There have been a lot of memorable eggs in my life but I suppose the best of them would be those I gathered myself from the little henhouse we kept at the edge of the meadow for a couple of summers. I’d knock off this chore (and I never thought of it as that) first thing in the morning, and those eggs would be breakfast. The yolks were closer to orange than yellow and exceedingly firm. Delicious, of course. Especially with thick-sliced bacon.
It did not seem possible to me, when I was eating one of these ambrosial breakfasts, that I was committing slow suicide. And as a matter of fact, I didn’t believe it. Didn’t care what the legion of food scolds—the most prominent of them on the government payroll—were saying. I put my faith in eggs. And butter. And salt.
They had “science” on their side, and the machinery of government, which they used to demonize the egg and proselytize for something called the “food pyramid.” Against their “science,” I had only my faith. But it was strong and I held to it.
Now, it seems, we egg lovers have been vindicated.
Something called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee of the Department of Health and Human Services has finally decided that you may go ahead and eat eggs without fear. This, after 40 years of warnings that a couple over-easy in the morning was a kind of slow walk down the road to a coronary.
Since I had never stopped eating eggs, my reaction to the news was not to feel as though I had been liberated but wonder who, if anyone, would pay for getting it so wrong. When the government started issuing edicts about what constitutes a “healthy diet,” and warning people off eggs and red meat and shellfish and pointing them down the path of cereal and pesto, one person in seven in the United States was obese. The number is now one in three.
A lot of people who got that way thought that they were following a government-approved diet.
Egg consumption declined by over 30 percent when the government put them on its dietary blacklist. People have to eat, so they substituted other things for eggs. Things that helped to make them fat. The eggs they did not eat would not, it turns out, have clogged their arteries and killed them. The stuff they substituted for those eggs, however, might well have caused them to suffer from type 2 diabetes and worse.
It is not as though there were no dissenting voices raised against the dietary scolds and hall monitors. The study that could be said to have started it all was challenged. Critics pointed out that its author, Ancel Keys, did broad surveys and comparisons of populations, regarding what they ate and the prevalence of heart disease in each. The United States came out looking bad, and he put the blame on cholesterol. But Keys cherry-picked his subjects and did not include West Germany and France and other nations that favored diets high in cholesterol but did not suffer from especially high incidences of heart disease. He got the results he was looking for, and Americans were told to lay off the eggs.
Among the skeptics were James W. Vaupel and John D. Graham, who published an essay—wonderfully titled Egg in Your Bier?—in the Winter 1980 number of The Public Interest. Vaupel and Graham did both the heavy statistical lifting and the skeptical risk assessment that the anti-egg sentimentalists had neglected in their crusade. The nub of the argument is captured nicely in this paragraph:
But we were made to worry by those whose profession is to incite worry. They had a mission and it was to keep the rest of us safe. They were, and are, apparatchiks of the Nanny State.
It is, I suppose, fair to wonder if what you eat or drink is going to make you ill or even kill you. But the least trusted source and guide if you are asking that question would seem to be the government. There are all kinds of theories and schools of thought on the matter of nutrition. There are crackpots and trained scientists peddling their particular dietary doctrines. You can go with vegan, or paleo, or even high-carb if you are into retro. But if you are looking for authority to settle the question, good luck.
Government had it wrong all these years, and government responds to pressure from the zeitgeist. If the government is down on eggs, it may be because it has been influenced in this direction by the people who sell things that are, supposedly, egg substitutes. Or because the health and hygiene lobby has put the arm on some vulnerable senator. If there is an interest group that aims to force us to put corn into our cars, then why not one pushing for laws about putting eggs—or their substitutes—in our mouths? The same review that led to eggs being removed from the dietary blacklist also resulted in a finding that coffee was not just okay and harmless but positively conducive to good health. We are thus advised, while we resume eating eggs, to also drink more coffee.
So did the lobbyist for Starbucks get to the panel?
In the end, one thinks, the hell with them all. If you are fortunate enough in this world to have a henhouse out behind your house, as I was, and your hens are reliable layers, then go out and gather their bounty every morning. Bring it into the kitchen, where you will lay a fat butter pat in the skillet, and when it is melted and popping, break two of those eggs—even go for three, if you are feeling daring—and when the white part begins to firm up, turn them gently so as not to break those plump orange yolks. Continue frying until firm. Slide on to a plate. Sit at the window and eat while you look out at the world and give thanks.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
