Getting Away From An Egg Industry That's Too Fragile

I eat a lot of eggs. This proclivity is inherited from my father, who was unimpressed by the 1970s medical consensus that eating egg yolks led to heart disease. "There's no evidence," he would say in those days, "that the cholesterol in eggs has anything to do with the cholesterol in your bloodstream." No evidence ever was forthcoming, and the medical establishment has since come around to my dad's reasoning. Eggs are great, my dad is smart and I hope he will now forgive me for implying last month that he eats cereal with too much sugar in it.

My wife and I buy our eggs at the farmer's market a couple blocks from our apartment, because that's the kind of insufferable people we are and the kind of insufferable neighborhood we live in. The price is generally $4.50 or $5 a dozen.

I've never been able to detect any difference in flavor between the farmer's market eggs and store-bought. But I like the idea of buying from somebody I sort of know, and having some assurance that the chickens involved were having fun when they weren't giving up potential offspring for my delectation. Also, even at $5 a dozen, eggs are a pretty cheap source of nutrition. My omelet this morning, made of two eggs, a scallion, two cherry tomatoes, a little butter and a little salt, cost me about $1.

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