12 Eggs

Prize Winner

This weekend, a friend and I stopped by the Truro Agricultural Fair, a lively small-town celebration of cackling chickens, banjo players, local farmers, and sunburned families. We oohed and aahed at the fresh tomatoes, basil, garlic, onions, flowers, pies, and jars of honey. We used our dried fava beans to vote for the most handsome rooster, the most comely hen. We smelled the tangy salt air, redolent with hay and manure and chicken coop and oregano.

Then we wandered over to the tables displaying the prize winners: biggest pumpkin, most scrumptious pie, most original wildflower arrangement, strangest looking vegetable, and as pictured here: the best looking dozen eggs. I took this picture because if I opened these eggs in the stainless steel coolers of the supermarket, I would reject them on the spot, maybe even trot them up to the service desk.

But here they are at the Truro Aggie Fair winning first place. (I’m assuming, of course, that there were other entries, and these eggs really were the most stunning.) Look at them! Brown, white, peach, mottled, some dirty, some really funky looking…a far cry from the perfectly pristine eggs I’ve come to expect. And that makes me wonder what the egg sellers do to their eggs to make them so spotless, so uniform, such a far cry from the real McCoy, as seen here at the Aggie Fair.

I’m not a fanatic about freshness or organic-ness, but I do like food to look good. And now I wonder about that, wonder if maybe those good looks are deceiving, wonder if those perfectly plump tomatoes, those shaggy bouquets of bitter greens, those so so orangy carrots, those glimmering apples are given the veggie/fruit version of Botox.

Maybe I’ve forgotten what real looks like. Growing up in the farmy lands of upstate New York, I remember my father’s garden, and if I brush away the threads of memory, can recall tomatoes that looked like a snarling grimace, corn with a few icky borers burrowed in, zucchini that curved into itself, gnarled little apples. Pretty much everything had dirt on it. But it was all organic, all nature’s own presentation. No one fussed and mussed with what the good earth, under my father’s patient and kind hand, produced.

So I look at these eggs and then I look again, and I see that beauty, real beauty, the kind that wins first place is spotted and speckled and splotched and funky and decidedly, freshly original. Yes, decidedly that.