It’s an awful time for omelets in America. Because of rising bird flu rates, egg prices are soaring: Cartons of a dozen that were once under $2 throughout the country now cost $5.90 on average. In New York City, bodegas are selling loosies, three eggs for $2.99 a pop. The restaurant chain Waffle House has implemented an extra surcharge of 50 cents per egg. Some supermarket shelves are empty. What was once a staple has become a source of panic.
But not for everyone. “I invented not having eggs, so it’s fine for me,” jokes the chef and cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz, 52, who opened the vegan restaurant Modern Love in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 2016. It’s also fine for those who simply don’t like eggs. They’re not vegan or allergic, morally or biologically opposed. Their response is visceral — as the director Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps the world’s most famous ovaphobe, once attempted to explain: “That white round thing without any holes, and when you break it, inside there’s that yellow thing, round, without any holes … brr! Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid?” Guy Fieri, the 57-year-old television chef, has compared scrambled eggs both “texturally and visually” to “liquid chicken.” “I hate them,” says Sandra Felix, 37, the chef de cuisine at Sqirl, in the Virgil Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, which opened in 2012 and soon became beloved for its egg-topped salads and rice bowls. “The way the yolk is bright yellow, but the whites are transparent, but then it’s completely liquid — it’s all those things.” She’s discussed it with her therapist.
American eggs, long the domain of backyard hens, became easier to buy and store around the turn of the 20th century, the result of advances like artificial incubation and refrigeration. At the end of World War II, consumption was up to more than 400 eggs annually per person (it now hovers around 281) and, by the 1950s, cheap eggs had become a supermarket standby. But while eggs have been heavily researched — scientists recently discovered a process for making a perfectly boiled one (it takes 32 minutes) — there’s little data on how many people hate them. “As far as I know, no one’s studied the psychology of eating eggs,” says Paul Rozin, 88, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania who researches disgust. If you ask around, though, the egg haters will eventually reveal themselves: The former food editor Denise Mickelsen, 48, began her tenure at Denver’s 5280 magazine with the 2017 column “True Story: I Hate Eggs.” Most people are “mystified” and “shocked” by her antipathy, she says, while others quietly confess to her that they feel the same.
Sometimes food aversions have an inciting childhood incident, such as misery or vomiting, but often there’s no traumatic history. The scent is one possible explanation: In certain preparations, eggs give off a sulfurous tang, which evokes “a bodily odor” or a “smell of digestion,” says Rachel Herz, 61, a neuroscientist at Brown University and the author of “Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship With Food” (2018). But a fresh raw egg should have no smell at all. The fundamental problem, experts propose, is the way it feels in the mouth. “It’s some combination of being an animal product and having a mucoid texture,” says Rozin. It doesn’t help that there’s irregularity between the yolk and the white — not only does each part taste and look different but they cook differently too. “The emotion of disgust is really to keep us alive,” Herz says. “One of the cues to contamination is irregular texture.”
Egg haters generally don’t hate them in every form. “I eat mayonnaise, and I can eat a souffle, if it’s not too eggy,” says Colman Andrews, 80, the egg-averse co-founder of the food magazine Saveur. (It’s their inherent moisture, he says, that he “just cannot handle.”) Cynthia Christensen, 62, the New Jersey-based cook and recipe developer behind the blog But First We Brunch, has similar misgivings — “it just can’t be a wet egg.” To the extent she can explain it, she blames her upbringing: Every morning for “at least a year” when she was around six, she says, her mother would have her suck back a raw egg straight from the shell for strength and stamina. No surprise, her older brother doesn’t eat eggs either.
Felix, the Sqirl chef, has spent the last three decades avoiding eggs, ever since her grandmother gave her a trio of pet chickens when she was 7. Seeing their bounty on the breakfast table terrified her. As a young chef at a Los Angeles Italian restaurant, she’d ask a co-worker to break the eggs into the pasta dough and mix it just enough that she wouldn’t have to feel the yolks between her fingers. Years later, the sight of a broken egg can make her physically ill.
But a breakfast sandwich is still on the menu at Sqirl, and the shakshuka is Felix’s own recipe. “Through the years, I’ve gotten better,” she says. Her goal is to make eggs so delicate and creamy they’re barely recognizable as eggs. “When I’m tasting something that I just made, I smell it, I look at it, I touch it,” she says. “Once it’s in the final form, that’s when I just put it in my mouth.” And then she spits it out.
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