This is it. There’s no going back. Britain has gone mad, and there is no cure.
Symptoms keep appearing at an alarming rate, yet every time we hope the condition is reversible. Now we know it isn’t.
Sainsbury’s, a chain of 1,500 supermarkets, is so committed to saving ‘our planet’ that it will no longer stock brown eggs. Only white-shell eggs will henceforth be on offer, and I for one detect a touch of racism there.
If you think this is a ridiculous remark, wait till you hear why Sainsbury’s has made this announcement. According to its report, white eggs leave a 12.7 per cent lower carbon footprint.
This, says the report, is “largely due to better feed conversion” and “the longer productive lifespan of the white hens”. Whatever that means.
When I read this yesterday, I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. It wasn’t. It was 4 June, still, as it ever was on that day.
Even assuming the cited datum is correct, you’ll notice it’s expressed in percentages, not absolute numbers. As someone who used to advertise drugs for a living, I know the trick only too well.
Let’s say Drug A has an incidence of side effects of one in a million, whereas Drug B produces two in a million. The advertiser of Drug A will use those findings to claim its product is twice as safe, and this is statistically significant. Quite. But it’s not clinically significant, meaning that for all practical purposes both drugs are perfectly safe.
So give us absolute numbers, chaps, not those larcenous percentages. Considering that Britain produces less than one per cent of global carbon emissions, how much better off will ‘our planet’ be if Burford Browns (producer of popular brown eggs) goes out of business? One trillionth of one per cent? Less? How many zeros are we talking there?
One piety thus served, the report effortlessly segues to another: “Additionally, white hens are less prone to feather pecking, leading to higher animal welfare.” Are birds animals? Don’t answer that, the issue is way beyond semantic quibbling.
I thought animal welfare has something to do with the way humans treat animals, or in this case birds. Turns out I was wrong, or rather not wholly correct. We are also supposed to protect animals from one another.
In that spirit, I propose HMG commission its own report, ideally an expensive one, to find out which breeds of dogs are more likely to chase cats around the block. We can then confiscate the most felinophobic dogs and put them down, ignoring their owners’ protests.
Good idea? No? You’ll have to explain to me how it’s any worse than this war on feather-peckers.
You’ll be happy to know that the war is already under way. The report says that Sainsbury’s “is making progress on transitioning our shell eggs from brown to white eggs.”
‘Transitioning’ is such a lovely word, don’t you think? I wonder if we are protecting hens’ rights to transition into cockerels, but this discussion is for another day.
The company’s spokesman then added a human touch to the arid jargon of the report: “We know Britons love their eggs and, as we work with suppliers to transition all our own brand to white shells, they can now enjoy them knowing they are better for the environment and the hens.”
Do I detect a reprieve for Burford Browns, my favourite brand? If Sainsbury’s is ‘transitioning’ only its own brand, may there be hope for others? But never mind that.
Now I know how destructive brown eggs are, I’m heaving a sigh of relief even as we speak. Here’s my chance to alleviate my persistent anxiety about henpecking (no, Penelope, this isn’t about you). Now I can tuck into my poached on toast secure in the knowledge that I thereby protect both the environment and hens’ plumage.
Jonathan Swift thought he was clever coming up with disputes between small-endians and big-endians. He didn’t realise he was writing not satire but prophesy. Replace those two warring factions with brown-eggians and white-eggians, and there’s the good Dean writ large.
There is little we can do about the on-going onset of virulent woke insanity. That is, in general. In particular, I’m hereby undertaking never to buy another egg from Sainsbury’s, and I hope you’ll follow suit, along with millions of other customers.
Tell those self-righteous, virtue-signalling, holier-than-thou woke morons to go boil an egg. The eggs we’ll be buying from now on will come from a different shop.
I’ll leave you to contemplate the racial overtones of the report on your own. Are the authors venting their unconscious bigotry by claiming that brown hens are more violent than white ones? I’m merely extrapolating, but this should make perfect sense in the loony bin we call Britain.
Our planet is saved! All hail Sainsbury’s. I, too, vow never to buy an egg from Sainsbury’s.
I have read a bit about chickens. We used to have some Rhode Island reds, which lay brown eggs. Chickens with white earlobes (usually accompanied with white feathers) tend to lay white eggs. Chickens with red earlobes tend to lay brown eggs. There are even some breeds with blue-green earlobes that lay pale blue-green eggs. My understanding of the proliferation in America of eggs with white shells is that the chickens that produce the eggs (leghorns) have a slightly higher egg-to-feed ratio. Thus, following that truly American trait of pursuing the almighty dollar, farmers tend to favor the leghorn. Europeans, being less concerned with profit (really?), tend to raise chickens that produce brown eggs. However, based entirely on nothing scientific, the past decade has seen a rise in the availability of brown eggs. I seem to recall many years ago hearing brown are more healthful, but that is merely a marketing ploy. I think any preference among buyers is just based on familiarity. That is, people whose mother served them eggs with white shells will tend to buy white-shelled eggs.
I question the calculations behind the derivation of the carbon footprint of any chicken, domesticated or wild.
A non-white man who isn’t left-wing enough is sometimes described by the Woke as a coconut, because he’s “brown on the outside but white on the inside”. Perhaps they’ll now start calling him a brown egg, thereby additionally accusing him of destroying “the planet”.
I await further developments with interest. Greta Thunberg will no doubt blame the existence of brown eggs on the Jews. David Attenborough will make a documentary showing that brown eggs, like brown moths, have evolved because of the burning of fossil fuels. And Mr Andy Burnham will win the Makerfield by-election with 98% of the vote after promising to be “tough on brown eggs, tough on the causes of brown eggs”.
It will all be eggstremely eggsciting!