The other day I cooked an egg.  Not just any egg.  The shell of this egg was brown.  And to be honest, it had just a little bit of chicken poop on it.  I gladly cleaned the poop off before cracking it in the pan.  The yolk was not yellow.  It was orange.  Bright orange.  And it stood up high and round in the pan.  I cooked it for a few minutes on medium heat with a lid over the pan.  That’s the secret to eggs over easy.  By putting a lid over the pan you can cook both sides of the egg before flipping it over.  I always worry about the yolk breaking when I flip it, but these fears were unfounded with this egg.  The yolk was firm.  The yolk was tall.  It would take more than a casual flip to break this one.  I turned the heat off just afterwards and put the lid back over the pan.  That’s the other secret for the perfect egg over easy.  Turn the heat off after the flip, and let it sit there for two or three minutes.  To finish it off I crushed some kosher salt between my finger tips, rubbing it over the egg.  Then I coarsely cracked a few peppercorns over it.  I laid the finished product over a hot piece of toast and carried it to the table.  As I cut into the egg, the severed yolk just barely oozed onto the toast.  Success.  There was no butter on this toast.  Just a little grease from the egg to moisten it.  And the yolk of course.  That bright orange vibrant yolk.

Grocery store eggs are not like this.  Even if you get the expensive so-called ‘free range’ eggs from supposedly happy chickens, they are still light yellow, flaccid, sad little things.  Most people in EMS (which seem to be the main audience for this blog) that I encounter (I realize that my generalizations about people in EMS have offended some.  Apparently there are a few liberal minded folks in EMS.  I think I have met about three of you, but I keep hearing that there are more.)  could care less about where their eggs come from, what they look like, or what they taste like.  Most of the people reading this blog care about only one thing when buying groceries…price.  Period.  The end.  That’s it.  Go to Wal-Mart, go to the egg section, and…yep, that’s the cheapest.  Are they broken?  Nope.  Into the cart they go.

However, those eggs were obtained from chickens that are packed five and six deep into a cage that is only a few cubic feet.  The chickens are normally so stressed by the tight quarters that some of them actually rub themselves on the cage in an anxious frenzy.  This often causes bleeding and infection.  The tight quarters require antibiotics to be pumped into the feed.  And don’t get me started on the feed.  The feed is of the lowest quality.  It’s garbage that was engineered by Monsanto, grown just as fast as possible on a monoculture farm using chemicals and pesticides.  The chickens are engineered as well.  Most are designed to grow so freakishly fast that they have trouble walking  Chickens that don’t lay cost money, so speeding up the process as fast as possible saves money.  None of these chickens will ever be outdoors, not even the so called ‘free range’ chickens.  That’s a dirty trick too.  The ‘free range’ wording on a carton of eggs can be placed there if the chickens have ‘access’ to a yard.  This is usually a door open to a few square feet of fenced in grass in a vast factory environment containing as many as 20,000 chickens.  They never get near a range, but they can put it on the carton.  The stench of ammonia is so bad in these places that employees have to wear respirators.  The cages stacked on top of one another often lead to poop raining down on several layers of cages for days.

You get the picture.

However, most people I have discussed this with roll their eyes at me and say, “Buckman, who cares?  It’s a fuckin’ chicken.”  Actually, I got that exact wording from about three different people.  So it is becoming increasingly obvious that the well being of our food animals is not going to be a factor in the decision about how most of my coworkers eat.

So, let’s try a different tack.  You are eating this.  You are going to put this in your mouth and swallow it, and you are expecting it nourish your body and the bodies of your family which may include young children.  The animals that made this food were genetically engineered to be freaks.  They live in a toxic environment literally covered in shit.  They are so ill from close quarters and eating an unnatural diet that they need a constant influx of antibiotics.  Despite this some egg operations actually accept a 5 to 10% death rate of their chickens.  And you are going to take the product of this animal…and eat it.

That’s disgusting whether or not you give a damn about the well being of the animal.

So the other day I drove out to the farm where my egg was created.  These chickens are allowed outdoors.  So much so in fact that they surrounded the car when I pulled up and I had to use my foot to gently push them aside so my daughter and I could walk around the farm and pet the other animals.  Yes, the eggs had a bit of poop on them.  That’s what happens when an egg comes out of the nether regions of a chicken.  But the chicken itself was not covered in the excrement of hundreds of other sick and filthy chickens.   My eggs were not white.  Some were brown.  Some were bluish-green.  And that orange yolk that I remember from my childhood that most people never see now?  That comes from bugs.  Yes.  Chickens are birds, and birds eat a lot of bugs.  Grubs.  Worms.  You name it.  There is also a bit of feed, but the chickens will eat this to supplement what they can’t get by running around the yard.

Oh, and something else I haven’t mentioned yet.  The taste.  The taste is…well…it can only be described as eggy.  Yep.  Definitely eggy.  But here is the catch.  Most people who are younger than me and have been living in the city have no idea what an egg tastes like despite the fact that they have been eating them for years.  Factory farmed eggs simply don’t taste like eggs.  They taste like…nothing.

My wife is a student at the University of Louisville studying anthropology.  She also used to be a kitchen manager.  So one of her interests in anthropology is the cultural implications of food.  As a mother of her family she has a big stake in this too.  Not to mention the epicurean implications of the eggiest egg we have tasted in two decades.  She has been studying this subject for quite sometime now.

I was once a vegetarian for twelve years for no other reason other than it just did not seem right to me to be taking the lives of other animals when it was not absolutely necessary.  Why did I give this up and go back to eating meat?  To be honest, my career in healthcare opened my eyes to the inevitable death of animals for us to exist.  Industry, medicine, the production of power, science, research, all consume animals.  And yes even farming vegetables kills animals.  Tilling a field to plant corn will quite possibly kill as many mammals as any operation that produces meat, including organic operations.  The more research I did, the more I realized the futility of my actions that were symbolic at best.  When I got married and started working in the rolling hell hole which is a private ambulance my dietary restrictions caused social tension and inconveniences which made my little one man crusade quite uncomfortable.  So I finally gave up, and bellied up to the food trough that is prescribed by our consumerist culture.  I am now sixty pounds heavier, and the food tastes like crap.  This obviously didn’t work.

So this is Food 2.0.  I am going back to the drawing board.  But this must be a cold reboot.  I don’t think my previous kind of vegetarianism was the answer.  To be honest, I ate mostly crap then too.  So I am going back to the diet drawing board with no preconceived notions, and no misconceptions.  My vegetarian friends from days past may look at this as a cop out, but I assure them it is not.  My readings lately have led me to believe that small amounts of meat from a sustainable farm that practices rotational grazing techniques which allow the animals to live in a healthy environment may actually be good for everyone concerned, including the animals that are being eaten.  Believe it or not.  Well, the individual cow that is being eaten may think differently but our proclivity to eat these animals may actually be the one reason that allows their species to coexist with ours.  If we let them act like cows and grow up to be healthy adults on a polycultural farm, my yearning for a well smoked brisket may be just as important to their species as it is to mine.  And it may also come to pass that I may never eat pork again for similar reasons.  But this is the stuff of future blog posts.

To be honest, I am not really sure where this journey will take me.  But I can tell you without hesitation that I am sick and tired of eating cheap crap sold by mega corporations that have little to no interests in my health.  I am tired of gaining weight while eating food that is bad for me and tastes like cardboard covered in salt and sugar.  I want to eat an egg that tastes like an egg from a chicken that acts like a chicken.

Oddly enough I have studied pharmacology for years, but I have embarrassing little knowledge of the substances I ingest everyday.  This idea is beyond organic.  It is beyond vegetarianism.  It is beyond food miles, and recycling, and health and sustainability…as I said, this is Food 2.0.  And it starts with me making a deal with a coworker to get eggs off of a farm that I have seen with my own eyes and rubbing a bit of poop off that egg.  As the saying goes, “You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.”

Don’t worry, I have got plenty of EMS stories left in me.  But if you hadn’t noticed by now, this blog is about a bit more than working on an ambulance.  What the missus and I have decided to do is take things one by one.  Eggs…check.  And as we figure out other pieces of the puzzle, I will try to report back here.  I have been making my own beer now for a few months with fantastic results.  Once I find a way to make a sustainable, healthy beer (Is there such a thing?  Sure.  In the same way that turbinado sugar and honey are better than high fructose corn syrup.)  that is a true product of my surroundings, I will let you know.  We have looked into everything from goat shares to CMA farming to cheese making, to free trade coffee.  I lost over ten pounds last month.  I did this not by going on a diet, but by changing my diet.  I also ate desert every night.  It’s amazing what simply avoiding fast food and not eating mass produced, factory farmed crap will do for you.

So, here I am.  I’m not sure where this is going, but I am sure that you will hear about it here from time to time.  So, go out and have a food adventure.  Go out and have a brown egg with an orange yolk covered in poop from a chicken that eats bugs.  It may sound gross to the uninitiated, but when you get right down to it this is a lot better than a snowy white egg with a yellow yolk made from a chicken that eats corn.  Honest.  I promise.

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