Think extra crunchy cookies are good? Then rock on

The price of eggs has come down, a lot. No one seems to be celebrating. We all bleated with impotent fury when eggs went to $4 a dozen, and rightly so, but now that the crisis has passed, it seems as if we should be grateful for hen-fruit price normalcy.

The other day I was feeling so flush I bought jumbo eggs, which are like the extra-strength aspirin of eggs: Just as you can't imagine a situation in which you'd want lesser-strength aspirin, why wouldn't you want jumbo eggs? The carton contained four eggs with double yolks, which seemed as if they were apologizing for the shortages. Let us make it up to you with some yolk BOGO.

There was a hard thing in the scrambled eggs, which I assumed was a shell fragment. Now I'm wondering if it was a sliver of fine Carrara marble.

Here's why: Trader Joe's just announced a recall of some cookies because they contained "rocks." Really. Rocks. They could've slapped on a label that said, "Quarry-sourced" and some people would like them.

But it made me wonder: How big were the cookies? I think of a rock as a rather substantial item. In the list of hard things, it's mountain > boulder > rock > stone > pebble > grain. Right? Technically, I suppose they're all rocks, but no one leaves the beach and thinks "I'd better wash all these rocks off my feet."

A stone is something that fits in your hand when you want to skip it on water or throw it at a glass house. (Unless you live in one.) At a certain point the stone would bounce off the glass wall, which means it is a pebble. You're more likely to have a pebble in your shoe than a stone, but you'll call it a rock, because you're exaggerating the discomfort.

If someone throws one of these rock-infused cookies at your head, it's not going to hurt. You wouldn't reel back, seeing stars — someone threw a rock at my head!

If it was a grain of rock, you might not notice it at all in the rich experience of eating a delicious cookie. The human tongue is a remarkably sensitive instrument, but it's hard to imagine that someone who's paved it with cookie dough and studded it with sundered chocolate chunks can discern the existence of a flavorless speck.

What I'm saying is that I think the term is shard. It would have avoided a lot of confusion if they'd said shard, because it sounds as if they had a shard-type situation.

This might mean new warnings on packages. This product was processed in a facility that contained nuts, granite, milk and marble. This might confuse people who think that means there's such a thing as a granite allergy. Some people might claim to be granite-sensitive. I mean, you know there are people who would announce to the restaurant order-taker. "Just so you know, I'm igneous-intolerant."

Others would eagerly latch onto a diet that eschewed most rocks except for sedimentary rock. Even then, they'd eat only locally excavated limestone, because the stuff you get from Down South is just full of ruthenium and palladium thrown into the atmosphere by the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that "cookies that accidentally contain rocks" is something you never thought about before, but will worry about now when you take a bite, until this minor anxiety is replaced by something else, like roofing nails in ice cream.

Drat. Now I'm worried about that.