National Egg Day, June 3rd

June 3rd is National Egg Day, and it’s been around since the 1950s. The whole thing started as a way to get people thinking about eggs again after some rough years when everyone got worried about cholesterol. Turns out the experts figured out that maybe eggs weren’t the villains they thought they were.

The American Heart Association changed their tune around 2000, saying healthy adults could eat an egg a day and stay within their daily cholesterol limits. Just like that, eggs were back in business.

Think about it – one egg has 75 calories and seven grams of protein. That’s a pretty decent deal when you’re looking at the math. They’re packed with omega-3 fatty acids, choline for your brain, and antioxidants like lutein and zeaxanthin that help your eyes. All in something that fits in your palm.

The thing about eggs is they don’t ask for much. You can scramble them, fry them, boil them, poach them. You can make a French omelet that takes some skill, or you can crack a couple into a hot pan and call it breakfast. Every culture seems to have figured out their own way with eggs – huevos Mexicana, Japanese oyakodon, French “omelet au boudin de Nancy”.

The nutrient choline in eggs helps with brain development and memory. Makes you wonder if maybe we should be giving kids eggs instead of sugary cereal on test days. Not that anyone’s going to listen to that kind of practical thinking.

What’s interesting is how we got here. The American Egg Board had to work pretty hard to convince people eggs were worth eating again, even coming up with that “Incredible Edible Egg” slogan. Marketing aside, the science backed them up.

If you want to mark the day, you could try cooking an egg a way you’ve never done before. Or see if it’s actually hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk – though that’s more of a party trick than a cooking method. You could visit a farm, see where eggs actually come from instead of just appearing in cartons at the store.

The real celebration might just be appreciating that something so simple has managed to be useful in so many ways. Eggs bind ingredients together, they leaven cakes, they thicken sauces, they stand alone as a meal. They’re one of those rare things that work exactly as they are, but also help everything else work better too.

A fresh egg has a high yolk and thick white. Brown and white eggs are the same nutritionally – the color just depends on the breed of hen. Simple facts that somehow get complicated when people start overthinking things.

So there’s your National Egg Day. June 3rd. A day to remember that sometimes the most ordinary things are the most remarkable, if you pay attention. Not that the eggs are asking for recognition. They’re too busy being useful.