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Last weekend my husband cracked open an egg to make me
breakfast - and out popped two egg yolks.
I know what you’re thinking: How astonishing! A man got up early to fix his wife
breakfast! Not surprising at all, in
fact. He fixes me breakfast all the time. The freak show egg, however, was a bit
unusual.
“Ew,” said my daughter.
“I’ll throw it out,” said my husband.
“Hold on there just a minute, Captain Suburbia!” I protested,
thinking this is what I get for marrying
a boy who never owned chickens, a cow, or
a pony. Toss a perfectly good, cage
free all-natural 50 cent egg just
because it has two yolks? I don’t think so. Two yolks are double the fun. Even a Gemini like me will relish a two yolk
egg, in spite of those ‘eating my twin’ twinges of guilt.
When I was a kid we owned a slew of Bantam hens (midget chickens,
for you city folk). My job was to
collect the eggs. The only ‘bad’ egg, in
my humble six year old opinion, was the one with the half formed chick
inside. This is a delicacy in Guangxi,
but I’m not Chinese, and the thought of eating unborn baby chicks is slightly
less than lip smacking. But double yolk
eggs are an entirely different matter.
Two yolks is a sign from the gods - a run out right now and buy a lottery ticket kind of lucky omen.
Or maybe not. Is
finding a two yolk egg really all that lucky? How many lottery tickets should I be
buying? Should I quit my job and hope
that something else even better comes along before we lose the house? These are big questions, big enough to
require at least 15 minutes of intensive online chicken reproduction research.
It turns out that getting a two-yolker is more common than
you might think. Young hens that aren’t quite
hormonally settled can often drop two egg cells and their accompanying yolks into
the oviductular canal (the egg chute) at once.
The shell forms around these two yolks, the egg is laid, and there you
go, a double yolk egg.
So you can stop ‘laying’ that hogwash on your kids about
where eggs come from and tell them the truth next time.
What you don’t
want to find when you crack open your morning egg is ‘no yolk’. According to
some quite creepy Wiccan and Wizard websites, the lack of a yolk indicates that
something seriously evil is at work. Back
in the 1600s, finding a no yolk egg was enough to get you thrown into the pond.
So if you happen to find a yolkless egg, make sure you bury
it in the backyard with some suitable offerings to Zod to appease his
bloodthirsty lust for the raw hearts of tiny children. Or take your chances with that egg white
omelet. It’s totally up to you.
Surprisingly enough, a lot of very educated people don’t
realize that an egg is not a baby chicken that was snatched
from its mother and put in the fridge before it could hatch. Hens lay an egg roughly once a day, whether
conception or ‘fertilization’ has occurred or not. As a woman who has given birth – vaginally - three
times, I feel for them.
This might be TMI for many of you, but I think this is important
info. Now you can assure your kids that
they are NOT eating the unborn without having to get into a complicated
discussion about reproductive rights. Kids
don’t get enough protein as it is; you can’t have them refusing to eat eggs on
moral grounds.
You see, only a rooster can fertilize an egg, and that’s by
having sexual relations with a hen. I
know from first-hand experience that this involves a lot of flapping. When I was little, my dad told me that all
that all the flapping meant that the hen was happy to see the rooster. I’d like to point out that the hens did NOT
look ‘happy’ to see the rooster and it was pretty clear to me, even then, that
my dad was attempting a massive cover-up.
My embarrassing lack of chicken reproductive knowledge is all
on him.
The problem of fertilization is why you don’t see any
roosters around egg farms. No one wants
to find a baby chick sunny-side up on toast. In fact, roosters are not only useless in the
egg farming business - they can be downright counter-productive.
A chicken will lay more eggs if a rooster is not around to
harass her about stuff. The same way
shopping is more relaxing for us if we don’t bring our husbands. So if you are thinking around raising chickens
(which I am), don’t get a rooster.
As you can see, I’ve done a lot of research about
chickens. That’s because I’ve been
wanting backyard chickens for a while now.
The only thing keeping me from pulling the trigger is the smell (worse
than cat litter), and my husband. He
thinks that chickens will be the first step down a slippery slope to Alpaca
farming.
He’s probably right. Have
you seen an Alpaca? They’re absolutely
adorable.
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