Dazed and confused? Not me. I’m just Lost in the Cheese Aisle.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

ONE GREAT BIG HONKIN’ OMELETTE

When we were in New York last week visiting Eli (hizzownself) and The Other Elisson, She Who Must Be Obeyed and the Mistress of Sarcasm made a little side trip to Whole Paycheck Foods to forage for some Lunchly Grub.

They came back with a pleasant enough array of foodstuffs, but it’s what they left behind at Whole Foods that fascinated me.  Lookee:

Ostrich Eggs!
Ostrich eggs.  Want to make an omelette?  You’re gonna need a bigger pan.

Ostrich eggs!

Those are great big bastards, indeed, and you might assume that a brace of ’em could feed a small army.  Well, maybe... but at forty bucks apiece, is an ostrich egg a good deal?

Naw.

Looking at the weight and volume of its contents, one ostrich egg is roughly equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs.  That’s enough to make a great big honkin’ omelette, but if you buy an ostrich egg at Whole Foods, you’re paying about ten times the price of the same amount of garden-variety cacklefruit.  Now, I can appreciate the novelty value of eating certain things (raw whale, anyone?), but that’s a lot of money for an egg... even if it came from a cage-free ostrich raised in an environment absent hormones or antibiotics, massaged daily with Japanese beer.  Perhaps it is a reflection of the difficulty of harvesting the eggs: taking them away from a resentful mother ostrich capable of disemboweling a man with a single kick.

Me, if I want to eat weird eggs, I’ll go for caviar.  Or a raw quail egg with my ikura nigirizushi.

1 comment:

Randy Rager said...

Jungle Jim's here in Cincinnati has them at both of their locations as well, and for the same price.

I smell some good old fashioned price fixing.