And now for a hundred carat gold-plated encrusted in diamonds full size plug. For which, as ever, I have neither been asked to make nor paid. This one’s on me. All my plugs are!
Saturday night TV in the UK is absolutely terrible. Dreadful. Beyond hope. So Saturday nights I either crack open the DVD boxsets – usually West Wing or Mad Men – or I give up on TV altogether and listen to the radio instead. My favourite programme of the week is BBC Radio 4’s Archive on 4. which goes out from 8 to 9pm Saturday nights. This Saturday, it’s all about eggs. Bliss that it is to be in England where we have such a fine radio station.
A mess with eggs
Eggs have risen and fallen over the years according to government and policy dictate. During The Second World War they were scarce as… well, I was gonna say hen’s teeth but that’s one helleva scrambled simile. So let’s just say, boy, were they rare! So there was this thing called powdered eggs instead. No idea how much, if any, eggs these packets contained. You could use them for cakes, I’m guessing. But a fried egg on toast was probably out the question.
Then after the war, the government wanted to feed us up. Eggs became – no, not gonna say it – very inexpensive due to inhumane battery cages which we thankfully no longer have in the UK.
Cholesterol
Then came all the scares about cholesterol. And eggs were the baddies. From eating an average of five eggs a week per person in the UK, consumption slumped. Then came Edwina Currie’s outburst about salmonella in eggs for which despite flagrantly flaunting her legs on Strictly Come Dancing is what she’ll always be most remembered for. Eggs got a bad press. But, unlike the best thing to do with a raw egg, they bounced back.
Delia Darling, aka Delia Smith, recommended them – which was once enough for a whole nation to get boiling, poaching, frying and scrambling – and the NHS decided that cholesterol wasn’t such a problem after all and you could eat as many eggs as you liked!
Fads, fashion and fillingness of eggs
Eggs, as I’ve written here before, are practically the perfect Paleo food. Eggs are filling. Eggs are a dieter’s best friend but eggs are also great for anyone who isn’t on a diet. They’re practically the most perfect complete food on the planet. Why wouldn’t you want to eat eggs every day, several times a day? Eggs are also essential for vegetarians who want to do Paleo.
Binding? Nope. Not provided your diet elsewhere is healthy with naturally-occurring fibre. I eat eggs every day. They don’t bind me up at all but they do fill me wonderfully.
Go to work on an egg
Perhaps it’s because I’m from the generation that was told to go to work on an egg, I never swallowed all this eggs are bad for you nonsense. How on earth could they possibly be?
The programme will be available on iplayer for a week after it goes out on Saturday. If you’re not in the UK you may have problems accessing it for which I’m truly sorry. A programme based on the social history of the egg sounds about the best way possible for me to spend part of my Saturday night. My two favourite subjects in one programme – food and human history.
Do catch it if you can.
