Unexpected Whole Food

1.I was at Barack Obama's Inauguration today....wait....let me savor that wonderful food again. I. was. at. Obama's. inauguration. today.....

Ah. Ok. So because of that, I wasn't planning to do any blogging. But two things happened.

The first, a funny thing, involved a lamb. Lane and I are splitting a lamb from Groff's Content Farm and I needed to call their butcher today, because they do not get the inauguration off. In butcherese, the call was not very unusual. Miscellaneous directions on subdividing meat and bones. No, I don't know the ear tag number of the creature. Yes, I'd like the intestines. Yes, I'd like the head and any organs. And if anyone else doesn't want their organs, I'd be happy to take those, too.

The thing is, this type of conversation held in a dense throng of N million people pretty darn far away from an actual farm, well, draws looks. One person standing by asked me where I was from. "Silver Spring, Maryland." Oh. It was pretty funny.


2.The second thing involved a simple, hardboiled egg, was new even to me, and has set me thinking.

I guess because security teams thought trash cans might be a risk, they removed them all from the Mall. For sustenance, I had brought some cheese, cashews, and hardboiled eggs. At about 9, having been out since 6:30, I decided on an egg.

I broke it by dropping it on the ground and dusting it off. Then I went to find a trash can to peel it into. There weren't any. I didn't have anything to put a shell into. And even though other people were dropping things left and right, I couldn't bear the thought of littering. So I ate the eggshell.

I have never done this. The only time I've eaten eggshell is when someone didn't do a very good job of it and there were shards in the egg or salad or whatever. So when I tried I fully expected it to be a fail and for me to sort of spit it out after choking on sharp shards. This did not happen. The shell chewed easily and was easy to eat and swallow. I had no idea. I'm not sure why we don't eat eggshells, or what this means going forward. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'll know more tomorrow.

Update: No ill effects. So I deem hard-boiled eggshells to be edible. Who knew!

Update 2: I gave Phil two eggs in his bento for work. He tried them with the shells. He said it didn't make too much of a difference one way or another in terms of "better" or "worse," but it did have the benefit(?) of grossing out his colleagues.