The other day, my wife and I disovered that we are egg snobs.
What this means is that we've become fussy about the eggs we buy, and we demand quality. Through miscommunication, we not long ago ended up with a carton of ordinary eggs, when for a long time we've been accustomed to free-range eggs. The ordinary eggs were watery, smelled of sulfur, and were unappetizing.
An acquaintance pointed out that she couldn't tell the difference between ordinary eggs and organically-grown eggs. From what I know, the difference can be small. The quality of an egg depends partly on what the hens feed on, but also on the quality of their life. The colour of the shell has no bearing on the quality of the egg.
Organic eggs come from hens that are fed organic feed without hormones or pesticides. Sometimes carotene is added to make the yolks more deeply yellow. However, if the chicken lives out her life in a tiny metal cage as is often enough the case, she'll still produce low quality eggs, albeit a greater number of them.
Free range chickens are allowed to roam a yard outside of a cage. Again, there are varying degrees of freedom. Some operations only let the chickens out for a couple of hours a day, others may keep the chicken run entirely indoors. We feel that only a chicken that has complete freedom to leave her coop and run around a yard outside will give the best eggs.
Fortunately, in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, there are many egg farms that encourage this kind of free running. Our favourite eggs come from a family farm where the chickens are actually loved. They even get upset when they try to eat one of their birds for dinner.
Today's image is lifted from the famous "New Yorker" magazine cover. The inaugural New Yorker featured the fictional dandy "Eustace Tilley" drawn by Rae Irvin in 1925. I redrew the image by hand and repainted it from sampled colours. I copied the masthead font and altered it to make the pun.
It turns out that The New Yorker has an annual Eustace Tilley contest. I'll submit this image, although a lot of the entries are more creative and compelling than mine. Still, I had fun re-creating Irvin's work. By copying another's design, an artist learns more about visual tradecraft.
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