Eggsthetics

I recently learned of a product for cooking eggs in a way that forms the yolk into an emoji in the center of the egg, from a video about “useless” kitchen products.

But for humans, food is something that goes beyond mere survival, utility. Food acts on the level of culture, not just biological need.

This product for creating egg emojis is a perfect example of how food for us is transcendent beyond the need for sustenance. We use this product to aestheticize the egg, as we aestheticize and encode all food with cultural meaning.

So this egg product may indeed be useless. Yet uselessness exhibits the essence of food for humans. Uselessness is the mark of food. It is only when sustenance has been transformed by people beyond its original form, into meals, dishes – socially encoded forms – that it becomes food.

The truth of this is visible in a reverse example, like Huel, a meal shake product that delivers necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavor, texture, form. We regard Huel as barely food, perhaps one step up from dog food, because it lacks the transformational, aesthetic nature of food.

Whereas these emoji eggs represent the essence of food. We encode our eggs with emojis, just as we encode all food with meaning. Lovingly and laboriously transformed, and presented in a bento box, these eggs reveal to us our humanity.

Useless, yes. But that is the point.