ANCESTRAL EATING: A Note on Eggs

Yes, I know I was talking about dairy consumption, but I just felt I should...

Welcome back to ANCESTRAL EATING, my friends. I interrupt scheduled programming with an important note on the foodstuff to which I owe all my successes of recent years. Yes, I’m talking about the humble egg. I promise that next Saturday, I will resume talking about dairy. In fact, I’ve got a thrilling dispatch planned about how the invention of dairying on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe was an event of world-historical importance, because it unleashed the Indo-European peoples on the world…

Anyway, it’s eggs for today.

---

If there’s one thing missing from Weston Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, it’s eggs—and birds’ eggs in particular. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t talk about them: he just doesn’t say a lot. A handy search with ctrl+F reveals a mere 29 mentions of the word “egg” or “eggs” throughout the book, most of which are references to fish eggs. There are references to ant and insect eggs and then, eventually, there are some references to birds’ eggs.

One of the most important references to birds’ eggs comes with Price’s visit to Australia, when he describes the proper diet of the Aborigines.

The foods available for these people are exceedingly limited in variety and quantity, due to the absence of rains, and unfertility of the soil. For plant foods they used roots, stems, leaves, berries and seeds of grasses and a native pea eaten with tissues of large and small animals. The large animals available are the kangaroo and wallaby. Among the small animals they have a variety of rodents, insects, beetles and grubs, and wherever available various forms of animal life from the rivers and oceans. Birds and birds' eggs are used where available. They are able to balance their rations to provide the requisites for splendid body building and body repair.

Otherwise, we don’t hear much about birds’ eggs. Price notes that the jungle Indians of the Amazon consume “bird life, including many water fowl and their eggs.” But that’s basically it as far as birds’ eggs go.

Of course, Price knows that birds’ eggs provide the highest quality nutrition. There’s no doubt about that: he says as much. He also notes, towards the end of the book, that the quality of a bird’s diet determines the quality of its eggs, which is absolutely true and something I like to remind my followers of whenever I can. You are what what you eat eats. This is true of all animal products, in fact, not just chickens and their eggs.

The simple fact is, the people Weston Price encountered in his globe-trotting adventures in the 1930s just didn’t eat that many eggs. Even when Price was firmly back in the modern world, or at least not in the Stone Age, when he visited the Loetschental Valley in Switzerland and the fishermen and crofters of the Outer Hebrides, in Scotland, he had little reason to talk about eggs.