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It’s not easy to make a real egg. First of all, you have to get a real chicken. Then you have to find a real place to put it, then you have to find real food to feed it so it stays alive. It’s quite a production, and sometimes the chicken doesn’t enjoy itself so much, seeing as a couple hundred generations ago chickens were just running around willy-nilly and now, generally, their lives suck.

So, to the rescue — what else — Californians! A San Francisco company called Hampton Creek Foods (is there a Hampton Creek in San Francisco? I think there is NOT) has created an egg substitute. It is called Beyond Eggs. It supposedly tastes just like real eggs. It is cheaper than real eggs. It does not require that a pesky chicken to exist for it to be eaten. Here’s some more info on it from Fast Company:

[Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek Foods] has deconstructed the egg, analyzed its 22 special functions, and replicated it with plant-stuffs like sunflower lecithin, canola, peas, and natural gums from tree sap. By all accounts, the substitute tastes just like the real thing — even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s sold as a gray-green powder that you need to hydrate before use.

I don’t want to refer to real eggs as romantic — probably not the right word — but a gray-green powder that needs to be hydrated? That’s not the eggs we knew when we were little, and not even the eggs we know now, and that’s sad.

But what’s even sadder is that pretty soon there are going to be 9 billion people on the planet and guess what they’re NOT all going to eat? Real eggs. Protein substitutes are the wave of the future, and you can either catch the protein substitute wave or you can be sucked out to sea on a current of all the problems that come from raising “real” protein, like the fact that there’s no land left, and crowding animals together makes them require so many antibiotics that eating them means you might as well have injected yourself with whatever disease the medications used to prevent. So we should probably all get comfortable with gray-green plant powder, not just the vegans.

Of course the idea isn’t necessarily that we’d eat these eggs plain, but that we would use them in things. Like mayonnaise, dressing, and muffins. And omelets. Just kidding. Well, I’m definitely just kidding about my omelet.