When people are lost somewhere, as in the jungle or on a lonely island, they will try to eat almost anything when they get hungry. In some such way primitive man, in his search for food, must have tried to eat the eggs of the birds. Exactly when this happened, or where, we cannot know, of course.

But we know that the chicken hen has been furnishing man with eggs for food since prehistoric times. In fact, the chicken, which probably originated in the jungles of India, spread throughout the world long before recorded history.

Chickens were known in China at least 3,500 years ago! When the Romans began pushing north they found chickens already established in England, Gaul, and among the Germans. They probably didn’t reach the Western Hemisphere until the second voyage of Columbus in 1493.

Today, the single animal which is the most widely distributed food producer in the world, is the chicken. In some parts of the world, however, the duck and duck eggs are preferred. Did you know that the duck can even beat the chicken in producing eggs? There are instances where ducks produced 360 eggs a year.

If you counted all the hens in the world and the number of eggs they produced each year, it would come to about 2 eggs per week for each human being on earth! In the United States alone, the average each year is about 65,000,000,000 eggs.

An egg can be separated into three parts, the white, the yolk, and the shell. The white accounts for about 58 per cent of the weight of the whole egg. It consists of about 87 per cent water and 12 per cent protein. The yolk accounts for about 32 per cent of the weight of the egg. It is about 49 per cent water, 32 per cent fat, and 17 per cent protein. The shell is about 10 per cent of the weight of the egg.

Eggs are considered a good food because they supply amino acids, minerals, and vitamins.