I am not a judgmental person. If I were alive during the Biblical ages, and saw Jesus Christ pleading with a group of people not to throw stones on a hapless woman, you would catch me in the center of the crowd screaming Ditto with all the lung power that I could summon. However, I make an exception in the case of non vegetarians. These people, I judge, and judge strongly. In my mind, the finest oak, the shiniest pearls and the drollest remarks around the most oval of dinner tables do not a civilized person make, if that table has the breast of one being, the head of another, and the kidneys of something that at this very moment, should be rightfully leaping carelessly over an unkempt garden hedge. I can only offer myself the solace that not too long ago, it was perfectly acceptable to spend a weekend watching public hangings, and over the course of time people have learnt to settle for reruns of the Sopranos. Similarly, I reason that at some point in the future when the people of Tibet are not ignored by the world, and dolphins get their due, people will learn to love their lentils, mash their eggplants and caress their asparaguses with the tender ease that springs from the deeply churned wells of satisfaction.

However, every prejudice has its exception (which must explain why Billy Joel is in business), and I am prepared to set aside mine for the Egg Benedict.   The manifold reasons a person would choose to indulge an Eggs Benedict are readily apparent to even the most virulent hostility in my tensed, plant seeking frame. I recognize that eating an Eggs Benedict need not have anything to do with the meat, just as a performance at the Carnegie Hall need not be tied to the machinations of the performer on stage. People have told me, (and I believe them) that the Eggs Benedict experience is not just about the taste. It is about the allure. It is not about the maddening rush of a raft rushing through the river. It is about coming in contact with the low hanging clouds wafting over its body, the very gentle firmaments that you had spotted with wonder from the shore. It is not the dish of a barbarian who mistakes civilization as a distraction for the senses and discourteously plunges into the insides of a fellow being. It is about the atmosphere being created within a person waiting for the summons from a royal page, prior to being knighted.

Over the years, eggs have done humanity a profound favor by being oval. They could have been square and scratched our elbows. They could have been round and rolled off our counter tops. But they have chosen to be oval, and for their efforts, we take pause and appreciate all that is, but need not be. The Eggs Benedict is beyond oval. It is an over achiever. It chooses to assume the identity, not of the pathetic and literal "Fried", or the more benevolent "Sunny Side Up", but that of "Benedict". A kind, noble, chivalrous type of creation that like Michaelangelo's David is as content as is confident, and has continued to exist through the years with a supreme indifference, so as to massage meaning and form into our frailties and vanities. A supreme structure, it is made up of a series of parts that are perfect by themselves, and have come together, not for completion, but only so we can experience the phenomenon of what it is to be larger than life. Nothing is too small, nothing is unimportant. The perfection in each of David's fingernails is readily visible in the crisply toasted English muffins, the set poached eggs, the perfectly cured Canadian bacon and the carefully garnished Hollandaise sauce.

Like other non-vegetarian dishes, the Eggs Benedict is not a opera of ruin; it is an ode to perfection. It makes us yearn for a civilized time, when Humpty Dumpty was in his Heaven, the lark was in its wing, the rose was in its thorn and all was right with the world.

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