Egg

An egg is a little package, and everything inside it has a job.

The yellow part is called the yolk. It’s a lunchbox — food, packed and ready. The clear wobbly part turns white when you cook it; it’s a water pillow, for cushioning bumps. The shell feels solid but it has thousands of tiny holes in it, too small for you to see, so air can whisper in and out. An egg breathes.

Now — the question everybody wants to ask. Was my breakfast egg going to be a chick?

No. Here is the true answer: a hen lays an egg most days whether or not it could ever become a chick — a bit like how your body grows hair without asking you. For an egg to start becoming a chick, a rooster has to be involved, and on egg farms there are no roosters living with the hens. So the eggs we eat were never going to hatch. They were only ever breakfast.

A hen lays about three hundred eggs in a year. Try counting to three hundred and see how long it takes.

One more strange, true thing: if an egg has a secret crack you can’t see, cooks find out by putting it in water. A bad egg floats. A good egg sits on the bottom, like it’s behaving.