Poached Eggs and Pisco Sours

Hmmm.... well, readers, it's a rainy Sunday here in the maddening, neurotic apple. Not just a summer shower dispelling the heat, but a day long deluge with nary a break in the clouds. Car tires on rainy streets outside the front door and the tinny pattering of rain out the back are dangerously close to lulling me in that strange city way into my second nap of the day.

But there is a blog to be written as much as I would like to slip out of conscious realty for an hour or so this drippy Sunday afternoon.

If it wasn't so wet, I might have wandered (ever so slowly with the old fractured foot) down the street for brunch. There is nothing better than perfectly poached eggs with oozing golden yolks served atop an English muffin or alongside tasty, crispy homefries and some kind of salty pork.

Yum.

Or, perhaps being so late in the afternoon and not much of a day to be in the park, I could be at the neighborhood bar enjoying some refreshing cocktail topped delicately with the delightful frothiness of whipped egg whites.

Oh, but wait.

Hundreds of millions of eggs were recalled this week because of potential links to outbreaks of salmonella. Oh sure, one assumes everyone has already checked for and discarded the recalled eggs, but it makes you think twice, doesn't it?

If you haven't read any of the press yet about the recall, you may want to give one of these articles a gander: Egg Recall Expanded after Salmonella Outbreak in the New York Times and Egg Recall: Supplier Jack DeCoster Has History of Health, Safety Violations on Huffington Post.

In this blogger's unprofessional opinion, the industry that produced these eggs is extremely distasteful and the lack of true regulation that allows such nasty violations against human health and welfare is beyond unsavory.

What are we to do, ladies and gs?

Going without poached eggs and pisco sours is not an option.

Knowing where your food is coming from is a big start. Would you buy eggs from the grocery store if you had known they had such an unappealing history?

Probably not.

But the people who bought those eggs didn't think to find out about where the eggs came from. And who can blame them? We weren't conditioned for it growing up. But now we have more and more information coming at us all the time: Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and Food Inc. by Robert Kenner to name a few.

And, yes, anyway one of these will overwhelm you and make you wish you hadn't read it or watched it, or may inspire you to become a vegetarian until you really just have to have that cheeseburger. But it all starts with a few simple choices.

And, you can decide to understand where your food is coming from and whose hands, grubby or not, are sending it to your mouth.

We've got a lot of work to do, myself included. I ordered groceries for delivery earlier this week (first time ever due to this silly fractured foot). I'm sure some of my produce came from far away, but I didn't ask. When I eat out, I never ask about where the food comes from. I'm too afraid my list of places to eat in this wonderful gastronomic metropolis will become small and expensive.

But eggs that I buy myself, well that's easy. I can ask any one of the many egg sellers at the green market about how they care for their chickens. And many have websites where I can read about them. And with so many local options why would I want eggs distributed through national wholesalers?

Eggsactly.

Stay tuned!

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