Chris White

How do you eat your eggs? Serve them up fried and you’ve probably got a high sex drive. Like them poached and you’re very likely to listen to dance music. There’s even a correlation between the level of your disorganisation and the number of boiled eggs you get through.

Before you ask (fried, at least three times a week, and always on a Sunday), I now know all about eggs from a newspaper article I read, a TV news report I saw, and a slot on a radio programme I heard, during one fairly average day at home in London last month. Since then I haven’t been near a boiled egg, and I will try better to understand the merits of poaching them once I have worked out how to turn the volume down.

The story goes that the British Egg Industry Council commissioned some people at a research organisation called Minilab International to come up with this rubbish – my apologies, these findings – which duly got picked up by almost every media outlet in the UK. No surprise then that British Egg Week, for which the story was released, got off to a cracking start (more apologies).

PR professionals are hired to get news stories into the media and our business could do worse than to take a few lessons from the men and women who organise things for the egg industry.

My father used to shun eggs because he was told they were full of cholesterol. That’s what most people used to think. I inherited many things from my dad, including his high cholesterol, but not his low level of egg consumption.

But my father did know that an apple a day kept the doctor away. In fact, you can bet your bottom dollar that most people know that one. It’s a PR gift handed down from one generation to the next that is almost never employed in the service of our business.

Our sector needs some micro work to go with the macro solutions. Over the last decade or more, big government has come out to bat for us, funding promotional campaigns to get us all to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables as part of a drive to foster healthier eating and to reduce healthcare bills.

Government attention has made us feel important too. It’s made us feel good about ourselves and, even if fresh produce consumption levels remain disappointingly low, it is generally accepted that the strategy has worked, especially among small children.

But you could argue that the business is now too much in thrall to the six- and seven-figure sums by which governments operate. You could also argue that we’ve become so focused on the big-picture stuff that we’ve ignored some of the detailed work. At a time when governments are all desperate to cut spending, it’s no surprise that some of the campaigns we fought so hard to create are now under threat.

In these cash-strapped times, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that our business needs some clever PR types to push out the kind of stories that are helping the egg industry. We could do with a PR egghead or two of our own to help us grow fresh produce sales.

Popeye used to teach me to eat more spinach because he said it’d make me stronger. He should be warned that nowadays I like my spinach with two fried eggs on top. It works for me, and it’ll surely work for you.