The Only Important Question About Eggs

Hint: It’s not about how much they cost.

Editor’s Note: This post includes two short video slideshows that are essential to the story, so I strongly urge you to read the web version, not the emailed version. Phone is fine for this one, however — no computer needed. Enjoy! — Paul

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Eggs have been in the news a lot lately. They supposedly decided the 2024 presidential election, Waffle House has added a surcharge for them, other restaurants are coming up with workarounds for them, stores are limiting how many cartons of them you can buy, a skincare brand is selling them, NYC bodegas are selling them as “loosies,” someone recently stole 100,000 of them, customs officials are seizing them at various ports of entry, some countries are refusing to export them to us, Viktor Orbán wants to fix their price, rolling them across the White House lawn may soon come with a corporate sponsor advertiser, blah-blah-blah.

But I don’t want to talk about any of those aspects of eggs. Nor do I want to discuss any of the common egg-related debates, such as white vs. brown, large vs. extra-large vs. jumbo, free-range vs. cage-free vs. pasture-raised, scrambled vs. hard-boiled vs. soft-boiled vs. sunny side, or even the chicken vs. the egg.

Those are all interesting questions, but they’re just side issues compared to the only egg-related question that really matters, which is this: In what sequence do you remove the eggs from their carton as you use them?

From my perspective, there are only two acceptable answers to that question. The first goes like this:

That is the method that I use.

A more unorthodox but acceptable approach would be like this: