The Blackberry Walk

You go to the shops today, go to Tesco's, wherever, and you walk down the egg aisle. There, you open a box to make sure they aren't cracked - an important habit. You look inside, expecting 12 brown eggs, 6x2 as they always are, only to find your eggs are not BROWN. They are WHITE. This was me about a year ago, back when whatever powers that be, perhaps that ever-sleazy invisible hand of the market, decided that the British public were not deserving of BROWN eggs and were instead to be subjected to eggs which were WHITE.

On the face of it, my concern may sound ridiculous. It's what's on the inside that counts, many tell themselves and others. And this is true, the shell's colour holds little bearing on its contents. Placed side by side, two omelettes, one cooked with brown eggs, the other cooked with white eggs, I would not be able to tell the difference: I will admit as much. But when this shift was beginning to occur in the supermarkets, there was nevertheless an uneasiness in my stomach. These white eggs, white as a quartz-sand beach, white as Elizabeth I's face - these white eggs - they look like Playmobil eggs. They look like Hollywood eggs. They look thin-shelled and weak. These aren't real eggs, they're fake, they're plastic, they're imported, they're YANK eggs. These are the eggs you see Americans with online, digital eggs from the screen, not real eggs from the shops. It's yet another instance whereby the Americans have barged in and yap yap yapped endlessly until the embarrassed Englishman, too thoughtful to interrupt, gets reprogrammed by his yapping. Once again, the very icons of English identity are torn down and desecrated. A doctor friend of mine has said that even young Britons have begun speaking with an American accent. "They picked it up from the telly," their parents tell her.

However dastardly the Atlantic invasion has been for our culture, oddly, the attempted erasure of brown eggs hasn't its origins in Yank over-reach. No, it is far more absurd, and far more insidious. The colour of an egg is down to the breed of chicken, not necessarily the colour of their feathers or anything like that, just the breed. So in selling white eggs over brown eggs, all of the brown egg-laying hens have been effectively GENOCIDED - their race shall end - in favour of the new white egg-laying hens. The reason? White egg-laying hens are marginally more environmentally friendly.

Now, this to me is absurd. To say that the white egg-layers should utterly replace brown egg-layers for the sake of this frankly BS metric of 'carbon footprint' is beyond cruel, and I think speaks to a deeper evil. The white eggers are slightly smaller than the brown eggers, and require slightly less feed to produce the same amount of eggs: this is it. This knowledge mustn't have been news to those who study chickens. They must've known they could squeeze out a few more bob by cheaping out on feed and breeding white eggers, but they had never done so. Yet once the big E-word - 'Environment' - is trotted out, all the supermarkets stand up and get in line, yes sir no sir three bags full sir. And this was meant to be a capitalist economy! Profit margins this small hadn't driven them to make the change in the past, so they aren't clothing economics in environmentalism; no, the motive they claim is this intangible fiction of carbon, which haunts the minds of the conscientious middle classes. And the way in which they moved in lock-step! Such moves must be centrally planned - Sainsbury's can't just change their hens a few weeks after discovering Tesco's unveiled their plan - so someone somewhere is pulling the strings. Blackrock? Perhaps, if not Blackrock, some other cabal, operating under the same ESG guidelines thinks it's worth their time to change the colour of eggs. Was there a movement to change the colour of eggs? There was for the battery hens - and I'm glad Tesco's listened and stopped selling the eggs of battery hens - but there was nothing like this to replace brown eggs. No, this was a move from the micromanagers on high.

What this is is eco-fascism. It is central planning, a command economy, conducted through large multi-national corporations which are managed, not led. A system of managers, of mandarins, who infuse every public and private institution, and whose true allegiance is to some shadowy force obscured from your view. And their goals? These are harder to pin down. These managers are mostly nerds, not chads; they are no Napoleons, no lions, no leaders who will charge into battle, but sly foxes who keep their cards close to their chest, only letting on what they want you to know. One thing they clearly want is to reduce our carbon footprint. I don't know how many focus groups they passed the phrase 'carbon footprint' through, but semiotically it doesn't sit well with me. Carbon, that is the building block of life - to say that carbon is the enemy, not carbon dioxide, could just be a Freudian slip, or else it's intentional; and footprint, that mark which distinguishes us from the other beasts of the world, what identifies us as humans. So, looking behind the tired expression and attempting to see the words once more for what they are, reducing our carbon footprint is to reduce the vital energies of man in the areas which make us uniquely human.

Though they may talk about it endlessly, this obsession with the environment and with climate change, I don't think the elites really care about it all that much. What they really want is the power it gives them. They go around giving talks, telling AP News and Reuters to send every news agency in the first world the same few articles about climate this or climate that, to say that climate change isn't something that can be solved - unless you give us more power to bring about a solution. Only we, the organised minority, can solve climate change. Look, the water levels are rising! That flood you had, ooh, that flood was worse than last year's wasn't it! Record temperature, record temperature! You go into work the next day and you mention, "It's awfully hot today," and the next person says, "must be climate change." What else could it be after all, if not climate change, we can't just HAVE WEATHER anymore can we.

There really is no hope. We are occupied by an evil elite who want nothing more than to make us serfs in an AI economy and we will have nothing. We will be led by no one, and if a leader is allowed to appear, you'll know full well he will have been thoroughly compromised by the elites so that he does their bidding. The mediaeval Catholic Church and their international elite threatened with fiery images of hell and purgatory, and today's Davos elite threaten with fiery images of climate disaster. We're all being manipulated into compliance, and there's nothing we can do about it. The masses will never shirk their programming. The chickens won't come home to roost for these elites. We will be treated like the brown egg-layers, once more productive workers, whether human or robot, are found. It's all over. There really is no hope. 

The eggs though, I'm fixated on the eggs. Why the eggs? Why go after BROWN eggs and make them WHITE? Is it some magical disappearing act, whereby the people are dazzled by the colour of their eggs changing overnight wherever they shop? A small flex of power by those in the elite to those who can see it and will notice? Why have they come after the eggs? I just want BROWN eggs, because that's the colour eggs are, the colour I've always known them. Is tradition not enough of a reason to keep anything? Can we not be content having it the way it is because it has always been that way? The things I love dwindle and perish in favour of newfangled nonsense like white eggs.

Well, to this day I have never bought a white egg. I search at the supermarkets to see if there are any brown eggs, and if there aren't, I look elsewhere or go without. I am a brown egg purist, and I will be until the day I die. If brown eggs do completely disappear, I will buy chickens to continue making brown eggs. Because without holding onto something, some small branch from the riverbank, the current will take you. The current will take you down the river and into the salty sea of formlessness and you will have NOTHING. Nothing at all. Because all the soil which anchored your roots in the culture will have been eroded away by the torrent of modernity, and you will be washed away with it.