fried egg
swardraws
This is a simple meal—a fried egg, a bit of black pepper, served on a ceramic dinner plate and eaten with a dinner fork. It required hundreds of people to prepare and cost a million dollars to serve. One million dollars.
First you need an egg. This egg came from a free-range chicken raised on a farm in Northeast Missouri. It was gathered by the farmer riding a Honda Foreman ATV manufactured in Marysville, Ohio, then shipped to Chicago in a Fruehauf trailer hauled by a Peterbilt truck. The pepper was grown in the highlands of Vietnam, where it was harvested by old women and shipped in a Soviet-manufactured truck to Ho Chi Minh City where it was processed and ground, then loaded in a container car built in China from recycled steel. The container car was loaded on a ship registered in Liberia and transported to the port of Los Angeles, where the container car was transferred onto a train bound for Chicago. The Fiestaware on which the egg is served was manufactured in Newell, West Virginia and hauled to Chicago in a leased White Freightliner truck driven by an Iraq war veteran from Georgia. The flatware was manufactured by the Oneida company, which originated as a Christian utopian-socialist community in rural New York.
One egg, a sprinkling of pepper, on a plate, with a fork—easy peasy, perfectly breezy. Cost to you? Maybe twenty-two cents. Plus one million dollars in associated expenses.
How’d it taste?
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