Trying to ration eggs is rather like trying to ration
cabbages. There is no means of checking, acquiring or stopping the back- yard supply. Thus no scheme of egg-rationing, except one in which there are more egg-inspectors than eggs, can ensure equality of supply for all. How a scheme so full of difficulties is going to work successfully it is impossible to say. In normal times the village poultry-keeper works partly under a system of communal collection. He sends the bulk of his eggs to the collecting-centre, keeping back enough for himself and his local customers. For some time he has operated a system of voluntary rationing, allowing half-a-dozen eggs per week per customer. Now he will send all his eggs to a collecting-centre and get, in return, somebody else's eggs for his own customers. In these days of transport-difficulties this seems fairly mad. The first result of it is that the local poultry-keeper, priding himself on his own produce and not knowing the quality or age of the eggs he is made to sell will refrain from applying for the necessary licence. The local shop-keeper has his own objections: more coupons, more bother and the knowledge that half his rationed customers have ducks or hens in the back-yard laying a comfortable supplementary supply. The town-grocer doesn't want anything to do with it, and urges you to ration in the country. The Minister of Food certainly has a tough job, and perhaps he could do worse than read, before he is much older, that fine sad story of Sherwood Anderson's The Triumph, of the Egg.
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