Full Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
This book is about a strange object—strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker's Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory habits are considered alongside one another, and personal narrative and broad swaths of natural history jostle, like yolk and albumen. Mapping curious eggs across times, scales, and spaces, Egg draws together surprising perspectives on this common object—egg as food, as art object, as metaphor and feminist symbol, as cultural icon.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Dear Egg
Why We Break the Things We Love the Most
Rotten Eggs
The Egg Came First
Experiment with Eggs by Making a Hollandaise in the Time of Global Warming
How to Cook a Planet
Spoons
The Glue That Holds Us Together
All the Eggs in Israel
All the Eggs in Ukraine
All the Eggs in Korea
All the Eggs in China
Eggs in Utah
Mohawk
So Many Eggs, One Small Basket
Which Came First? Chicken Porn Can Help You Make Up Your Mind About Eggs
Breaking a Few Eggs
Blue Planet, Blue Omelet
Humpty Dumpty, Revised
Do Eggs Bring Skunks?
Would You Eat a Red Speckled Egg?
The Incredible, Edible Egg
What Is a Cloaca?
A Million Year Old Egg
A Lot of Pressure on One Egg
Sidewalk Cooking Eggs
A Science Fair Every Year
The Sex Lives of Fish
The Present Was an Egg Laid by the Past That Had the Future Inside Its Shell—Zora Neale Hurston
Recipe for an Already-Cracked Egg
