Insisting on Cheaper Eggs Is a Huge Mistake
Insisting on Cheaper Eggs Is a Huge Mistake
newrepublic.com
Insisting on Cheaper Eggs Is a Huge Mistake
49 comments
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Maximizing profit got us into this mess. The problem isn’t with charging less.
The article makes good points about how corporate farming has introduced cruelty and disease. But vaccinations exist, and eggs were cheap before there was mass corporate farming.
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Or we could just stop eating animals and burning fossil fuels? Its not hard to stop these endemic diseases and climate change
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Expectations that it should be cheap drive up that consumption. Per capita consumption has gone up. It fundamentally can't work at mass consumption and production levels we see today
The process of producing animal products is inherently quite inefficient. It takes quite a lot of feed to do so at scale and you lose a lot of that energy
That's going to always push you towards factory farming at scale because it's horrifying but more efficient resource wise (still many magnitudes less efficent than eating plants directly)
For some examples, lets look at something like beef production. Your best case you would think of is probably something like only grass-fed production. But there isn't enough land to support anything close to current consumption
we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
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Why the focus on "efficiency" with food? The purpose of food in human culture goes way beyond caloric efficiency, and honestly caloric efficiency is the last thing we should consider when discussing food supplies. We don't want to, nor do we need to, get into a race to the bottom where we destroy all food culture because it turns out that eating bugs is the most space and resource efficient way to create food.
Not to mention the unspoken assumption when we start talking about food efficiency that the human population of earth should be maximized because we want to be efficient in our food consumption, therefore we should restrict our diet to the bare minimum so that we can support more people.
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No it's not
It's one of theost clearly visible symptoms of the disease, currently.
Yeah, 2 dollar cartons produced by egg factories with 20 chickens in a small box is also not right, doh, and yes, it got us where we are now.
But eggs shouldn't have to cost 13+ USD either and at this point, that IS Trump's fault. He could have and should have jumped on this, break up the big factories, push for smaller free range places, etc, but instead he is playing tyrant and war games.
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My Canadian free range, grain fed eggs are way cheaper than the cheapest factory farmed American eggs...
Maybe look at your president if you don't like the prices ?
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Well clearly a bait and switch article here.
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The author doesn't even get that nobody is actually demanding cheap eggs as a solution to any problem.
Pointing out "Where are the cheap eggs?" is a sarcastic question on several levels. We know that cheap eggs are meaningless, we know that the Executive Branch can do fuck all about the prices of eggs, and eggs are currently more expensive than before.
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Author wanted to write an article decrying the egg industry (rightfully or not), and "the price of eggs" is so hot right now.
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Fucking thank you. We need the prices of eggs to be higher. Ethics has a cost
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I don’t know about the rest of you but every carton of eggs I see says “cage free”. Maybe that’s a regional thing, but it seems consumers have voted against factory farms. I don’t know if the term means anything and perhaps the first step is to make it so
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Cage free sounds pretty good but if you look into what their lives are like it's still really not great
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"Cage Free" - Chickens are instead crammed into a large windowless enclosure and have essentially no room to move around.
"Free Range" - Large windowless enclosure has a small door that leads to a small patch of dirt that none of the chickens use.
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49 comments
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-us-1.7450654
It's not an unsolvable problem. Eggs in Canada are cheap and have remained cheap. The problem is with unchecked capitalism.
America is in the find out phase when it comes to fucking around with letting capitalism min max 'efficiency' over resiliency.
At the cost of still having the factory farming the original article talks about. Animal agriculture's many problems are often worse in the US but don't pretend they don't exist elsewhere
https://sentientmedia.org/enriched-versus-cage-free-eggs/
https://www.compassioninfoodbusiness.com/latest-news/our-news/2025/01/us-ahead-of-canada-in-cage-free-egg-transition
Yeah, factory farming is still shit, but there is a structural difference with allowing farms to concentrate to the level that American farms do. When an infectious disease hits, you cull a far greater proportion of the population.
Supply management doesn't solve all ethical issues with eggs and dairy, but it is still a better system than unregulated free market capitalism.
Clearly you can do stuff to bring agricultural prices down, BUT with the bird flu going around don’t expect miracles in egg prices. If somehow, magically, high egg prices are the only negative effect we will encounter related to bird flu, we are extremely lucky.