Like a lot of folks, I occasionally find myself shopping at the Whole Foods.  But I tellya, it's under duress. 

Whole Foods can be summed up by the egg section.  It ain't like the old days, where you go over to the egg freezer, grab a couple dozen for a buck-fifty, and be on your happy, guilt-free way.  There's a continuum now:  cheap eggs on the left, expensive on the right.  They up-sell you, as if you're buying a Lexus, only instead of more bells and whistles, you're buying varying degrees of freedom from guilt.    

Over on the left are the really cheap eggs, something like three bucks a dozen.  They don't exactly tell you that the eggs in those cartons are all but squeezed out of chickens in egg-sweatshops somewhere in Thailand, then shipped overseas, one egg at a time, on dozens and dozens of oil-tankers which circumnavigate the globe thrice before getting to you, and that you're going to be consigned to hell for all eternity and repeatedly pecked to death by angry chickens if you buy those eggs, but...they don't NOT tell you that either. 

One step up is the free-range chickens, a steal at three-fifty a dozen.  "Aha!"  You think.  "An extra four bits isn't bad to makes sure that the chickens who laid my eggs have space to roam.  It's a deal!"  Your head fills with images of chickens laughing and tossing frisbees to one another across green fields in slow-motion, stopping only occasionally to squat and discreetly lay a perfect, happy egg before resuming their idyllic roaming. And your hand drifts one egg-column to the right.

But, soft!  Lo, what does the next column of eggs promise?  Not just free-range, mind you, but veggie-fed!  Now, I can never quite get clear whether it's good or bad for the animals I'm eating--or whose eggs I'm eating--to be fed grass, or corn, or grain, but if they're touting veggie-fed as the preferable option, I'm assuming that means that "veggies" (a broad category, granted) are what the Great Fowlish Deity Above intended every chicken on the green earth to consume.  So what's a meager four dollars a dozen, in the great scheme of things, to ensure that the chickens who are there to serve YOU, remember, are well and happily fed?  And your hand drifts another egg-column to the right.

Nay, but tarry, i'faith, for just another dollar a dozen--pennies per egg, may I remind you!--you can get ALL that...and some extra Omega-3's right in the eggs themselves.  Again, I haven't bothered to look, because who has the time, but, as unlikely as it seems, surely whatever process they use to infuse the eggs with an extra amount of God's Great Panacea MUST be 100% natural...we are at Whole Foods, after all, and these eggs are coming up on five bucks a dozen, so hey, in for a penny, let's GO FOR IT!  

Now here, at what is for now the final egg-column, things take a turn for the bizarre:  what are the most expensive eggs?  Laid by college-educated chickens, perhaps?  Or chickens who have dined exclusively on leftovers from Greens, the esteemed Los Angeles vegan restaurant?  Or, perhaps, with all the obsession with local and organic products, perhaps they are eggs laid on the premises, indeed, by a chicken who is sitting right there atop the egg-freezer, doing her business right into the carton seconds before you buy it?    

No:  the most expensive egg option is fertile eggs. 

Okay that's weird.  With all the anti-cruelty stuff flying rampant around the store, with all the assurances that the cows whose meat you are consuming lived happy and productive lives frolicking in the fields, lowing jovially with friends and family before willingly and happily going off with Farmer Ben and his shotgun behind the woodshed, with all that going on, how is it that the eggs go full circle, making apparently the cruellest eggs the most expensive? 

When I was a kid, my sister managed to turn me off eggs for awhile by telling me they were aborted chickens.  My mother disabused me of that notion after I refused my seventh fried egg and had to fess up that I felt a pang of guilt for preventing a chicken its God-given right to peck and scratch. 

I've been eating eggs ever since.  At this point, I'd probably eat a fertile egg, too.

But I still find it weird that at Whole Foods, fertile eggs are the apogee.  I'm wondering if this signals a strange turnabout at this particular high-end supermarket, and that before long another wing will open up--only to the most well-heeled customers, mind you--where they sell endangered species meat, like in The Freshman.  For two hundred dollars, you can buy yourself a Spotted Owl sandwich. 

Free yourself of enough guilt, it would seem, and pretty soon you need to buy yourself some more.