I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone ask, “What’s that got to do with the price of eggs in China?” If I did, I could actually afford to buy a dozen eggs.
It’s not clear who coined the sarcastic rejoinder to a comment that’s wildly beside the point. Example: We’re debating which is funnier, My Cousin Vinny or The Bird Cage, I say, “There’s nothing like real Vermont maple syrup.” Then you say, “What’s that got to do with the price of eggs in China?”
Anyway, this column is not about the price of eggs, a subject that became a hot topic a year ago and now has more followers than Taylor Swift. I’m so over both! This column is about the size of eggs, an eggs-igent crisis that has received poultry, er, paltry coverage—an egg-regious oversight by the media.
I’m omelet-you-know what’s happening. When buying a dozen eggs (we favor large), I always flip open the carton to check for cracks. At age 75, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at eggs. Some years ago, I began staring harder at the open cartons, thinking: “These eggs are not large.”
My next thought: “Maybe it’s just me.” Maybe I needed new glasses. Maybe I needed to lower my egg-spectations. Maybe this carton of clearly small eggs was simply mislabeled.
I wasn’t going to embarrass myself by asking another shopper, “Do these look large to you?” or complaining to customer service and having a clerk call my wife: “Mrs. Dawson, we have your husband here and he’s very upset. He keeps saying we sold him small eggs marked large.”
Aside from kvetching to Candy, I kept my mouth shut about eggs (except, of course, for her delectable omelets and deviled eggs) until the price started making headlines and I felt that it was time to confront the size issue because, well, size really seemed to matter.
I decided to visit an egg vendor at the Winter Park Farmers’ Market and ask shoppers if they had noticed that large eggs just ain’t what they used to be. Before setting out, I googled the question and was overcome by waves of validation. It’s not just me!
Here are some observations I found online: “I cooked up a couple of ‘large’ eggs this morning. I’m sorry, but these are not large eggs. They’re barely what used to be considered medium.” Added another eggs-pert: “Yup, 100%. Three large eggs today equal two large eggs from a few years ago.”
Chimed in an observant poster: “For the past 20 years, a dozen large eggs filled the bottom of the pan I boil them in. I’m boiling a dozen right now. I could have fit four more.” A baker agreed that she seemed to be getting less egg and spending more dough: “I made a pie yesterday, and I’m pretty sure my ‘large’ eggs were not.”
On and on it went. But I reminded myself that these were semi-anonymous internet gripes and, like a plate of scrambled eggs, should be taken with a grain (or more) or salt. I wanted to hear it up close and personal, so one Saturday I hung out at the Lake Meadow Naturals egg tent at the Farmers’ Market.
I learned that egg cartons, like bras, come in different cup sizes. I learned that eggs are sold by the pound. I learned a stupid poultry joke: “What do you call a chicken looking at lettuce? Chicken sees a salad.”
Most importantly, I learned that I’m not alone. When I say, “I see small eggs,” I’m like the kid in The Sixth Sense who said, “I see dead people”—because he really did!
A few people claimed not to have noticed any downsizing, including a guy nearby selling shrimp, a product with its own sizing issues. Still, most shoppers were like Marie and Ed Murphy, fellow boomers. “Absolutely—not even close!” Marie replied when I asked if eggs today seem smaller than advertised. “I started noticing it 10 years ago.”
Dale Volkert, the market vendor and owner of Lake Meadow Naturals, has been selling eggs since 1960. He did not comment on how lay shoppers perceive egg sizes, but assured me, “The standard for eggs has not changed.” And he wasn’t yolking.
Volkert has 17,000 chickens on his Ocoee farm, untouched by bird flu when we spoke in April. The eggs that his brood squeezes out come in five standard sizes: super jumbo, jumbo, extra-large, medium and pullet (from the youngest chickens).
Here’s the rub: Each carton of a dozen eggs can vary by 3 to 4 ounces. For egg-sample: A jumbo carton ranges from 30 to 33.99 ounces. Large from 24 to 26.99 ounces. Pullets from 18 to 20.99 ounces.
I asked Volkert if he had a theory about the super-jumbo belief among consumers that carton labels eggs-aggerate the size of the contents. While the standard has not changed, he said, “The grading and sizing of eggs on machines is much more sophisticated now.”
Once upon a time, explained Volkert, each egg was weighed separately on a scale. Today, machines are better at measuring precise weight. As a result, some eggs might fall just below the minimum weight for the next size up, or just above the minimum weight for the next size down.
This was like tregg-onometry to me. My notes were so confusing, I asked Volkert to write it out for me. “It goes by weight, not looks or size. If, say, there’s an egg in a large carton that just missed the cutoff for ‘extra large’ it will look bigger but on the high side of the required weight rather than the minimum.”
Got that? Maybe like the price of eggs in China, the minutiae of egg production is irrelevant to my eggs-istential crisis. Maybe it’s rooted in the nostalgia that, in our day, the music was better, the cars were cooler, the tomatoes were more delicious and the sports heroes were saints.
I asked Ed Murphy if he ever went by Eddie. “Oh yeah. Back when eggs were larger.”
Greg Dawson is a journalist and author. He has worked as a reporter, a television critic, an opinion columnist and a consumer columnist. His most recent book, with Susan Hood, is Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis (HarperCollins, 2022). Dawson is a contributing writer for Winter Park Magazine.