Eggs

In JRR Tolkein’s first classic tale of Middle Earth, The Hobbit, there’s a riddling contest between Bilbo Baggins and the creature Gollum. Bilbo’s first riddle is

“A box without hinges, door or lid,
Yet inside golden treasure’s hid”

to which the answer is obviously an egg. Obvious, at least, to anyone brought up on a European or North American diet of large eggs containing bright yellow-orange yolks. This egg yolk pigmentation was something I had always taken for granted as normal, until I moved to Khartoum in 1992, where I was surprised to find that shop-bought Sudanese eggs had very pale grayish-yellow yolks. Since the taste was pretty much identical, I didn’t think about it much at the time, apart from the fact that it rendered the expression “sunnyside up” redundant.

One of the great pleasures of African life – even of the curious hybrid lifestyle of the long term resident – is the simplicity and freshness of the food we eat. Of course, Nairobi and even Kampala supermarkets offer the consistent year-round supply of most products that people from supermarket economies have become accustomed to – but nearly everybody buys fresh food from the market. In Khartoum, this meant that the supply of fresh produce was very seasonal: most green vegetables, for example, were only available in the short Sudanese winter – the rest of the year it was simply too hot for most temperate and sub-tropical crops to flourish. But the benign climate in highland East and Southern Africa provides almost a constant supply of most fresh fruit and vegetables – and the export horticulture business has led to widespread availability of exotics like leeks, French beans, sugar snap peas, courgettes and baby corn (among others).

Furthermore, the exacting food appearance standards so beloved by major supermarket chains lead to huge amounts of rejected produce which makes its way into local markets (or cattle feed). Despite our best efforts, mother Nature remains unable to produce uniformly straight French beans or identically-sized mangoes, and as a result our local markets overflow with stubbornly non-conformist misshapen fruits and vegetables whose taste belies their appearance.

Which brings me back to the subject of eggs. During a short consultancy assignment for Kenya’ s largest grain milling business, Unga, I learned that it was common practice to supplement commercial chicken feed with yellow dye to colour the yolk. This practice apparently began in the 1930s, when factory farming became widespread in Europe and North America, and when chickens no longer had access to fresh vegetable matter containing the xanthophylls necessary to generate the yellow colour preferred by consumers. Initially, fresh marigold petals were added to feed mixes, but for cost reasons this was quickly replaced by the synthetic dyes still used today.

The obsession with appearances (at least insofar as food is concerned) has still to make its way to Main Street, Africa, perhaps because people have more pressing needs than the colour of their eggs or the size of their tomatoes. The economy is not yet – to use a foul expression - supermarketized.