Nostalgia Sunday – Welcome to Eggs-rael

June 20, 2010 - 9:15 PM by

Pinch me, I must be dreaming. For the first time in all my years here, I’ve found a place with egg white omelet on the menu. Not that you aren’t able to order an omelet made of egg whites in Israel. But this generally this involves making long explanations to young wait-persons who generally respond with everything from a blank stare of utter confusion to a just-as-confused-but-trying-to-be-helpful, “Are you sure you only want the whites? I’m going to have to charge you for a regular omelet anyway, you know.” So, having it on the menu is a big deal.

It got me thinking about eggs, which are a very important part of the daily diet for most Israelis – and not just during Passover when it’s all eggs, all the time. According to a 2007 report by International Egg and Poultry Review, hen egg consumption in Israel was 30.98, putting Israel 36th in world per capita consumption. In 2004, Globes reported that the average Israeli consumed 239 eggs per year.

One of the reasons consumption is so high is because eggs aren’t just for breakfast in Israel. I still remember this revelation at the age of 7 or 8 when I was invited to dinner at the home of a little girl in my Grandmother’s Jerusalem neighborhood. Her mother served us fried eggs, sunny side up. Wow! Breakfast food for dinner! This must be a pretty good country to live in if you can have that.

Of course, actually coming here to live meant dealing with some of the peculiarities of egg procurement. For example, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, eggs were taken away from consumers and delivered straight to our soldiers. The only eggs available were tiny little substandard ones — and then only through the black market.

Meanwhile, Israel’s soldiers were being stuffed silly with four, five and six eggs a day. Eventually, this artificially created shortage ended, eggs came back to the grocery shelves and those soldiers — now in their 50s and 60s — treat their high cholesterol levels with statin drugs. (Israel’s Hadassah Hospital, you should know, was a pioneer in the use of statins for controlling high blood pressure).

Another weird thing was that there were no egg cartons, just trays of eggs. If you just wanted to buy a few eggs, say 6 or 8, the grocery store proprietor would place them very carefully in a little brown paper bag and hand it to you to carry gingerly back home. And if you were lucky, most of them would arrive whole. This led to the development of the portable plastic egg carrying case.

Even before the State was founded, most of Israel’s eggs were marketed by evil monolith (I am not kidding) Tnuva which at one point in the 1980s marketed 66% of all of the country’s eggs. To its credit, Tnuva did standardize levels of production and was the first Israeli company to qualify for ISO 9002 international standardization. Nonetheless, times have changed and today Tnuva has to make do with controlling a mere 35% of the egg market in Israel.

I’m too young to have experienced the austerity regime of Israel’s early statehood but the excellent Nostal site (in Hebrew but with lots of pictures) has a nice entry about powdered eggs, which seem to have characterized the era for many.

But I am old enough to have seen one of the last egg stores in Tel Aviv, which was located on Shenkin Street right next to Cafe Tamar. It was not a boutique. It was a dumpy little store that sold one thing and one thing alone: that perfect oval symbol of rebirth.

Today, we have egg cartons by the dozen, restaurants like Tel Aviv’s Benedict that serve eggs all day and all night, and shakshouka, a North African dish consisting of eggs poached in tomato sauce, is a staple on every menu. (The Israel Poultry Council has a nice recipe here).

As for the aforementioned egg white omelet, it was served to me at the Si Espresso cafe. Located at the Latrun junction, the cafe is a popular hangout for mountain bikers from all over Israel (hence the healthy Lite Breakfast)*. Definitely recommended, even if you aren’t wearing biking shorts.

*This past Friday morning was no exception; the bikers hadn’t yet received the news that one of their own, triathlete Shneor Cheshin, had been killed while riding by a hit-and-run driver. You can read more about it in Yossi Melman’s impassioned editorial, Drivers to Blame, in Haaretz.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , • Category: Food, General, health, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Travel 

Comments

5 Comments on Nostalgia Sunday – Welcome to Eggs-rael

  1. nicky on Mon, Jun 21st 2010 9:12 AM

    2. Cheshin was a friend of my husband’s. He found out about his death just a couple of hours after it happened, as he and his cyclist friends went to the memorial service of another Israeli cyclist killed in Italy a month earlier.

    Just a month before her death, another Israeli cyclist was killed on Israel’s roads.

  2. Rina on Mon, Jun 21st 2010 5:24 PM

    3. I love eggs for dinner.

  3. Jessica on Tue, Jun 22nd 2010 4:11 AM

    4. And Cafe Hillel is serving some decent Eggs Benedikt, but not every branch does it as well as the one at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Karem…

  4. David-Joe on Fri, Jun 25th 2010 3:52 AM

    5. Since childhood I have not eaten eggs – even the name in Hebrew or English is enough to make me throw-up.

    The smell of any egg, especially hardboiled is just the most disgusting!

    I refute that it was Zahal feeding eggs to troops that resulted in the cholesterol problems now of soldiers then. Three years or whatever of service during the late teens to early twenties is not sufficient to generate a shronic problem.

    Problems that require statins result either from genetic disorders or a LIFELONG diet of unhealthy eating.

  5. Nostalgia Sunday – On the radio | ISRAELITY on Sun, Aug 28th 2011 10:20 PM

    6. [...] the great egg dearth of the 1973-4 Yom Kippur War, entertainer Gadi Yagil was hired to promote egg consumption in 1977 [...]

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