So I was visiting the American Egg Board website to read about their new advertising campaign featuring incredible people who do incredible things thanks to incredible eggs and I was struck by something else: World Egg Day was October 10th. And here we are in February. I have to be honest here. I'm kind of pissed at the people who made my 2008 calendar because October 10 was completely blank. I mean aren't calendar makers supposed to help us out and remind us about the important holidays? Whatever. It's too late to bitch about it now. I missed it. I'll have to make sure not to miss 2009 World Egg Day.
But, guess what, apparently it's not too late to send your 2008 World Egg Day greeting after all. On the American Egg Board site, you can still create your own World Egg Day card and email it to people. You can add cool shapes, paint on your egg, add backgrounds, even write on your egg. I'm not sure about the etiquette here. Sorry it's late works if you send a card a couple weeks after the holiday, but it's five months late now. I guess I'll have to trust the American Egg Board on this. Let's see, what should I say on my card? Happy World Egg Day, the day we commemorate the hatcheries where the laying hens come from. Half the chicks born there are male so they have to be disposed of. Sometimes they're ground up in machines, sometimes they're tossed in garbage bins, where they die of either suffocation or starvation. Thing is, I'm not sure if that's the message the American Egg Board had in mind when they created World Egg Day.
Stop! That's way too cynical. The American Egg Board didn't create the holiday. It came about by popular acclaim. They just help us commemorate it. Anyway I've got other things to worry about. Like I was all set to send a World Egg Day card to my friends Sarah and Tom but now that I think about it I'm pretty sure I didn't hear from them last World Egg Day. So fuck 'em, they're off my list. back to what I should say on the card. I could talk about how World Egg Day is a time to reflect on the laying hens who spend their two years in beyond-comprehension misery in their cramped cages until productivity declines and it's slaughter time. Greeting cards often work their magic with rhyming verse. Maybe I should try that.
On this special World Egg Day,
We celebrate the hens who lay.
And when their laying days are done,
An electric bath until they're stunned.
Shackle the legs, slice the neck,
The eggs were yummy, so what the heck.
To these hens we give our thanks
As they're boiled alive in the scalding tank.
No! That totally misses the spirit of the holiday. The American Egg Board would be horrified. They give us the tools to design and write our very own World Egg Day cards and this is how we show our gratitude? The Senior VP of Marketing offers up his own favorite egg-based recipes and this is how we repay him?
These living, breathing hens feel pain as much as American Egg Board Senior VP's of Marketing feel pain. 23 million chickens are killed each day in the US so people can have their chicken meat and their eggs. Happy belated World Egg Day.
