The egg had such a flimsy shell that the contents fell out at the slightest tap and splattered on the floor. The second egg, too. As a frugal farm girl, I would have saved it, but scraping a raw egg from a tile floor is a “lotta nope” as they say these days. As I cleaned up, I couldn’t help but think about endless cages of white, undernourished chickens, producing over-priced eggs with paper-thin shells.
My mother kept a chicken coop on our farm. They flocked together in colorful bouquets and ate like show horses. They were part of our food source but, most of all, they were beloved by my mother. Who knew they were so powerful?
Temple Grandin wrote a book a few years ago called Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. In it she said that chicken breeders selectively breed chickens to produce more eggs and larger breasts. Stacking the chicken’s DNA on one side for specific traits, of course, causes stacking of DNA in other areas. They ended up with rapist roosters. They still don’t know why.
Speaking of roosters, some pundits say the high price of eggs helped get a certain former president re-elected and changed the trajectory of American government for decades. Even with the thinnest of margins, that is power. I pay about three dollars more for a dozen eggs than I did a few years ago. I have heard some comments about the cost of a political soul, but I think that is an elitist viewpoint. I do try not to be judgy.
Some eggs are extremely expensive. Consider the story of the billionaire owner of a private equity firm who went through a divorce. His wife got the kids and he turned to eggs. He started seducing leggy blondes with green or blue eyes into donating eggs to his account at a reproductive services clinic. He was probably interested in the eggs and the size of the breasts, also. Reports say he paid them about a million dollars each. Staff members recruited women from social media. I wonder if those women ever think, “Do I know where my children are?” like the old drug commercials. I hope she’s thinking, “I really should fire my attorney.”
Now in prison in NC (where I was a frugal farm girl), he’s the one in a cage. He hired women to gestate the eggs and hired staff to raise the nine children produced from the eggs. There is elitism and then there is Elitism. He probably never thought of scraping raw egg from the floor. Two things we learn from this story: people with the most gold sometimes try to make the rules, and eggs from the more beautiful birds cost more.
Popular fiction has picked up on the power of eggs as well. In The Handmaid’s Tale women’s eggs are obtained by imprisoning the women—they’re kidnapped and raped and then their babies are taken away. It’s pretty expensive to make women into breeders. The social cost is even greater than the economic cost. Who wants fifty-one percent of the population walking around planning to murder the other forty-nine percent? That’s insane. Thank goodness it’s fiction – for now.
People pay a lot for eggs, and not just with money. I saw an advertisement in a Mensa (the high IQ society) magazine. A Mensa man was advertising for a Mensa woman to bear a child for – get this – him and his WIFE! It’s like he said, “I’m sorry, honey, you just don’t measure up.” Maybe she was sterile and I’m being judgy again but, if not, it just goes to show that high IQ does not equal smart. I’m pretty sure that one cost him a marriage.
One of my friends said she had considered donating eggs to a fertility clinic. I saw the advertisement on TV soliciting egg donation. They offered her $19,000. I don’t think that is enough. For one thing, my friend is a high-quality human being. She’s beautiful and she’s funny as heck. I’d pay a LOT more for a kid with a sense of humor. My son has one and he can make me howl with laughter. My grandson does the same, so those genes got passed down. My grandchildren for many generations are going to be laughing. I take credit for that. I had GREAT eggs. They are probably raisins now. Nobody is bidding for them.
If a person is egg shopping at the fertility clinic, are the eggs classified, the way the supermarket uses Large, Extra-Large and Jumbo, except with High-IQ, Pro-Basketball player, Movie Star, Standup Comedian? Those eggs are going to be expensive. I always figured that people who were born with one of these traits hit the DNA lottery, but they didn’t do anything to earn it. They didn’t even buy a lottery ticket; it just came for free. So why should anyone pay extra for it? There are no guarantees in the DNA lottery.
If we ever become a society where everyone is buying the Extra Jumbo eggs and having pro basketball players all over the neighborhood, it’s really going to change that pick-up game at the park. Why would anyone watch pro sports when they can just go play them down the street? Will the more plain-looking people have an easier time dating because there are so many beautiful people that they have become commonplace? And by the way, the people who buy the stand-up comedian egg are going to be very sorry during the teen years.
What if multiple egg buyers get an egg from the same person? It’s going to be interesting when all these little girls at ballet class at age three look like siblings. Las Vegas Showgirls will be a dime a dozen. Which begs the question, is it possible for an egg clinic to take the most desirable egg and clone it over and over again? What if they make a million of those eggs and sell them? Nobody would know for a few years and by that time the doctor who did it would have a big house on Mars.
DNA testing will be a whole new ballgame. The family tree will now be a grove of Aspens, with many trees connected only by the roots. There will be cousins popping out of the woodpile all over the place. “Yes, I am your half-sister three times removed but we have absolutely no ‘family’ in common. No, your grandpa was not cheating with your third half-cousin.” So confusing.
Even egg banks will become old technology, eventually. There is a lab in California that is researching the ability to take a couple of stem cells from a human and turn them into both egg and sperm cells. This would allow a lesbian couple to have a child made from their DNA, but if I were to do it alone, I could use an egg cell from me and a sperm cell from me and have Me Squared! The lesson we learned from the rapist roosters was DO NOT double up on genes because the bad ones get doubled too. Once all my DNA is doubled, who knows what could happen? I could end up being a stand-up comedian, or I could end up as a sex-crazed-seventy-year-old running for office.
It has been a hot topic on CNBC in the last few years because of inflation, bird flu and the impact on the economy, politics, and society – the price of eggs, I mean. It is interesting that something so basic can be seminal (pardon the pun) to pretty much everything, but I have to wonder if the power structure is evolving? Instead of gold making the rules, maybe the people with all the eggs are going to be making the rules. I think my mother would like that.
Barbara E. Miner is currently working on a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Reno, Lake Tahoe. One of her short stories, “The Snake Stomper,” won first prize in the National Organization for Women writing contest in 1992.