Ah, spring! You know it’s here when drugstore shelves fill up with marshmallow eggs and pink Peeps. But few people realize that real chicken eggs used to be as seasonal as their candy imitators. Even fewer know that the egg was once a speculative tool as controversial as credit default swaps are today.
The egg’s seasonality made evolutionary sense, since chicks hatched in spring stood the best chance of survival. It also made sense to eat, paint, roll, and otherwise revel in eggs when they were most abundant and cheapest. In mid-19th century New York, there were 72 times more eggs arriving on markets in May than in January.
Yay modern farming and refrigeration!
I guess this helps explain the egg on the Seder plate and all of the eggs that get eaten over a typical Passover.
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