Black Swan Eggs Used to Be a Secret Ingredient in Ovaltine
By Dec 24th, 2010, 10:51 am
You may know that the “ova” in Ovaltine comes from the Latin word for egg and doesn’t refer to shape. (Thus answering the classic Seinfeld question of why the drink isn’t called roundtine.) But according to National Geographic’s Pop Omnivore blog, there used to be some strange eggs in the mix indeed, which happened to relate to an acclaimed Natalie Portman movie now in theaters: Supposedly, New Zealand’s Ovaltine factory used to use black swan eggs in their mix.
Until the late 1960s, New Zealand’s Ovaltine factory harvested local black swan eggs to add to their drink mix. Since the black swan nests in colonies, collecting the eggs was easy. After the black swan population suffered great losses following a 1968 storm, the Ovaltine folks turned to chicken eggs instead.
