Freezing Eggs

I always shop at a little liquidators store here in SW Washington. I am not telling you the name, because finding great places to shop like this is kinda like finding a favorite fishing hole. Sharing the location is not something done lightly, but it is just above Fourth Plain on Main. They go and buy pallets of short-dated and non-moving stock from the big stores and sell it to us cheapskates for usually less than half the cost of the same item in the corporate stores. It is kind of strange shopping there, you definitely don't go with a shopping list. You buy what they have and then you plan your menu when you get home.

Now the other day, there was a sign out front "Organic, cage free brown eggs, 99 cents a dozen or 5 dozen for $4.00". So I beelined in and picked up about 10 dozen. Took them home and went to the handy-dandy Georgia Egg Council website and found out how to freeze them (thanks Google). I also made two dozen pickled eggs to go with my beer (so Mayberry, you think that you had a problem with flatulence when eating preps, beer and pickled eggs would put you to shame my friend) So the first lesson yesterday was to take advantage of sales and put things aside, there usually is a way to do it, and it will save you money and add to your preps.

The second is a different thing entirely. I have watched the organic food thing take off during the past two or three years. For the most part, this is a middle and upper-middle class female phenomenon. Oh sure, there are folks out there who are serious organic types, but usually they garden a lot, and they usually steer well clear of the chain stores.

The chain-store organic phenomenon is a marketing ploy aimed at the middle class to pry more money out of them for the same product. The way that it is played in the media and in the advertising, a mother might as well give her child to the man in old van over by the school than let the child eat food with "bad stuff by bad companies" on it. Being a member of the stunned masses these folks are force fed information by mass media, they never sit down to think that the "organic" foods that they so righteously purchase are grown by agribusiness, transported thousands of miles by truck, and are purchased in corporate stores. They are paying a premium (usually twice the going rate) for food that is just as strange as the foods they are rejecting.

How this ties in with the eggs is that the stores that I frequent (I usually refer to them as "Used Grocery Stores") are starting to become heavily organic (Thank God they don't price as organic, one price fits all for specific food type). What this shows me is the depth of the commitment to "Safeway Organics" that the middle class have. At the end of the day, this fashion will fail, the high price of gas, the high price of buying organics, and the low production yields of organic agriculture will conspire to drive this "premium market niche" back to the fringe and specialty stores where it dwelt all the years before the yuppie uber-moms picked it up as a status symbol .