Never paid much attention to the price of eggs.
Until now.
And from the numbers I've been jotting down, I'm reminded of something the late, great Merle Haggard said about the “Golden Years” of old age:
“Friends,” an ailing Merle said in Cheyenne, “we've been LIED TO!”
Same with the politics of the price of eggs.
These days I do most of the grocery shopping for my wife and I. And I do almost all the cooking. I'm the “pot wrestler” at our house.
Taking over the cooking seemed only fair when I retired. She'd been cooking dinner for decades, on top of all that raising the kids stuff, which she tells me was a lot of work. Back then, it was my job to take the kids to the playground down the street after dinner, to give her about a half hour of peace, quiet and sanity.
These days, I like to cook. I get to decide what we're having for dinner. (We haven't had Brussels sprouts or tomato aspic once since I took over.) I enjoy whipping up new recipes, like a little science project in the afternoon, with the verdict – good or bad – obvious at dinner. My lemon chicken with spinach is to die for. And the “Girl Meets Farm” recipe for ribs I use makes the house smell like heaven.
It hasn't been all sweetness and light, though. One night years ago I poured cold water into a hot glass baking dish full of acorn squash, and you should have seen the explosion. How was I to know? When my wife was taking home ec in junior high, learning not to pour cold water into a hot glass dish, I was cutting out knick-knack shelves in industrial arts.
My mother, a home ec major, had no sympathy for boys who said they couldn't cook. “If you can read,” she said, “you can cook.” Case closed. (She also said “eggs are no good cold,” so don't be late for breakfast, Buster.)
These days, I head over to the local Walmart most afternoons to get what I need for whatever I'm cooking. Gets me out of the house. And I notice a lot of guys my age (old) doing the same thing, often with perplexed looks on their faces. (I wasted about a half hour looking for “broccolini” one time. And I never can remember where they stock the essential cans of “Manwich.”)
The price of eggs has been in the news lately. The folks who said annual inflation hitting 9 percent under hopeless Joe Biden was only “transitory,” and no big deal, now say Donald Trump promised the price of eggs would drop on Inauguration Day, which they didn't.
So I started paying attention to the price of eggs. And I jotted down some numbers.
Toward the end of February – about a month after Trump took office – I bought a big box of 60 large eggs for $27.50, which works out to 46 cents per egg. Then toward the end of March, a dozen eggs cost $4.97, which works out to 41 cents per egg. Or you could get the 60-egg box for $24.12, which was 40 cents per egg.
For a couple weeks, eggs held firm at $4.97 per dozen. Then last week they dropped to $4.47 per dozen, or 37 cents per egg.
So just in the weeks I've been watching, the price of an egg under the Trump Administration has dropped 9 cents, or almost 20 percent. This, despite the insistence of our liberal friends in the media that the price of eggs have actually gone UP under Trump. (Not where I shop.) And this, in the face of egg-centric Easter, and the controversial killing last summer of millions of egg-laying chickens over bird flu fears.
Bottom line, the price of eggs where I shop tells me that we're heading in the right direction, despite the predictably hysterical cries of our liberal friends, who have never given Trump the benefit of any doubt.
Why not give this guy some time to work the wonders he's so confidently predicting?
Don't take my word for it. And don't believe the wildly-varying egg prices reported on the the news.
Trust your own eyes. In the egg section.
Dave Simpson can be reached at: DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
