Eggs

Thirty feet in the air off a northern Canadian highway stands the giant Vegreville Easter egg, rotating gently in the wind. The egg is eighteen feet wide, nearly twenty-five long and designed to turn with the breeze like a weathervane. It is decorated in a traditional Ukrainian pysanka pattern with thousands of gold, black and white aluminum triangles, for the egg is an homage to the Ukrainian immigrants who settled the area long ago. It is a technical feat: the tile- cutting technology developed to produce the mosaic on the egg’s curved surface was later used to tile the exterior of the Space Shuttle. Whatever day of the year you may spy it, it is undeniably an Easter egg.

Eggs have become an expensive purchase recently, as you’ve no doubt noticed, with supermarket prices in the UK rising by as much as 85 per cent in the past year. Here in America, the cost of a dozen now averages out at $3.29, an improvement on the $4.25 of two months back, but still well north of the $1.50 many consumers are used to. Globally, more than 140 million chickens have been killed by avian flu and related culling since October 2021 – including 48 million across Europe and the UK. As a result, we find ourselves in one of those periodic cycles where major media outlets loudly debate the merits of backyard chicken flocks. To borrow an observation from The Godfather: these things gotta happen every five years or so.