Success is getting what you want; happiness is liking what you get

Thursday 20 June 2013

The Big Egg

Various towns around New Zealand have something to skite about.  Ohakune has the Big Carrot, and Taihape has the Big Gumboot.  Here in our new home town of Levin, there is the Big Egg.  Actually, all we saw was a sign, we really didn’t see a big egg at all.  But we called around to The Big Egg Company this morning to purchase some free range eggs.

DSCF5732 Free range eggs this way

It wasn’t hard to decide which grade of eggs to buy.  Jumbos, of course.  Robin loves his eggs for breakfast, so why buy tiny eggs when we can get jumbos?  I can see we will be having a bacon and egg breakfast tomorrow.

DSCF5731 Inside the shop

The extinct New Zealand Moa must win the prize for the largest egg.  Imagine how much scrambled eggs you would get from an egg this size.  Fragments of moa eggshell are often encountered in archaeological sites and sand dunes around our coast line.  Thirty six whole moa eggs exist in museum collections and vary greatly in size (from 120–240 millimetres (4.7–9.4 in) in length and 91–178 millimetres (3.6–7.0 in) wide

Moa egg

During the first century or so after their arrival in New Zealand from Polynesia (1250–1300 AD), the Maori people extensively hunted moa as a ready source of food.  Moa bones were carved into fish hooks and pendants, and the skins and feathers were made into clothing.  Weighing up to 250Kg and 2.5 metres high, these magnificent birds were hunted to extinction by about 400 years ago.

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