From prehistoric egg thieves to Roman French toast, Hollywood protein shakes, the cholesterol wars, and the remarkable chemistry of a soufflé.

The first egg thief wasn't human. Long before chickens appeared in barnyards, animals were raiding nests for one of nature's most convenient packages of nutrition. Eventually humans joined the thieves, and we have been eating eggs ever since.

Growing up in Alaska, I learned about gathering gull eggs. It was a traditional source of food, although I discovered that finding and collecting them could be considerably more work than the finished breakfast justified. Today, most of us simply open the refrigerator.

An egg seems like a simple thing. Crack the shell, cook what's inside, and breakfast is served. But the history of eggs includes the domestication of chickens, the rise of agriculture, Roman cooking, French culinary ingenuity, Hollywood bodybuilders, and one of the more spectacular nutritional controversies of the twentieth century.

We have turned eggs into everything from powdered protein to delicate soufflés. We have celebrated them, condemned them, and rehabilitated them. Along the way, we developed an industrial system that produces inexpensive eggs on an enormous scale, sometimes at a considerable cost to the animals producing them.

And to think, it all began with stealing someone else's breakfast.

Which Came First? The Egg, Obviously

Eggs were around hundreds of millions of years before chickens. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, and birds all reproduced using eggs long before anything resembling our modern domestic chicken existed.

The development of the amniotic egg was an evolutionary breakthrough. Its membranes and protective structures allowed ancestral reptiles and their descendants to reproduce away from water. Eventually, birds evolved eggs with hard, calcium-rich shells.

For early humans, eggs offered an appealing nutritional opportunity. They were rich in protein and fat, required no pursuit of a running animal, and came conveniently packaged. The principal challenges were locating the nest and avoiding whatever animal might be defending it.

Before domestication, eggs were largely a seasonal resource. Wild birds lay eggs during breeding seasons, and nests could be difficult or dangerous to reach. The modern expectation that a refrigerator should contain a dozen eggs year-round would have been unimaginable to our ancestors.

How Rice Helped Domesticate the Chicken

The ancestor of the domestic chicken is principally the red junglefowl, a colorful bird native to parts of Southeast Asia.

For years, archaeologists debated when and where chickens were first domesticated. A major study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022 examined evidence from more than 600 archaeological sites across 89 countries. The researchers identified some of the earliest convincing evidence of domestic chickens in Thailand, dating to roughly 1650–1250 BCE.

The possible explanation involves rice.

As people began to grow and store grain, their settlements became attractive places for wild junglefowl to find food. Birds that tolerated humans could take advantage of agricultural waste and spilled grain. Humans, in turn, discovered that keeping these birds nearby offered a dependable source of food.

It was a relationship that benefited both species, although the modern chicken might reasonably question the terms of the agreement.

Chickens eventually spread along trade routes into China, India, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. They provided meat, eggs, feathers, and sometimes entertainment in the form of cockfighting. Their cultural importance extended beyond dinner. Eggs became symbols of fertility, renewal, and rebirth in many societies.

Agriculture had transformed the egg from a seasonal discovery into a renewable food supply.

The Romans May Have Invented French Toast

The Romans enjoyed eggs, and ancient Roman cooking included everything from simple boiled eggs to elaborate preparations with sauces, herbs, and spices.

The cookbook traditionally attributed to Apicius includes a dish called aliter dulcia, meaning another sweet dish. The recipe calls for pieces of white bread soaked in milk, fried in oil, and served with honey.

If that sounds suspiciously like French toast, the Romans may have a legitimate culinary claim.

Some later translations include beaten eggs, although the surviving Latin text does not explicitly mention them. Nevertheless, the basic idea of soaking bread and frying it was around long before anyone called the dish French toast.

Unfortunately for the Romans, the French had considerably better public relations when it came to naming food.

Eggs became essential to cuisines throughout the world. Chinese cooks developed steamed egg custards with delicate textures. Japanese cuisine gave us chawanmushi, tamagoyaki, and countless uses for eggs in noodles and rice dishes. European cooks discovered how effectively eggs could thicken sauces, enrich pastry, and create structures that seemed to defy gravity.

The French, particularly, turned eggs into a culinary art form. Consider the omelet, hollandaise sauce, mayonnaise, crème brûlée, and the soufflé.

And much of that culinary magic comes down to protein chemistry.

An Egg Is an Extraordinary Piece of Food Technology

An egg contains nearly everything necessary to develop a chick, provided it has been fertilized and incubated under the proper conditions.

For human nutrition, a large chicken egg provides approximately six grams of high-quality protein, along with fats, vitamins, minerals, and nutrients such as choline.

The protein is particularly useful because it contains all nine essential amino acids in proportions that make it highly digestible and valuable for human nutrition.

Choline, concentrated in the yolk, is important for cell membranes, nervous system function, and the production of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in muscle control and memory.

Egg yolks also contain lutein and zeaxanthin, carotenoids associated with eye health.

Yet the remarkable thing about eggs is not simply their nutrition. It is what happens when we cook them.

Egg proteins are folded into intricate molecular structures. Heat causes them to unfold and interact with one another, forming networks that trap water and change the texture of the food.

That is why a liquid egg white becomes solid when heated.

Beat egg whites, and you introduce air. The proteins rearrange around tiny bubbles, helping stabilize a foam. Heat that foam, and you can create the towering structure of a soufflé.

Egg yolks contain emulsifying compounds, including lecithin, which help oil and water remain dispersed together. Without that chemistry, mayonnaise and hollandaise sauce would be considerably more difficult to make.

An egg is simultaneously a protein source, thickener, emulsifier, foaming agent, binding agent, and structural ingredient.

Few foods are as versatile.

From Eggs to Hollywood Protein Powder

Long before the modern supplement industry filled grocery shelves with protein powders, bodybuilders and athletes were experimenting with eggs as a way to increase protein intake.

Raw eggs acquired a reputation as a particularly powerful muscle-building food. Hollywood eventually helped popularize the image of athletes drinking eggs, although cooking egg protein generally improves its digestibility and raw eggs carry a risk of Salmonella infection.

During the middle of the twentieth century, nutrition entrepreneurs began selling concentrated protein products to bodybuilders. Among the pioneers was Rheo H. Blair, formerly known as Irving Johnson, who developed milk-and-egg protein powders and marketed them to athletes and Hollywood clients.

Blair promoted mixtures containing milk proteins and dried eggs, sometimes recommending that his customers mix them with cream. His marketing suggested dramatic improvements in muscular development, although the evidence supporting the more extravagant claims was considerably less impressive than the advertisements.

The modern protein supplement industry owes something to these early entrepreneurs.

Egg protein remains a perfectly good source of protein. But it does not possess mysterious muscle-building properties unavailable from other complete proteins.

Nor does putting protein into an expensive container make it fundamentally superior to food.

How Eggs Became Public Enemy Number One

The nutritional reputation of eggs changed dramatically during the twentieth century.

Egg yolks contain cholesterol. A large egg has roughly 185–200 milligrams, and as concerns about cardiovascular disease increased, dietary cholesterol became a major target of public health advice.

In 1968, the American Heart Association recommended limiting dietary cholesterol and sharply restricting egg yolks. Eggs became associated with heart attacks, clogged arteries, and the supposedly dangerous American breakfast.

The problem was that cholesterol in food and cholesterol circulating in the bloodstream are not the same thing.

Our bodies manufacture cholesterol, primarily in the liver. Dietary cholesterol can influence blood cholesterol levels, but the response varies among individuals and is generally less pronounced than the effect of saturated fat.

This does not mean dietary cholesterol has no biological effect. It means that judging the cardiovascular consequences of a food solely by the cholesterol printed on a nutrition label is an oversimplification.

Researchers also faced another problem: people who ate eggs often consumed them with bacon, sausage, butter, and other foods high in saturated fat. Separating the effect of eggs from the rest of the breakfast proved difficult.

Over time, dietary guidance became more nuanced. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee concluded that cholesterol was no longer a nutrient of concern for overconsumption in the general population, although it did not declare unlimited dietary cholesterol harmless.

The American Heart Association has subsequently emphasized overall dietary patterns rather than treating eggs as nutritional villains. For many healthy adults, an egg a day can fit into a heart-healthy diet, with additional consideration for people with dyslipidemia or other cardiovascular risk factors.

Eggs were never magical health foods, and they were never the principal cause of the cardiovascular epidemic.

Their reputation suffered because nutritional science, public health messaging, and dietary fashion do not always move at the same speed.

The Uncomfortable History of the Cheap Egg

There is another aspect of egg production that deserves attention: the chicken.

Modern laying hens have been selectively bred to produce far more eggs than their wild ancestors. A commercial laying hen may produce hundreds of eggs annually, supported by controlled feeding, lighting, breeding, and veterinary management.

The result is an extraordinarily efficient system for producing inexpensive protein.

But efficiency has consequences.

For much of modern industrial egg production, hens have been kept in battery cages, crowded enclosures that severely limit their ability to move, spread their wings, perch, nest, or engage in other natural behaviors.

Animal welfare concerns have driven changes in legislation and consumer preferences, with increasing numbers of producers adopting cage-free systems.

Cage-free, however, does not necessarily mean chickens spend their days wandering peacefully through green pastures. Many cage-free hens live indoors in large flocks. Free-range systems provide outdoor access, although the amount and quality of that access may vary.

The terms on an egg carton can describe housing conditions, but they do not automatically tell us everything about animal welfare.

There are also substantial disease concerns. Avian influenza can spread rapidly through poultry populations, resulting in the loss or destruction of millions of birds. Outbreaks disrupt the food supply, increase egg prices, and present difficult questions about how commercial poultry systems are organized.

We have become remarkably good at producing cheap eggs. Whether we have adequately considered the welfare of the animals involved is another matter.

Back to Breakfast

For all the history, controversy, and chemistry, most of us encounter eggs in considerably less dramatic circumstances.

In my house, eggs are part of an ordinary morning.

I often have a smoothie. My son JJ prefers four scrambled eggs, prepared without hot sauce. I cannot entirely explain the absence of hot sauce except to observe that he has inherited some of his mother's culinary preferences.

The egg has traveled an extraordinary distance from the wild nests our ancestors raided to the modern breakfast table. We have bred chickens to lay them throughout the year, developed sophisticated methods to cook them, turned them into commercial powders, and spent decades arguing over their cholesterol content.

We can turn an egg into a simple breakfast or a delicate soufflé. We can use it to thicken a sauce or create a dessert. We can eat it boiled, fried, poached, steamed, scrambled, or baked.

And after all this time, it remains what first attracted those prehistoric egg thieves: a compact, nutritious, remarkably useful food.

The chicken might have a different opinion about the entire arrangement.

Dr. Terry Simpson is a surgeon and culinary medicine specialist. Fork U explores the history, culture, and science of food, with occasional detours into the nutritional nonsense that surrounds it. This article is educational and is not a substitute for individualized medical advice.

References and further reading

1. Peters J, et al. The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9214543/

2. Apicius. De Re Coquinaria, Book VII, Aliter Dulcia. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Apicius/7*.html

3. National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. Choline: Fact Sheet for Health Professionals. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/choline-HealthProfessional/

4. Carson JAS, et al. Dietary Cholesterol and Cardiovascular Risk: A Science Advisory From the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2020. https://professional.heart.org/en/science-news/dietary-cholesterol-and-cardiovascular-risk/top-things-to-know

5. Harvard Health Publishing. Eggs have less effect than saturated fats on cholesterol levels. 2025. https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-nutrition/eggs-have-less-effect-than-saturated-fats-on-cholesterol-levels

6. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service. Questions and Answers — USDA Shell Egg Grading Service. https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/qa-shell-eggs

7. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Safer Food Choices. https://www.cdc.gov/food-safety/foods/safer-food-choices.html

8. The Blair Niche Project. Muscle Insider. https://muscleinsider.com/column/blair-niche-project/