be used securely, antiseptically, in the preparation of nutrition. But break that pale, pure, fragile oval capsule and release the contents into a bowl with other ingredients and the results are, well, potentially fatal.
Well, according to the food inspectors, they are.
What an egg apparently it is not is the wherewithal to create a gorgeous, glistening , golden mayonnaise to dip your thick, salty chip into, or slather onto roughly sliced ham in your doorstep sandwich. What it is not is the basis for a rich and dark chocolate mousse, so intense in flavour that you must be silent as you savour it, except for the occasional orgasmic grunt or moan. It is probable that by serving my children and my overnight, hungover guests my speciality scrambled eggs I am seriously endangering their health, because I like egg to taste like egg. My scrambled egg is wet, soft, luscious, a liquid mess of egg and butter that slips down the throat, bursting with sensation, waking those jaded taste-buds and letting you know that you're still alive despite the evidence to the contrary of the dull rhythmic thumping in your brain.
I am outraged. I am outraged that there is a small paramilitary organisation of men and women with clipboards telling me that the humble egg is dangerous, while putting their feet up in the evening and watching with equanimity the endless advertisements for 'food products' which have about as close a relationship to real food as I have to Piltdown Man's put-upon wife. I am outraged that the food inspectors deem it perfectly acceptable that so many children exist on a diet of 'food products' whose main ingredient is 'recovered meat', or to be less colloquial about it, residue scraped off the mechanical equipment used to separate the decent meat from the carcase of an animal, or 'reshaped fillets of fish' which is the piscine equivalent married to entirely artifical chemical flavour equivalents. I am outraged that there are 'enriched citrus beverages' out there which contain 2% or less of actual fruit juice, the remainder of the 'beverage' being made up of "Water, High Fructose, Corn Syrup, Citric Acid, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Beta-Carotene, Thiamin Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Natural Flavors, Food Starch-Modified, Canola Oil, Cellulose Gum, Xanthan Gum, Sodium Hexametaphosphate, Sodium Benzoate To Protect Flavor, Yellow #5, Yellow #6 ". I am outraged that salmon farmers feed their fish with so much vegetable oil that the fish can slip out of your hands as you prepare it, and that your fillet of seared salmon can, far from being healthy, be fattier than a high street quarter-pounder. I am outraged that ridiculous health claims can be made about fat levels, so that I can buy a bag of lurid pink marshmallows which bears the strident shout "0% fat!" without mentioning that it's practically all sugar.
Apparently in 2000 there were some 68000 cases of salmonella. It's a nasty disease, it's 4-7 days of food poisoning and then the patient gets better. According to my research there are many ways of contracting salmonella, one of which is through uncooked eggs or under-cooked meat, but also poor hygiene and ...inadequate thawing of frozen food. So why aren't the food inspectors howling for the banning of chicken nuggets and scampi? What did the egg ever do to them.
Set against these poor 68,000 inflicted (and I'm not being sarcastic - I had food-poisoning after oysters and I know how miserable it is...) the 22% of the UK population, that's 13,250,000 of us, who are obese after susisting on a diet largely consisting of fat and sugar, and the harm which can be done by the battery of chemicals and additives careless bodies expose themsleves to. I refer you to this page http://www.freedomyou.com/nutrition_book/enriched_fortified_synthetic_food.htm . It makes for grim reading.
And yet the government sponsored crusade is against the egg.
Poor egg. How did it come to this? And don't get me started on chicken...
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