A Good Egg

I grew up poor. Not poor poor, but definitely poor. Mom did what she could so far as food was concerned, and I never felt deprived or bereft, but there was a lot of the cheap stuff: liver, shrimp, spaghetti (which my dad steadfastly insisted upon calling pasghetti, mostly because it irritated the hell out of my mother), meatloaf (with a significant quantity of bread mixed in with the ground beef), canned Chinese food, and, of course, Shit on a Shingle. And eating out was closer to anomalous than rare. On the few occasions that we did go out to eat, of which I can remember only two, one of which was at McDonald's, the other  Gino's . . . which was the Baltimore equivalent of McDonald's.

Shortly after I graduated from high school I went into the army, and most of my meals for the next three years were eaten in mess halls. It was fine by me, but not quite what you'd call haute cuisine.

So I guess it's no surprise that I didn't really think much of or about food. It was just future shit to me, so the cheaper the better, and the more the merrier. I did go outside of my comfort zone to please women, of course (because that's what we do, right?), but as for myself: I was happy to order from the dollar menu.

But about a year ago X-1 and I had to start keeping track of Jacqueline's food intake, and for the first time it really hit me (1) how easy it was to take in a vast amount of calories if you weren't thinking about what you ate and (2) how eating at restaurants was sure to at least triple the number of calories you took in for a meal. 

And I've recently decided to apply the Write Down What You Eat and Track Your Calories Program to myself, which has been quite the eye opener. Nothing is more real than what is real in your own immediate life, after all. 

So I've started thinking about my food.

And this morning for my breakfast I didn't just have an Eggy in a Basket, as is my usual wont. I had a Fresh Farm Egg 1 Eggy in a Basket. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly where the main component of my breakfast had come from. And I knew that that egg hadn't just been shat out of a machine that looked like a chicken. I knew that it was not a product, but a consequence. A consequence of love, care, gentleness, laughter, and sweat. With children playing nearby. 

It was a good egg.

It was a damned good egg.

And if Feuerbach was right (and of course he was right), "Man ist was er ißt." 

So this morning I am a good egg. And this is something I shall continue to endeavor to be.

1 Thanks, Brother C!