I’m Pro-Choice, but…

1 February 2010, Monday

Scene: Bus station @ 4am

I’ve gotten 3 hours of sleep only to find the bus to Dien Bien Phu won’t leave until after 5am. Sitting on the empty bus I realize how hungry I am. I wander over to where they are selling some transportable breakfast items: hardboiled eggs and packaged bowls of ramen noodles. I would love 2 eggs, and maybe a couple for my 14 hour bus ride. The man serving the eggs eats some in a small bowl, mixed with some type of sauce. He cracks 2 open into a bowl and hands them to me.

Oh. There’s something very wrong or very different about these eggs. That wasn’t sauce…
They are surrounded by a lattice of something brown. I lift my eyes from the bowl, looking all around me I hope for some alternative explanation to the truth my mind already knows. Are these eggs not from chickens? Maybe they cook them in a special way? Oh boy.

There’s one obvious answer which I badly want to deny. Hard boiled eggs had sounded so good…
When I first saw the eggs in my bowl my mind had immediately jumped to the several biology classes I’ve had where we dissect and examine chick embryo’s at different stages. In these labs we never incubated past a set number of days, stopping before the nervous system fully develops. The brown network around my eggs is the cooked bloody placenta wrapped around the yolk. I’ve had plenty of eggs in Vietnam. But these are different, specifically allowed to be fertilized.

I think, as I stare at the eggs, that if it is an early stage and the embryo is still just a small ball of tissue I’ll eat it anyway. Not such a big deal.

I lift my spoon and cut a piece away. Oh man. I push the bowl away from me and apologize that I can’t eat it. This is my first experience with Asian food where I am really shocked and not willing to try something.

Inside the egg is a full, boiled, chick fetus. I had cut right into the head.

It’s too early for this, I think. I ask for the ramen. I’ll take the MSG over this. The man sitting next to me appears to be a business man and asks, “Ok?”

“At home we don’t eat eggs like this, they are only white.” He doesn’t seem to understand fully.

“Where you from?”

“America.”

“America, you no have?” he gestures at the egg.

“No. The eggs in America don’t have…” for lack of a different, simple explanation, “…babies.”

He chuckles.

Saying it makes me squirm a little inside. One thing that really confuses me is that an egg with a chick should have the same nutritional value as an unfertilized egg, minus half the genetics, right? So they eat this for the taste? They must take them from the nest just before he bones start to really develop. I stare at the large pot full of “hard boiled eggs.”

I eat my noodles and try not to stare at the other bowl in front of me. I feel bad I wasted the food. Even though I didn’t eat any, no one else will eat it now. I pay for the eggs, noodles, and a snack, $1.25 total.

I’ll eat almost anything but I think I just found a new limit. I have a thing about eating the whole body, particularly the head, of an animal. Except with insects, then it’s ok.