Eggs

Don’t egg me on!

I have enough egg on my face already because of this blog.

“You are what you eat,” the old cliché says.   And I used to eat eggs.  Until this morning, that is. When I sat down to my scrambled eggs for breakfast, I realized that they looked just like my brain on pharmaceuticals. That kind of ruined my appetite, so I decided to find out what’s up with eggs these days.

It is not pretty.

Mostly its tons of hormones and antibiotics.

Bra for Men who Ate Too Many Chickens

First, the hormones.  If you eat the standard eggs for sale in grocery stores, your breasts will grow huge, and your wrists will get limp.  You may even have to wear a bra.

Regardless of which sex you started out as, you will soon be begging for a same sex partner. Maybe marriage even-- if Hopey Changey can get that off the ground. It’s all the eggs at the so called “White House Mess” (Who could imagine a better name for their dining hall?) that have led Obama and Biden into making the recent shocking announcement of their plans to marry each other.

Then, the antibiotics.  Even worse. The big chicken growers (Purdue, Tyson Foods, Pilgrims Pride, and THE KOCH BROTHERS, who are in this game too!)  feed chickens so many antibiotics that almost all micro organisms have now become resistant to every known antibiotic. This means that when you go to the hospital and get a dose of antibiotics to kill some deadly germ, it won’t work because the germs have evolved to be immune to antibiotics.

The Food and Drugs Administration has been wringing its hands about this and finally “urged farmers to give fewer antibiotics to livestock and poultry to reduce the risk of superbugs, multi-drug-resistant bacteria, that can be transferred to humans and can cause infections that are difficult or impossible to treat, are more likely to be fatal, and can require longer and more expensive hospital stays. [1]

The reason that so many antibiotics are required is that chickens are raised in their own excrement.  Piled up on top of each other in giant chicken condos with no space to even move, the pee and shit from the upper chickens rains down on the ones down below, making for an awesomely unsanitary living situation.[2]

The antibiotics are no longer even working at the chicken farms. According to the Poultry Site, an industry website,  “87 percent of chicken carcasses tested positive for e. coli after chilling and just prior to packaging…Every year, contaminated poultry products cause approximately 1.5 million illnesses, 12,000 hospitalizations and 180 deaths. However, most people eating cooked chicken feces have no symptoms and are unaware of what they have ingested.”

In addition to all the drugs and hormones, the egg producing chickens have their beaks cut off so that they won't peck each other out of frustration created by the unnatural confinement. “After their bodies are exhausted and their production drops, they are shipped to slaughter, generally to be turned into chicken soup or cat or dog food because their flesh is too bruised and battered to be used for much else.”[3]

The Department of Agriculture[4] has decided that this situation requires immediate action. So what to do?  The decided that the best course of action is to pull their inspectors out from the chicken farms (because they were not doing any good anyway) and told the industry to regulate itself, like a good capitalist should. Same as the banks did. Kind of like Glass-Steagall repeal for chicken farmers.[5]

So what do the smart people do when faced with this situation? They steal eggs from wild sea gulls.  And its legal under Federal law! In Alaska the National Park Service even approves of opening currently closed off areas within Glacier Bay National Park to local native egg raiders.[6]  Alaska Senators Murkowski and Begich are pushing a bill (S.1063) to allow the eggs to be taken from within the park. [7]

Senator Murkowski

In his July 28, 2011 testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on National Parks, a notorious Alaskan eggologist testified that if the Huna Tlingit natives were allowed to raid glaucous-winged gull eggs within the park,  that activity would result in about a 22% reduction in the number of fledglings in the area.[8]

But what are our other options? More hormones, bigger breasts, and the loss of valuable antiboiotics.

Glaucous Winged Seagull in Glacier Bay, Alaska

So I say, let’s get us some fresh wild eggs-- no hormones,  no antibiotics! 

Write to your Congressman and ask that you be given the same rights as the Huna Tlingit Tribe to raid eggs in the national parks.

Or maybe you can just pick up your eggs in Washington, DC, at Senator Murkowski’s office.

This is a certified organic free-range blog.

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[1] For more detail, follow this link.

[2] According to one source "laying hens" are “crammed together in wire cages” with no room to spread their wings. Crammed so closely they  “urinate and defecate on one another.” http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/chickens.aspx

[3] For more on the delightful fun of chicken farming, hit this link.

[4] As usual in the Federal government, regulators are tripping all over each other and confused about who is supposed to regulate what. The USDA regulates the farms and the FDA regulates the drugs in the feed, but neither one really has responsibility for the health of the egg consumers. That is left up to the Grocery Store Owners Association.

[5] The story on the new chicken regulations can be found here.

[6] http://www.cfr.washington.edu/research.cesu/reports/J9W88050018_Tech_Report.pdf.

[7] http://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republican-news?ID=ab1a5b96-b6a1-49d9-afdf-37c11fe0e7aa.

[8] Statement of Eggologist, Dr. Jack Hession (PhD), of the Sierra Club on S.1060-Huna Tlingit Gull Egg Use Act of 2011 before the Subcommittee on National Parks of the United States Senate, Washington, DC, July 28, 2011.