Eggs

I don't go grocery shopping often, and probably for good reason. Grocery shopping to me is a game where I'm challenged to spend as little as possible. So rather than coming home with the $3 box of flash-frozen non-hybridized corn from organic fields fertilized with butterfly tears, I come home with a 79-cent can of store brand corn that was shoveled out of a 90-story grain silo and boiled in a solid steel can that used to be the front fender of a Dodge Dart.

Sometimes, I'll pay more for better quality for the sake of the kids. But one place I won't compromise frugality is in the egg aisle. I will always and forever buy the cheapest eggs they sell, no matter what new variety of egg they roll out.

And roll them out they do. There are just plain old eggs in the off-gray carton. There are also lower-cholesterol eggs, pasteurized eggs, free-range eggs, organic eggs and combinations thereof that include free-range pasteurized organic low-cholesterol eggs.

But the point is, whether your egg of choice came from a chicken in a coop, a cage, an assembly line or a flowering meadow... whether that chicken was force-fed laboratory-synthesized hormone pellets or wandered freely about a certified-organic farm eating fresh grains sprouting from rich volcanic soil... there's one important thing to keep in mind about that egg:

IT DROPPED OUT OF THE ASS-END OF A CHICKEN.

Honestly, who in their right mind is going to be picky about what kind of ass-end that egg fell out of? "Well, the chicken was in no way genetically modified and lived freely on 1,000 acres and was fed only native baby grains and spring water." Uh-huh. And then an egg fell out of it's ass-end. And you're eating it.

Why would anyone pay more than the absolute minimum for that privilege?