The Egg and I

Reggie loves farm-fresh eggs.  He far prefers them to the ones available in supermarkets.  For a lot of reasons.

Farm-fresh eggs on the kitchen table at Darlington House

The recent health scare notwithstanding, Reggie thinks that eggs fresh from the farm taste better than supermarket eggs.  They taste egg-ier.  Their yolks are more flavorful and more vibrantly yellow than in the eggs generally available at grocery stores.  And they aren't as uniformly sized, either, which Reggie likes.  The ones pictured here were irregularly sized, ranging from small to large, and came in different colored shells.  Some were brown and some were white.  That's how the farmer gathered them that morning.

And then there's the issue of diet.  Farm-raised chickens eat a more varied, healthier diet than do the chickens that produce eggs sold in mass-market grocery stores.  Reggie knows for a fact that the hens that laid his eggs are farmyard chickens, as he's seen them running around at the farm where he buys them.  They don't live a cooped-up, chemicals-fueled life in an egg factory with thousands of other hens, never seeing the light of day.  Reggie likes that.

What a charming egg carton this is

But there's a bit of magic going on here.  Reggie's eggs didn't come in the carton he's showing in this post.  They came in a more pedestrian one, similar to the ones generally found in supermarkets.  Nothing special.  I bought the egg carton pictured here several weeks ago full of different eggs--since consumed--from a small specialty food purveyor in a nearby town.  But I saved the carton because I thought its graphics were too charming to toss it into the recycling pile.  And so when it came time for Boy to style and shoot this essay we decided to place the eggs we bought that morning in the more picturesque carton I had saved.  We thought it would make for a better photo essay.  And it did.

You think this stuff just happens?

Photographs by Boy Fenwick