Twitter Is Cracking Up Over This Simple Egg Mistake
Sometimes you see things that really reinforce the argument for a home economics requirement in high school. In a recent post, a Twitter user shared a picture sent from her cousin. "My cousin told her man to put 4 eggs in a pot to boil," she wrote. "This is what he did..." What he did was crack the eggs into a pot. The reasoning behind this wasn't given. Perhaps he thought that the whites would boil on the stove like water? Regardless, it shows he had no idea how to boil eggs.
As of writing, the post has received 183.6k likes and has been retweeted 16.5k times. Perhaps predictably, the reactions broadly fall across gendered lines. Men tried to defend the decision, saying, "Scrambled eggs ain't never hurt nobody," and tweeting, "My guy did exactly what he was told to do." Meanwhile, women said things like, "Men can't do anything right," or chalked it up to "weaponized incompetence," in which men make themselves useless so they don't actually have to do anything (via Twitter).
For anyone who does want to know how to boil an egg, the Food Network offers a pretty foolproof guide. Place eggs in a pot and submerge with water and a bit of baking soda. Step two: Boil with different times for different stages of boiled. After boiling, place the eggs in ice water to cool.
The actual issue with the Twitter eggs
Yes, many believe it is ridiculous that an adult would not know how to boil eggs. Part of the issue, however, is that schools don't teach the class of home economics. It's like taxes, cleaning, and sewing in that these are fundamental skills to simply coping in the adult world, but for some reason we choose to let them just figure it out.
In some parts of the country, family and consumer sciences (FCS) classes, which is today's home economics, are still taught. However, NPR notes that only 3.5 million students are enrolled in such classes. Gayla Randal, educational and program consultant for Kansas State's Department of Education, partly attributes the issue to how "anything that wasn't about a test score was scrutinized." After all, how are you going to grade the way plates are cleaned? So, the department received budget cuts. The other issue is that the idea of home economics is still cast as "women's work," placing it on a lower tier than classes that are supposed to lead to a profession.
The obvious solution to this and the "boiled egg" debacle was suggested by Anthony Bourdain in "Medium Raw." As The Feminist Kitchen summarizes, Bourdain approved of removing the shackles of home-ec from women, but thought it should be mandatory for everyone. The issue goes beyond eggs to the amount of things we expect everyone to know, but never take the time to actually teach.