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It’s Easter. And what does Easter mean? Chocolate eggs all round. And also something to do with Jesus coming back to life, but it’s a lot harder (and somewhat macabre) to exploit that for easy financial gain, so chocolate eggs it is. And sometimes rabbits.
However, have you ever stopped to wonder how exactly these eggs are made? Tens of millions of them are consumed each year, and they don’t just come from nowhere. Chocolate eggs go back nearly two centuries, so clearly a lot of time and effort has gone into their production. But, like with many modern foodstuffs, the nature of this time and effort, and the processes involved, can often be unsettling to hear about. Truth is, the creation of chocolate eggs has required the involvement of some “questionable” science.
First, you need something that can create eggs. Luckily, oviparous animals are quite common in nature. However, in the first attempts at creating human-consumable chocolate eggs, most potential egg-layers these were immediately rejected as a basis for said eggs, for a variety of reasons. Turtle eggs were deemed “too rare”, fish eggs were deemed “too small/expensive”, spider eggs were deemed “too unutterably horrifying”, and so on. In the end, the common strategy of “stick to what you know” was employed, and it was decided that bird eggs should be used.
However, which birds was another issue. Chickens may the most commonly used for egg production, but chicken’s eggs, you’ve probably noticed, are a lot smaller than your “typical” chocolate egg.
Most people would assume that ostriches would be used, given the size of their eggs. A reasonable expectation, but bear in mind chocolate eggs are nearly two hundred years old, and the efforts and all the trial and error needed to create them go back even further again. In actuality, the egg-producing bird used is Aepyornithidae, specifically elephant birds, the largest birds (and therefore largest eggs) ever known.
Elephant birds disappeared from the wild centuries ago, and now we know why; they were rounded up and entered into an intense programme intended to convert their eggs to delicious chocolate ones. Not exactly ethical, but the demands of capitalism seldom worry themselves with such concerns.
Obviously, the next step was the trickiest. How do you get a gargantuan flightless bird to start laying eggs, usually a mixture of albumin, water and membranes surrounded by a calcium carbonate shell, that are made of tasty chocolate, suitable for children to consume? This is a tricky ask, to say the least.
Birds may lay eggs, but chocolate is derived largely from cocoa, typically in the form of cocoa beans, seeds from the cocoa tree. Chocolate comes from plants, essentially. Birds aren’t plants, so getting them to produce chocolate proved quite a hurdle. Feeding the birds an intense amount of cocoa in the hope of turning their eggs chocolate proved a disastrous approach, leading to mass theobromine poisoning. Luckily, an alternative approach proved useful: genetic engineering.
One lone genius, despite the primitive techniques available at the time, figured out how to splice cocoa DNA directly into the elephant bird’s egg-production systems. Sadly, these ingenious genetic methods and all records concerning them were later destroyed in a terrible incident involving a stampede of enraged and mutated giant-bird livestock, and it was many decades before they were rediscovered and used to implant spider genes into goats, and so forth.
It might be reasonable to assume that with the production of chocolate eggs, this was the job completed. Sadly, as anyone who’s into chocolate will tell you, dark chocolate is very bitter and something of an “acquired” taste, and that’s without it having gone through a bird’s anatomy. So, it became necessary for the birds to produce eggs of milk chocolate.
Unfortunately, birds don’t lactate, almost by definition (except in some rare cases). Mammals lactate. So producing milk chocolate eggs required contribution from bird, plant and mammal biology.
A system of extreme inter-species cross-breeding was attempted, but this only resulted in a bizarre, stunted bird-mammal creature that was frankly ridiculous. So embarrassing was it in fact, that all of these bizarre creatures were gathered up and taken as far away as possible to be disposed of, ending with them being thrown into a river in a remote part of Australia, where it was assumed nobody would ever find them.
Eventually, despite their reservations, scientists were forced to re-use the genetic engineering techniques discussed earlier (this was before they were lost) and splice milk-producing glands and well as cocoa DNA into the bird’s systems. This proved an unexpected boon, as cow DNA was used for the lactation, meaning some birds ended up with extra stomachs, allowing for extra fermentation and a superior quality of chocolate.
The end result of this was giant birds producing large eggs with shells of pure chocolate. The chocolate-rich gloopy mass found within was typically extracted and used to make cakes, mousse, Nutella and, in a surprising number of cases, tarmac. The hollow shells were then packaged and sold in shops the world over.
You may point out that chocolate eggs come in many sizes, and you’d be right. That’s a handy result of domestication and intense selective breeding; you end up with a very wide variety of different shapes and sizes of the original creature. Given it’s been going on for over a hundred years, there are now many sizes and varieties of chocolate-egg laying birds.
So there you have it, to this day all chocolate eggs are produced in secret warehouses by hideously mutated giant birds, forced to lay them all day every day in utter defiance of morality, reason or the laws of nature itself.
Or maybe they’re just made with moulds in factories? I don’t know. Not really bothered about chocolate myself, to be honest.
Dean Burnett grew weary of people moaning about “having to” eat so much chocolate over Easter, so wrote this to help. He’s on Twitter, @garwboy.
The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett (Guardian Faber, £12.99). To order a copy for £7.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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How are chocolate eggs made? A totally factual scientific explanation
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