A few thoughts about eggs. 9 March 2007 7:02 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cooking, eating, eggs, health, ingredients, responsibility, restaurants, work , trackbackI grew up with the idea that a person shouldn’t, or maybe even couldn’t, eat more than one egg at a time. In fact, I can remember a quiz question on the subject in one of my Suske en Wiske comic books (Belgian, but popular with kids in the Netherlands, too): how many eggs could a person eat on “een nuchtere maag” — an empty stomach. Of course, logically, the answer is one, but due to a combination of literal-mindedness and less than entirely awesome Dutch reading skills (okay, technically Flemish, since as previously mentioned Suske and Wiske are Belgian) I took this as further proof that one egg was some kind of physiological limit for a long time. To this day, I get self-conscious about eating more than one egg at once, try to avoid eating eggs at more than one meal per day, and generally try to average eating at most one egg a day (I’ll only eat multiple eggs at a time if I haven’t had any in awhile, or I try not to eat any for a few days after, stupid obsessive-compulsive stuff like that). On the one hand, this is pretty sane dietary practice on my part, but on the other hand it’s not like I eat a ton of animal fats, so I probably don’t really have to worry about cholesterol — at least until menopause, when family history predicts I’ll be singing the doom song. But I digress.
I didn’t grow up with the idea of eggs as breakfast food; they weren’t part of my family’s usual Northern European-style morning spread of bread, cold cuts, and cheese (I’m guessing most of you reading have no idea the confusion this caused in my kindergarten peers, who all had cereal for breakfast and simply could not believe that my family and I had sandwiches). Eggs, to my mind, were a special lunch food, or a quick and easy dinner. Also, for a very long time, I thought “omelet” was another word for “spiegelei” or sunny-side up egg. But again I digress. But here’s the thing, a thing I should perhaps have worked into this essay a little earlier. I love eggs. So you can bet I learned to eat them for breakfast eventually, because hey, another chance to eat something I love. And in many places — say, my college dining hall, eggs were only available for breakfast or brunch, or very rare “breakfast for dinner” nights. If I wanted a fried egg sandwich for dinner, I usually had to make it in my dorm room. (Eventually I had to make all my fried egg sandwiches in my dorm room when the dining halls went over to exclusively using cartons of pasteurized egg stuff due to unfortunate Salmonella reasons. It was a total bummer, to put it mildly.) Still, none of this really prepared me to become a professional breakfast cook.
At the Glenwood, and I suspect many other restaurants (Morning Glory included, for that matter), a standard omelet is made with three eggs. Three eggs! I’m used to it now, but I still get incredulous, and when I first started cooking breakfast for a living, I would frequently wonder how those omelets didn’t make people sick. Upon hearing about them, my grandmother incredulously asked, “Op een nuchtere maag?” Yes, Oma, my customers eat three-egg omelets on an empty stomach. At the Glenwood, sometimes they even get them filled with sausage or bacon, or add those meats on the side.
Of course, most people don’t go out to breakfast every day, and most people definitely don’t eat eggs every day, let alone in crazy oversized restaurant-meal quantities (and restaurant portions are enormous way more of the time than just breakfast, but that’s mostly neither here nor there). If folks are only going out for breakfast once a week, tops, and they’re eating cereal the rest of the time, maybe it averages out okay. That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway. As a professional cook, I’m an enabler of people’s food habits, and one of my reasons for leaving the Glenwood was my increasing discomfort at enabling people who wanted to eat three (or sometimes more) eggs wrapped around sausage, with a side of bacon. While I may not want to eat everything on the menu at Morning Glory, at least I will never have a customer substitute their toast and home fries for dead pig in any form. And that’s a wonderful thing.
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I use to hate eggs, but now I like them.
What I am not sure I like at all is the hodge-podge that is the medical community in the United States, especially when the news seems to revolve around what is popular and/or profitable. I believe the Farmingham heart study’s conclusion was that they could find no corollary between a high fat diet and increased cholesterol in the 40-plus years the study has been going on. On the flip side, Dr. Roy Walford has seen very interesting results with regards to cardiac health and longevity (considering that is the point of keeping the heart healthy) by using calorie restricition. But what alarms me most is that most people haven’t heard of either of these people. Roy Walford is a bit obscure, but the “Farmingham” and “cholesterol” should be mentioned much more often together.
I have no idea what the truth is because every few days new information is being thrown at me in sound bytes. The egg scare of the 80’s is a perfect example of what I am unhappy about concerning medical “research” and the media. As you noted, eggs are very popular as a breakfast food. It seemed that everywhere you looked for awhile eggs were being villanized. Then, a couple years went by and eggs became okay to eat again in moderation. What I am curiouse about is how profitable is the egg industray, and what motivated such obvious interest in providing proof that eggs were healthy again?
Not that I make a career out of doing this, but I still haven’t found one research article that indicates a diet of high cholesterol will promote cholesterol in the blood stream (leading to c.v.d.). There could be one out there, but I would really like to see it or at least have it refered to. I am sick to death of just having to take things on faith. If someone is going to make a claim, I want more than a talking head’s word for it.
About ten years ago the ammino acid tryptophan was banned. It had lead to some sort of nasty disease, or, so the media sensationally claimed. Based on what I have read, it seems that the batch of tryptophan that caused the disease was contaminated, but– as far anyone can tell– normal tryptophan use is very safe. In fact, it might be even more effective than prozac for easing depression.
Interestingly, at the time tryptophan was yanked off the shelves, prozac was introduced. Prozac is much more commerically viable. Tryptophan is reasonably cheap and easy to make, while Prozac is a cash cow for the pharmacuetical industry. Some claim conspiracy theory– that Tryptophan took a fall, so Prozac would have no competition.
I’m not really into conspiracy theories, but I do believe that the medical industry, as a whole (and there are always exception), seems to be more interested in commerical viability then providing good, solid information to the public. I also believe the masses (being asses) are more interested in quick fixes than facts. Consider it, to me the equavilent of Fox News (I sometimes wonder if cholesterol is sort of a weapon of mass destruction hidden somewhere. I bet most people can’t even tell me what it is! Only that it is bad!) This is a nasty combo. Personally, I believe cholestrol in the blood stream is the dead canary to let us know there is a problem, but isn’t itself a problem. I believe (except in those rare individuals with a genetic predispostion towards heart disease) there is more an imbalance of sugar intake in the form of too many carbs (primarily processed foods) gluting the system and causing insulin imbalances (especially since most people aren’t burning half the calories they consume). How this all leads to clogged arteries, I don’t know, but I know my grandparents ate– what today would be considered– artery clogging diets. All of them lived to very respectable ages. All of them were very, very active– they seemed to burn very effeciently all the calories they consumed. And growing up they did not have ready access to Dorritos. Dorritos! Truly a black death-like plague, coated in cheese and with a very satifying crunch!– I love crunchy food. If my theory on excessive calorie consumption is correct my arteries are clogging at the mere thought.
Hmmm…that was a bit lengthy. Sorry about that. ; )
One of my favorite alone-for-dinner tricks is to put an egg on any readily available starch. There’s nothing like a barely fried egg on pasta. Well, ok, that would be a barely fried egg on pasta with parmesan.
Dear Cj:
You NEED to read the works of Marion Nestle, starting with What To Eat, which contains a brilliant 2.5 pages on the politics of cholesterol, followed by another page and a half or so about the science. If you do not, I may be forced to condense them into a TracyFood post in your honor — not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you still need to read Dr. Nestle’s books (and that goes for everybody else reading this who hasn’t already done so already).
Liz: You are making me hungry. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
At my favorite all-night diner in Seattle, the omelettes come in only two sizes: 6-egg and 12-egg. With all-you-can eat hashbrowns, and toast! I have never attempted to eat an omelette at Beth’s.