Who needs eggs?

For a recent potluck brunch, I was asked to bring a breakfast bread. I love such assignments because I love to bake. After considering several possibilities, I made pumpkin bread, suffused with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves and dotted with nuts and raisins. While I don’t mean to brag, it was delicious. Well, okay, I do mean to brag just a little, because this delicacy was made without eggs.

My mother, at whose hands and in whose kitchen I learned to assemble ingredients to create many different baked goods, would probably roll over in her grave if she knew my baking practices now. She never baked without eggs, and for the last 18 years, I haven’t baked with them.

Yes, the cost of eggs these days is unprecedented and downright prohibitive for many people. But their cost doesn’t concern me. I don’t use them is that they aren’t needed.

Many easily-accessible substitutes for eggs exist. I often use ground flaxseed mixed with water and beat to a gel-like consistency. It acts as a binding agent while providing protein, good fat, fiber, and several plant compounds that counteract some medical conditions, such as high blood pressure and Type II diabetes. Yes, eggs have protein and healthy plant compounds, too, but they come with a high dose of cholesterol that can be risky for some people. The flaxseed substitution eliminates that risk. I’ve also learned that for some foods, such as pancakes, I can skip the eggs and any substitution, and come out with perfectly good results. Why not simply use eggs, as my mother taught, you may wonder?

It all started years ago when my husband and I began our married life together. Having grown up on a dairy farm, I took for granted the use of animals for food. My husband, a lifelong city-dweller, always felt vaguely guilty about eating meat. Well, marriage is nothing if not the exposure to and potential sharing of each other’s values, and eventually, his reluctance to eat the flesh of a once-living animal rubbed off on me, and we became vegetarians.

From there, it wasn’t a huge leap to realize that taking an animal’s life or holding it hostage for its products – such as eggs and milk – are two sides of the same coin. The whole coin, for much of human history, was undeniably necessary for survival. Whale oil was needed for lighting homes, for example, and horses or other beasts of burden were required for transportation and farming. Humanity abandoned the old practices because better ones came along. And now, nutritionists are telling us that it is a better practice to eat fewer animal products and more plants. The autonomy and welfare of animals is a value that is gaining traction, and for me, it’s an important consideration for our food choices.

But there are others, including the toll animal agriculture takes on the planet. With its outsized need for land, heavy use of pesticides, air and water pollution, and rainforest destruction, the toll is out of proportion to the share of calories it provides. Its reliance on massive amounts of antibiotics to ward off disease and promote animal growth is a clear and present danger to humans. Overuse of antibiotics leads, eventually, to the development of “superbugs,” which are pathogens that have become resistant to antibiotics. This unflattering picture of modern day animal agriculture leads some to question whether it is even sustainable for today’s world.

It’s hard to argue with this trio of benefits of plant-based eating: our health, the health of the planet, and animal welfare. When we toss in the outlandish price of eggs these days, we can add the health of our wallet to that list. There’s no better time than now to explore plant-based eating.

Kathy Coughlin enjoys baking and has been doing so without eggs for nearly 20 years.