Last year, the elderly relative fulfilled a lifelong ambition to keep chickens and, now that we are all egged-out, I suggested he put a notice on the gate to start selling them. I thought I’d better check whether this was actually permissible in these days of Brussels regulation – after all, we don’t want a salmonella law suit on our hands. But googling “selling eggs” returns a page of hits that has little to do with Ambridge and a lot to do with infertility. And whilst it would be generous to believe that there is a nationwide desire to help childless couples, the headlines and sub-titles would suggest that the filthy lucre plays the leading role in this act. I was particularly taken by some of the tabloid press stories (both UK and US) and if we were to undertake a forensic comparison of egg seller stories with lottery winner stories, I think we would find considerable lexical and syntactic overlap. So today’s pic contains a few words of advice for egg sellers of all kinds.
BTW – I did another search for “selling hen’s eggs” and found lots of helpful information. Yes, it is legal if you have less than 50 chickens; but if you’re recycling supermarket egg cartons, you must remove the brand name. You must not grade the eggs and you can’t say that they’re free-range, corn-fed, oak-smoked or anything else that might be deemed commercial.