When did man begin to eat eggs?

When people get lost -- as in a jungle or on a lonely island -- they eat almost anything that’s available when they get hungry. In some such way, primitive man must have tried to eat the eggs of birds, in his search for food. We cannot know exactly when this happened.

Chickens have been furnishing man with eggs for food since prehistoric times. Actually, the chicken, which probably originated in the forests of India, spread throughout the world long before recorded history. Chickens were known in China at least 3,500 years ago! When the Romans began pushing north they found chickens already in England, Gaul and Germany. They probably didn’t reach the Western Hemisphere until the second ‘voyage’ of Columbus in 1493.

The single bird which is the most widely distributed food producer in the world today is the chicken. In some parts of the world, however, duck eggs are preferred. The duck can even beat the chicken in producing eggs. There are instances where ducks produced 360 eggs a year.

If we count all the hens in the world and the number of eggs they produced each year, it comes to about two eggs per week for each human being on earth! An egg can be separated into three parts, the white, the yolk and the shell. The white of the egg accounts for about 32 per cent and the shell for about 10 per cent of the weight of the egg.

The white contains about 12 per cent protein while the yolk contains about 32 per cent fat. Eggs are good food as they supply amino acids, minerals and vitamins to us.