Skyline Happenings

The price of eggs has some online creators suggesting that potatoes are a suitable alternative. Please believe me, they are wrong.

By Kaitlyn Tiffany in the Atlantic (thanks to Mary M.)

Like countless others who have left their hometown to live a sinful, secular life in a fantastic American city, I no longer actively practice Christianity. But a few times a year, my upbringing whispers to me across space and time, and I have to listen. The sound is loudest at Easter, which, aside from being the most important Christian holiday, is also the most fun.

I could talk about Easter all day. The daffodils, the brunch. The color scheme, the smell of grass, the annual screening of VeggieTales: An Easter Carol, which is the same story as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, except that it’s set at Easter and all the characters are vegetables who work in a factory (the Scrooge character is a zucchini). And most of all, the Easter eggs! Of all the seasonal crafts, this one is the easiest (no carving) and the most satisfying (edible).

This year, because of shocking egg prices, people with online lifestyle brands—or people who aspire to have online lifestyle brands—have suggested numerous ways to keep the dyeing tradition alive without shelling out for eggs. For instance, you can dye jumbo-size marshmallows, or you can make peanut-butter eggs that you then coat in colored white chocolate. You can paint rocks. The story has been widely covered, by local TV and radio stations and even The New York Times. “Easter Eggs Are So Expensive Americans Are Dyeing Potatoes,” the Times reported (though most of the story was about one dairy farmer who’d replaced real eggs with plastic replicas for an annual Easter-egg hunt).

I don’t think many people are actually making Easter spuds. Like baking Goldfish or making breakfast cereal from scratch, dyeing potatoes seems mostly like a good idea for a video to post online. Many Instagram commenters reacted to the Easter potatoes by saying things such as “What in the great depression is this” and “These potatoes make me sad.” And yet, because I love Easter and am curious about the world, I decided to try it myself—just to see if it was somehow any fun.

My local Brooklyn grocery store didn’t have the classic Paas egg-dyeing tablets, so I bought an “organic” kit that cost three times as much ($6.99) and expensed it to The Atlantic. I bought a dozen eggs ($6.49) and a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes that were light-colored enough to dye and small enough to display in a carton ($5.99), and expensed those to The Atlantic too. Then I looked online for advice on how to proceed; mostly, I wanted to know whether I should cook the potatoes before or after dyeing them. A popular homemaking blog called The Kitchn gave detailed instructions on how to dye Easter potatoes and “save some cash while flexing your creativity for the Easter Bunny this year.” The suggestions—which included soaking the potatoes in ground turmeric, shredded beets, or three cups of mashed blueberries—were not as cost-effective as promised. (Such a volume of fruit could cost north of $15.) But I did find out that I should decorate the potatoes and then cook them. (continued)