What Is an Egg Worth?

New York Times

06-08-2025

IN ARGUABLY THE most virtuosic use of food in cinema, from the 1985 movie 'Tampopo,' a mobster in an immaculate white suit stands behind his lover in a hotel room, retrieves an egg from the ruins of a room service meal and cracks it open. He is gentle: first a few taps against the rim of a bowl, then a deft tilting back and forth, the gloppy albumen wrung out. He lifts the raw yolk on the half shell and throws it back like a shot. When the woman turns her face to his, the golden demi-orb slowly re-emerges from his lips, still whole, trembling like a living thing, and slips into her mouth. Is it kink, metaphor or sheer ingenuity? Should we try this at home? They go back and forth, the viscous yolk wobbling between them, passed from mouth to mouth, lips never fully touching. Then the inevitable: Her eyes close. The sun, burst, leaks down her jaw.
The word 'perversion' is almost always used as a pejorative but, minus the sense of righteousness, it can be understood as simply a turning away from what is expected and proper, revealing hidden possibilities. Part of the thrill in 'Tampopo' is seeing something so ordinary, so basic, transformed into an agent of reckless pleasure. To an American audience, the scene might read as even more debauched now. In the '80s and '90s, the average retail price of a dozen large white eggs mostly hovered under $1. It gradually rose in the 2000s, approaching and then tipping over the $2 mark, with peaks in 2015 as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) ravaged the nation's commercial broods. The most recent outbreak of bird flu, which started in 2022, claimed the lives of more than 36 million 'table egg layers,' as the industry calls them, in the first six months of 2025, and the retail price per dozen hit a record high of $6.23, nearly 52 cents per egg, in March. Panic buying left supermarket shelves empty. Bodegas in New York City were reported to be selling uncartoned eggs — affectionately called loosies, like single cigarettes broken from the pack — at $1 a pop.
Politicians pointed fingers, blaming presidents past and present. The Justice Department launched an inquiry over potential price fixing. (Somehow, despite shortages, Cal-Maine Foods, the nation's largest egg producer, which declined to comment on the ongoing investigation, managed to sell more eggs between January and March 2025 and saw profits increase more than threefold from the same period the year before.) No one seemed to mourn the dead chickens or worry about the egg-farm workers exposed to the virus, or to remember that eggs are only cheap because of industrial mass production. (In 1913, when the majority of the U.S. population was shifting from countryside to city and losing access to backyard flocks, the average price of a dozen eggs was 25 cents, the equivalent of more than $8 today.) The all-day-breakfast chain Waffle House temporarily levied a 50-cent surcharge per egg, fobbing off the spike in cost on its customers. Others celebrated the egg's newly glitzy aura, encouraging indulgence. Cracker Barrel offered double Pegs — loyalty reward points — on every egg plate, while the billionaires' haunt Delmonico's, opened in downtown Manhattan in 1837 and often credited as the birthplace of the eggs Benedict, introduced a $52 'royal' version of that brunch staple, made with duck eggs and heaped with king crab and lobster (and, for an extra charge, caviar).
Like lobsters, which once prowled the shallows of the North Atlantic in such hordes that they were disdained as rations for the poor, and caviar, spooned over porridge by medieval Russian peasants and slopped in troughs to feed their pigs, the egg, hallowed by scarcity, was suddenly a luxury.
BUT WASN'T IT always? The egg is perfection, a feat of surely divine engineering. First, its gratifyingly streamlined shell, which although a few tenths of a millimeter thick — thinner than a fingernail — is as mighty as a cathedral's vaulted arch. In practice, an egg has withstood 53 pounds of force when upright and 90 pounds when prone, according to the Massachusetts-based materials testing company ADMET; in theory, as calculated by Harvard physicists, it could support as much as 3,000 pounds, or about 24,000 times its weight. The Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi, vying for a commission in the early 15th century to build what was then the largest dome in history, reportedly vanquished his rivals by challenging them to make an egg stand on end without support; after everyone had failed, he simply smacked the base of the egg onto the table and let go. Its curves may still be seen in the silhouette of his finished work, Florence's Il Duomo.
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