Recently, our daughter has been using brown eggs. Seeing her use those colored eggs transported me mentally back to the time I was first exposed to brown eggs. I think it may have been on my grandmother's farm when I was quite young.
I vaguely recall being served fried eggs made with brown eggs. I remember seeing grandma crack those brown eggs and pour them into the pan. I also recall refusing to eat them. My entire life, I have stayed away from brown eggs and would get grossed out by the thought of eating them. My reason? I had none. They were simply different than the white ones I was accustomed to eating. My thinking was, "If they were different, they had to be weird tasting."
We go to Earth Fare occasionally for a few items which is where our daughter purchases her eggs. A time or two she has asked us to purchase a couple dozen brown eggs on our way to her house. There I was, once again confronted with the weird brown eggs. Feeling the burden of that confrontation, I decided to do some research.
I assumed the brown eggs were what the healthy Euell Gibbons type of people ate. For those of you who don't know who Mr. Gibbons is, permit me to offer some information. He was an outdoorsman and proponent of the natural diet, living off the natural things in the wild during the 1960's. He talked with many experts, tried and created new recipes using only natural ingredients and really brought such thinking into public view. He was the spokesperson for Grape Nuts and the author of a book titled, "Stalking the Wild Asparagus". Mr. Gibbons passed away in 1975 after pioneering natural eating.
My egg research revealed some startling facts. What I discovered was brown eggs and white eggs are nearly exactly the same. Their make up and taste is the same, the only difference is the color of the shell. Here is the big revelation; white eggs come from white chickens and brown eggs come from red chickens. That's it!
After all those years living in fear of brown eggs, knowing for a fact they had to be gross compared to white eggs, I was now liberated from that childhood misunderstanding. These days, I stroll into Earth Fare, pick up a couple dozen brown eggs and head to the check out aisle. Maybe some less educated persons (as I had been) will see me with my brown eggs and assume I am a health nut! How cool would that be? What that person would never know is how wrong I had been in my judgment of the poor brown egg.
Now days, even though I know there is no difference, I still feel kind of cool dropping a couple brown eggs into the water to make poached eggs. I know they are no different but somehow my old thoughts of them not being the same still creep into my daily routine. In fact, they may even taste a little better!
I was an adult and impressionable in the 1960's. I had long hair, rode a cool motorcycle and wore an army jacket with peace patches on it. I imagine to people who saw me but didn't know me, I may have been considered weird. I may have been seen as hippie thinking biker without those people having any idea who I really was. To some, I may have been a brown egg.
My point is we are all so different. We see others who don't dress eat or think like us and we may have a tendency to think of them as being weird and distasteful. I may think anyone who is a fan of any team other than the Oakland Raiders as weird but I would be wrong.
That goes for styles, occupations, places they live, race, how they speak, the music they like, how long and what color their hair may be and on and on. We are all the same on the inside. God gave us all the same skeletal system, digestive system, nervous system and thousands of other things that make us the same. We are just a little different on the outside. Maybe once we take some time and do a little research we will find we truly are the same. Maybe then we will realize we can all love one another, even if our shells are different in appearance.
So if you see yourself as a white egg and are confronted with a brown egg, get to know that brown egg and you just mighty be surprised how much you have in common. If you are a brown egg, do the same. Give that white egg a chance, they might not be as distasteful as you have thought.
Let's face it. We are all eggs on the inside, we just look a little different on the outside. Coming to that realization, we should find it quite easy to love one another.