oof oeufs

 In the preface to his 1490 printing of the Aeniad, Wm Caxton set in motion the unification of the speech (or at least the writing) of anyone who lived in England. In my dayes happened that certayn marchautes were in a ship in Tamyse for to haue sayled ouer the see into Zelande  and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte Forlond. And wente to lande for to refreshe them And one of theym named Sheffelde a mercer cam in to an hows and axed for mete, and specyally he axyed after eggys And the good wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaut was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym wel. Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certainly it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite & chauge of langage. Nope, we're not talking about these eggs:

They tooo small, they robin's eggs! making their start in life in a little-used letterbox in Waterford: the parents devoutly hoping that their reprodustive hopes didn't get sliced in a rain of unwanted election flyers. I'm sure robin's eggs are more or less the same as Ballyfree eggs but it requires a lot more to make an omelette. 

I am here rather to share some newly acquired knowledge about reading commercial eggshells. New to me; I daresay you've known all about these eggy life-skills for years. Since shortly after the Rose Fitz-Kennedy Bridge opened we have discovered a rural rat run through Rathgarogue, Co WX, which allows us to by-pass New Ross altogether and shave 10 minutes off the journey time from Chateau Blob to The Déise. Bonus is that there is an honesty-box supply of organic free-range eggs [€2.50 / six] just at the Northern edge of the village. Turns out that we've been missing a trick because organic eggs is a mere sideline to their core pork and bacon business. 

We had a cock-up on the commissariat front recently and had to buy eggs from, like, A Shop. There is a heckuva lot of reading on a modern shop-bot egg: almost as diverting as a corn-flake packet. Even apart from the sell-by date. One egg was stamped 0 IE R 178A and another from a different source had 1 IE R 150. This is clearly a Good Thing mandated by Brussels to promote food traceability and quality control. Because I can't see Big Egg offering to purchase an automatic egg-ID stamper seeing it rather as drain on share-holder value. This quite apart from any suggestion that Egg Capitalism would be interested in foisting peculiar-eggs sourced in . . . Britain on the unsuspecting EU consumer. I've no idea how egg-labelling goes down in Germany or Portugal but I am tickled that some EUrocrat noted that their are 26 counties in the Republic and matched each county, sorted alphabetically in English, to one letter of the Roman alphabet. On a very small 'sample' I deduce the Monaghan [R] is the epicentre of Peak Egg in this country. The rest of the ID 150 or 178A is a unique code for each producer. Rathgarogue gets a derogation on each-egg labelling presumably because, selling a few dozen eggs a day, it would take them 30 years to pay off the loan required to buy a modern egg stamper. Each box is stamped with their producer's ID. 

More: IE is obvs from context Ireland and the first digit is a code for chicken welfare:

• 0: organic
• 1: free range
• 2: barn
• 3: cage

You do you, not gonna judge you. but in reality things are not always implied by the legislation.  Free range differs from barn thus "must have continuous access to outdoors during daylight hours, to fresh water and to external areas which are mainly covered with vegetation. The birds are housed in hen houses, where part of the floor is covered in straw, which allows the birds to exhibit their natural behaviour." With a facility housing 100,000 birds, access to outdoors might be a door at the far end the shed. Do not imagine for a minute that one of the few employees of the business adopts the persona of an old-style army gym-instructor and hooshes all the birds out into the Fresh Air after breakfast and won't let them in again until dark. In Ireland, it's bloody freezing, probably raining, out there, 5 days out of 7.  Producing eggs is a metabolic process and at least partly dependent on the ambient temperature.  Our experience is that chickens definitely know enough to come out of the rain if they could. This is all stacked towards a consensus that free-range is less than open range or wide range. It's actually difficult / impossible in regular stores to purchase eggs that are both organic and free-range. But Rathgarogue Organic Farms [Eircode Y34 XN20] has that covered!

NowaEurope eggs = eieren = jajka = ovos = uibheacha = ägg = αυγά = vecja = huevos = munat