I watched Sam as he prepared eggs for breakfast. He planned to scramble them, so he poked a small hole at the tip of the shell by tapping it with the point of a sharp knife, much as I would do were I trying to preserve the shell. He shook out the contents. I wanted to demonstrate how “we” crack eggs in America, so I took a knife to crack the shell in the center. Just as the blade came down, I suddenly realized two things simultaneously. The first was that these eggs, unlike our store-bought ones, had not been washed, and I was therefore introducing a host of bacteria into the egg matter. The other realization was that what the Ugandans call local eggs, collected from truly free-range chickens, might be more than just fertile, since there was no way of knowing when the egg had been laid. Who was I to assume I knew a better way to crack an egg?
Nov 122013