powdered eggs

My wife was just using some powered milk for something and I got to thinking about powdered eggs.

You have never lived until you have eaten powdered eggs.

I am not sure how they are made, but powdered eggs have their own flavor, their own consistency, their own sense of self that nothing else has.

Maybe the chickens are sad, or fed something horrible and just give up on life, producing powdered eggs. I don’t know.

We had them for breakfast almost every morning in the army. They were also in the C Rations we ate on occasion: powdered eggs and ham.

I remember coming up to the grill in the mess hall and the cook would have a large pile of powdered eggs on the griddle – a large, vaguely yellow mass – and he would ask, How do you want your eggs? Omelet, scrambled, fried, eggs Benedict? We would request something and he would cut off a portion of them, flop the glop on our plates and say, Here you go.

They were awful, yet we ate them. It is funny how you remember things that were so far back. Young men forced into government service eating powdered eggs.

You get used to almost anything. My son mentioned that the other day when I was talking about wearing a mask to help me sleep. I was describing it and he said if someone were to come up and hit you at random times during the night, you would still eventually be able to sleep.

And that’s true. You eat junk and sooner or later, junk is normal. I read where people eat nothing but tortillas and beans their whole lives and it is normal. The Louis L’Amour cowboys eat bacon, frybread and drink coffee everywhere they go and are perfectly happy.

I guess it is when you have a lot of choices that you have trouble. We eat something different every night. There are some things that are my favorites, but if I were to eat those each night, I would get tired of them.

But in the army, I ate the powdered eggs and I ate potatoes at every meal and things were fine.

Of course, I was 20. That might have made a difference.