In 1966, the price of eggs rose to a level that President Lyndon Johnson judged, God knows how, was too high. There were two culprits – supply and demand – and Johnson’s agriculture secretary told him there was not much that could be done. LBJ, however, was a can-do fellow who directed the US surgeon general to dampen demand by warning the nation about the hazards of cholesterol in eggs.
The conversations inside these rooms was depressingly transactional:
"We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist."
The effort was successful, and the message was carried in thousands of articles between 2011-2013.
Coke's position was clear: soda is one of the cheapest ways to get calories - a flagrantly inaccurate statement when factoring in the health consequences.
I watched as the FDA funneled money to professors at leading universities - as well as think tanks on the left and right - to create studies showing soda taxes hurt the poor. They also paid for studies that say drinking soda DIDN'T cause obesity.
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-drinks-tax/soda-tax-war-t...
Soda companies are deeply embedded in the USDA - so much so that the agency carries discredited talking points like "there are no bad food, only bad diets."
This ignores fact that sugar is highly addictive and has negative nutritional value.
In the end: racial tensions flared, soda spending was kept in SNAP funding, and many of the soda taxes were defeated...
> Coke's position was clear: soda is one of the cheapest ways to get calories - a flagrantly inaccurate statement when factoring in the health consequences.
I'm always amazed at how many people flat out get angry with me when I say fast food is simply not cheaper than cooking yourself, provided you have a kitchen. I'm consistently told that that level of thinking is necessarily classist (and therefore racist), because it's more time, effort, and in the short-term, money, that needs to be involved.
I do not understand how making stir fry with chicken breast/thighs, frozen veggies, and rice is somehow the most expensive, time-consuming task in the world, but apparently that's a high-class dinner to many folks on the internet, and I'm 100% convinced it's because of the lie they are told (and then perpetuate) that the dollar amount you see in front of you is the dollar amount in totality.
Well, that's an easy fix. Ask your employer to cut your salary to ~$20k-$30k. Tell them that you're going to be in the office at 7 on-the-dot, and he can write you up if you're 5 minutes early or late; you're going to be there for 8-10 hours, w/ a 30-minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (again, write-ups for taking even a minute longer than alotted). Sell your car, get a used one (financed, of course), model year before 2012, 80k miles minimum; give the profit away (give away any savings you have, too; you can't access any of your retirement or investment accounts, either). Insist that any credit you have access to be cut severely and the rates jacked up. Sell anything you own other than your car that's worth more than $2k, give the money away. You are also now limited to going 20-30 minutes out of your way to the "good" grocery store, since you are moving to a food desert. Your mattress now comes in a box from Wal-Mart; get rid of any sleep or wake-up aids other than your cell phone. Hard mode: separate from your spouse, if you have one, and adopt as many kids as you need to get to 2 or 3.
People are not making poor individual choices. They are, collectively, subject to perverse incentives that are imposed by a regulatory-industrial complex that profits from the ill health they develop when behaving as might be expected of any normal human being of the past two centuries. Thank you for being frustrated at the state of the world; it means that you recognize that there are improvements to be made. First step: stop blaming the wrong people.
I don't see how any of that stops someone from "making stir fry with chicken breast/thighs, frozen veggies, and rice" as OP put it. Maybe the chicken is the most expensive part of that. What does your retirement account or mattress have to do with taking a few minutes to cook some veggies and rice?
Because it's not "just a few minutes". It's the time to learn how to make it well; it's the cooking equipment to make it well, consistently; it's the navigation of an ever-shifting retail environment with way too much choice and featuring the kind of sensory input meant to overload your decision-making abilities, just to get the ingredients; it's the way that poor sleep (mattress) also affects those decisions; it's the way that financial precarity means juggling concerns of the now with concerns of the future (retirement), and how that kind of anxiety also short-circuits your decision-making; it's knowing that eating "chicken and frozen veggies and rice" for every meal is going to leave you malnourished in short order, too, but that because the internet rando who's more focused on balancing a silver spoon on his nose than the points of discussion at hand will ALWAYS find fault in what you do (if he cares at all), maybe throwing all of that stress out the window and ordering Subway is the right call after all. Your inability to "see" doesn't preclude what I talked about from being there and material and true. And they are.
And for the record, I cook, but I only have time to because I'm unemployed.
So much of what you described happens because people intentionally make those bad decisions. That being said, you can still feed yourself well in the above scenario. What the parent described is nutritious and not expensive, and people get food stamps to cover food if they cannot pay for it. The actual problem is that people refuse discipline and don’t want to give up their vices and bad decisions. People hide behind blaming large ephemeral “complexes” and industries because they want to hide from their own irresponsibility and because some just want to have more control over other people including over other people who don’t choose bad decisions.
Ironically, this kind of post is your own attempt to hide from your responsibility as a member of a community and society that is setting up the wrong structures and incentives for people to naturally make the right decisions.
You are correct. The argument of "people are forced to eat fast food because it's too expensive to eat healthy" is not intellectually honest at all.
I believe many people hold on to that sentiment because it's easier to blame a boogieman than to educate themselves on affordable, healthy diets and execute on learning to shop and cook for yourself.
I am, however, interested in bringing better educational resources and time-saving instruments to consumers. Many people grow up in an environment where they don't know how to properly shop in a grocery store. For example, you give someone a $50 gift card to the supermarket and they walk out with a cart full of crap, because it's all they knew growing up.
Then once you teach someone how to shop, they may not have experience cooking for themselves. For those of us who grew up cooking with our parents and continued to do so for ourselves, it's hard to imagine how overwhelming the learning process can be. If you grew up in a lower income environment with busy parent(s), chances are you never helped out in the kitchen with your mom or dad. They probably brought home a kid's meal from McDonalds on their way back from their second job.
> I'm always amazed at how many people flat out get angry with me when I say fast food is simply not cheaper than cooking yourself, provided you have a kitchen.
I think the challenge here is looking at numbers without factoring in reality.
A common scenario in poverty is money isn't available when it's needed. If one has $4 today for food now and will have $4 more tomorrow, their choices are to forgo eating until they can save up the ingredients or buy whatever food can be had today.
You are describing idealogues and zealots and bureaucrats who want that problem to continue to exist no matter what. Because they have an agenda which involves taking control of whatever they can if they can. They would be deeply distressed if food insecurity was solved without needing their top-down control.
I've heard the same thing, and I usually respond with prices of decent, filling food at the grocery store - like potatoes, a can of beans, a bag of apples, etc. As for cooking, you can buy a used microwave at the thrift store for about what a soft taco costs at Taco Time.
> I've heard the same thing, and I usually respond with prices of decent, filling food at the grocery store - like potatoes, a can of beans, a bag of apples, etc. As for cooking, you can buy a used microwave at the thrift store for about what a soft taco costs at Taco Time.
You may want to factor in that the 20 minutes they have to acquire and prep a meal is already coming out of the 6 hours they have allocated for sleep.
Having done a decade of hunger-level poverty, I found it surprising busy.
Takes me 2 minutes to microwave a $2 can of chili. The can is worth about 2 meals. The trip to the store, once a week.
Driving to Taco Time every day takes time, gas, and costs $20 for a meal.
Ironically, I microwave meals and such not because I'm poor, but to save time. I dislike going to restaurants and even McBurger because it takes too much time.
Another meal I like takes less than a minute. Pour some oats in a bowl. Add raisins. Add milk. Ready to eat. I doubt it costs 50 cents. Or make a couple cheese sandwiches with butter and a pickle.
FYI, half-decent Chili at Safeway is now more like $3.50-5.50. The days of canned food being cheap are over, even the tiny cans of super high sodium 200%+ DV Campbell's Chicken Soup costs like $2-3.
What are the poor people supposed to live off of? Potatoes, beans, and rice 24/7?
That diet is a tough sell. Especially since people in a low socioeconomic position are frequently quite busy trying to hold life together between 2-4 jobs and a family which includes children. I can understand why someone in this position would spring for something quick, easy, flavorful, and requiring as little expenditure of mental and emotional energy as possible.
The lack of empathy demonstrated throughout this thread for less well-off folks is not surprising but still a disappointing non-deviation from the HN stereotype. Why is it so hard to imagine being in someone else's shitty position? Being poor obviously sucks, it wears people down and disrupts and interferes with making optimal long-term decisions. This is obvious and I can't say I've ever truly been in this exact situation.
> These sound like things that can be done by someone who has resources when and where they need them.
> They do not sound like something that can be done consistently by someone without regular transportation or pay.
If someone has transportation to go to a fast food restaurant, they have transportation to go to a corner store and buy a can of beans. If they have money for one, they have money for the other. It's actually usually cheaper not to eat the junk food.
Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.
> If someone has transportation to go to a fast food restaurant, they have transportation to go to a corner store and buy a can of beans.
There's a number of ways this wouldn't be true and they aren't difficult to come up with.
Beyond that, the discussion is encapsulating somewhat broader points - the resources it takes to eat consistently healthy vs eating cheaply. It wouldn't make sense to only include fast food in the poor diet options.
Your seem to be asserting this: That someone living in a healthy-food dessert and without reliable access to transportation has no excuse to not consistently eat a healthy diet.
I counter that 60 seconds of thinking it thru would produce any number of scenarios that clearly speak against that assertion.
> Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.
This is meaningfully related, though it's a bit over declared. Some with limited access to resources may be able to put a healthy meal together if they're playing their A Game. But A Games are hard to come by for folks condemned to survival mode - maybe the sort where 5 hours sleep is the norm along with caregiving multiple people while working multiple jobs.
Apples don't contribute much to a healthy diet: they're sweet, acidic enough to damage tooth enamel, and packed with fructose. You'd be much better off leaving fruit out of your diet and occasionally treating yourself to a little bit of brown rice or raw broccoli in between your meals of beans and potatoes.
Apples are a lot healthier than the same amount of fructose in isolation. they have a huge amount of fiber, which is both filling and good for your microbiome. And I'd bet on some good vitamin content though I'm not sure which off the top of my head.
Some fruits may be not much better than candy in that the sugar can metabolize quickly, but apples aren't one of those despite their fructose content.
One hundred grams of apples (with skin) consists of 86 grams of water and 10.5 grams of sugar (mostly fructose), 2.5 grams of fiber, and negligible everything else. The only vitamin present in apples in non-trivial quantity is vitamin C.
There is as much protein in broccoli as there is fiber in apples.
To get your daily suggested intake of fiber (30 grams), you'd need to eat almost three pounds of apples a day.
Assuming what you say is true, an apple provides you with about 1/27th the amount of carbs the FDA recommends in a day, and 1/12th the amount of fiber recommended in a day.
I fail to see the harm. If I did feel wild one day and decide to down a dozen apples (I'm not sure I physically even could), I'd meet my fiber RDA for that day, and still have only eaten 504 calories worth of carbs.
You may object that I'm not getting any micronutrients this way, but most sources of micronutrients are nearly irrelevant calorically, so they don't really matter when you talk about capacity planning for macronutrients and calories.
The harm is that the apple is acidic, damages tooth enamel over time, its nutrition value comes only from sugar (most of which is fructose), and it's not actually filling. Ask any fruitarian how soon after a meal of fruit they feel hungry again.
Seeing no harm in eating apples is like seeing no harm in eating candy. Sure, eating a piece of candy once is trivial -- but you're insisting on candy as a part of my diet, not as an incidental, rare snack. Eating candy only has downsides.
I personally remember when Soda taxes were being proposed in Philadelphia. I did and do see soda as a luxury, so it sounded reasonable enough to me compared to alternatives
A lot of otherwise reasonable people that I had known at the time told me that I shouldn't be racist by voicing my support for these policies
I asked them to explain, but they would not, (do your own research, etc.) so I never really got a hold of their logic since the research that I pulled up always seemed so tenuous at best. I don't really recall if the taxes went through or not
This sort of shines a light on all of it though. Shows how susceptible we all are to this kind of manipulation =\
they went through, its like $3-4 for a 2 liter. even diet so its not even about sugar, though diet soda isnt really much better. and i think the latest study is less than half the money went where it was supposed to.
at the least, tax at sales tends to be regressive, affecting poor people more than not poor, which maybe you could claim is racist. but pa constitution doesnt allow anything but flat taxes, so unfortunately theres basically no progressive taxing here. sin taxes in general i find somewhat troubling, sure its a luxury but why is this luxury deserve more tax than that.
It depends on the food item. Ready to eat things like premade sandwiches or frozen food may have some taxes. Raw ingredients - produce, meat, eggs, bread, rice, oils, milk, cheese, etc- tend not to.
> "We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist."
It's funny, I heard my father-in-law parroting this when complaining about soda taxes. I also don't care for the taxes, but I don't see them as inherently racist. In fact, hearing him say this made me think that the characterization of the tax being racist is, itself, racist, as it bears the presumption that various minorities more regularly make the irresponsible personal choice of drinking soda, and this is without any data to prove it.
I think it's more of a blending of what's racist vs what's classist in America.
The argument should be that regressive taxes like soda taxes, much like speeding tickets, affects the poor at a much greater clip. Who cares about a soda tax or a speeding ticket when you make 500k a year? If you make that much and you want soda or you want to speed, you're going to do it. However, if you make 28k a year, the calculation is much different.
In America, poverty and race are strongly correlated (and there's causation, but I digress). Because of that, it's easy, although inaccurate, to use classism and racism interchangeably.
Calling someone racist creates a larger emotional response and is more damaging to social equity than calling someone classist.
I agree, but isn't it necessary to reckon with the fact that historically, explicitly and intentionally racist policies (for example, Jim Crow voting laws) often laundered themselves, when convenient, through classism in order to escape scrutiny? Put differently, would you contend that poll taxes were not racist?
Also, wouldn't we expect that organizations that are explicitly anti-racist would conclude that because classist policies or laws have racially disparate impacts, addressing them still increases racial equity even if they are ostensibly motivated by race-neutral class concerns?
> would you contend that poll taxes were not racist
I would not contend that they were not racist. I wasn't implying that every classist action is actually racist or vice-versa. Just that some are incorrectly labeled for rhetorical effect.
> addressing them still increases racial equity even if they are ostensibly motivated by race-neutral class concerns
Yep, nearly anything that effects class equity in the US will also effect racial equity.
> If this is true, shouldn't there be consequences for NAACP?
It depends on what the goal is.
If one seeks an opportunity to punish the NAACP or to chill discussion of racism, focusing just on the NAACP might be a way to do that.
Otherwise, if one seeks to end harmful astroturfing[1], then directing punishment (eg: press+fines) at the companies/lobbyists that craft those campaigns seems more effective.
As for the non-profits that get duped by bad-faith corporate campaigns, being held up as a hapless corporate stooge should provide all the aversion anyone could want.
I think we have an accepted fallacy in logic where we apply: Assume ignorance before malice.
I do agree ignorance is far more probable than malice, but malicious people are incredibly skilled at exploitation of ignorance and they use that skill without missing a beat.
1) The user you are trying so hard to catch in some contradiction seems to be arguing against the control large platforms have to effectively police speech into a box more narrow than the law, and (looking only at the provided snippets) does not seem to claim that the law can't or shouldn't provide some boundaries itself. Like, I don't know this user's opinion on whether truth in advertising laws are legitimate, only about whether it makes sense for Twitter / Facebook to be the ones who get to make the decision. In this case, they are asking why it isn't illegal, not why it isn't randomly being self-limited by the Internet-age speech carriers.
2) Even if the user quoted were "inconsistent" in that way--and because of #1 I don't think it is, but I want to note why I think your comment isn't as smart as you are hoping it is in more detail--one could easily take the comment to be born out of frustration at a world that decides lots of things should be forbidden but somehow not this one, whether coming from a place of sincerity or simply sarcasm: in a world where somehow there are a ton of things people can't say, why can they say this? A lot of times, I see people try to point out hypocrisy in online communication and in fact the two parties are just talking past each other, using the other's attempt to call out hypocrisy as a way to judge their position, ignoring that there are easier explanations.
Some spine on that guy. Why wouldn't you resign under that kind of directive? How can that possibly lead to a better outcome for the administration unless the outcome they wanted was for eggs to be cheaper for people who don't believe or listen to US surgeon general. I guess this was the President who took open door shits in front of staff and colleagues so I'm not sure its unexpected.
Is the fact that Johnson died at 64 of a heart attack somewhat ironic, or was he speaking from personal experience about the dangers of eggs (and the bacon everyone ate daily)?
I think the dietary cholesterol == bad thing is just totally wrong. Sample size of 1 but i eat about 4 eggs a day and steak almost every day but it's not processed fast food and my cholesterol, blood pressure, etc. are all _excellent_
There is about 10x more unesterified (absorbable) cholesterol secreted into bile than one typically eats in a normal day.
> Eating cholesterol has very little impact on the cholesterol levels in your body. This is a fact, not my opinion. Anyone who tells you different is, at best, ignorant of this topic. At worst, they are a deliberate charlatan. Years ago the Canadian Guidelines removed the limitation of dietary cholesterol. The rest of the world, especially the United States, needs to catch up.
The only caveat I would is that there is weak evidence for a "dietary cholesterol hyperresponder" phenotype that is more sensitive to dietary cholesterol than the general population.
I probably have (heterozygous) familial hypercholesterolemia, so my diet (even saturated fat) unfortunately doesn't influence the (very high) levels I have anyways. I'm envious of people like you, for sure.
Yes and no. Cholesterol by itself ain't bad, in fact it is necessary to synthesize sex hormones and vitamin D, among other things.
High sugar in blood is bad. High sugar and high fat in the bloodstream is worse. Also, recent studies seem to show that cholesterol limits are arbitrary and don't mean much in a vacuum: there seem to be a correlation between high LDL levels and longevity—i.e. people that live longer tend to have higher levels of LDL than average recommendations. Go figure.
The important levels for health are: stable glucose/insulin system, lower triglycerides, lower trig/HDL ratio. Everything else is too noisy a signal, including just measuring dietary cholesterol.
ApoB levels are the most predictive of cardiovascular disease, which represents the number of atherogenic particles in your blood. You may have high LDL, but a low particle count, and therefore be fine. Sugar and metabolic disease causes your body to produce larger numbers of smaller and less effective particles.
There is little relationship between cholesterol consumption and serum cholesterol levels. It's a large molecule and can't be directly absorbed through the digestive system. Almost all of the cholesterol in your body was endogenously synthesized.
The outsized emphasis on dietary cholesterol, a molecule, and its relationship to blood "cholesterol", a type of solid particle (many aggregated molecules) composed of fats held together by cholesterol and proteins, is mostly a verbal confusion. Your "blood cholesterol" is the number density of lipoprotein particles in your blood. It is not the concentration of dissolved cholesterol qua cholest-5-en-3beta-ol.
I agree that the cholesterol factor seems pretty well debunked, but I think the mistake originally appeared because dietary cholesterol is typically present with saturated and trans fats. These are known to typically function as a lever for blood lipid levels. If you eat them, your blood lipids will temporarily rise and gradually fall. The fact that this doesn’t become chronic for you seems abnormal (but great), and I spend so much time trying to understand it better. Very intelligent people are on both sides of this thing, saying blood lipids aren’t the issue or that they’re the core issue.
As you mentioned, eating whole, healthily prepared eggs and meat makes a difference. If you were getting that much egg and beef from McDonald’s you would likely be buried in the ground by now.
I used to eat like you and my blood work was horrifying, though. I’d say I was eating around 95% whole foods by volume, though I had a weakness for rice noodles and fermented sausages. I stopped that diet though and now my blood work is excellent, too.
This is a contentious but super interesting thing. There are some factors here I suspect matter a lot, but haven’t been properly proven out yet. I do think in the next decade or two we will start to get a good grasp on it.
One is gut flora and enzyme production. Essentially, where is that food broken down and what’s present as it happens? This is a big science experiment with significant variance across individuals. One common variable that’s becoming very obvious though is that people who adopt “western diets” tend to lose a staggering amount of gut flora diversity. I think this matters a lot for anecdotal but also research-oriented reasons.
I had a chronic bacterial illness which required nuclear-grade antibiotic regimens and that completely crushed me. I was burping up the most putrid gases, getting awful cramps, and having bizarre GI motility issues for over a year after; I’d never had troubles with food in my life. I’ve wondered often if I’d done my blood work before that, when I didn’t feel like garbage eating that food, if it might have looked good like yours. I really wish I started doing blood work sooner. Regardless, I wonder if gut flora can protect us from the harms that the greater body of evidence implies high amounts of saturated and trans fats can cause.
I’m totally plant-based now, and I meet countless people who say “I can’t eat like that because I just feel like shit all the time”. And I think yeah, I did too. I had to do all kinds of stuff to build my guts back up and now I’m a plant crushing machine. Had I eaten like this when I ate a lot of meat, I’d be bloated and miserable all the time. There’s no way I could handle so much fiber and sheer bulk. What your flora and system is accustomed to seems crucial to both what you’re able to eat, what you want to eat, and how well it supports your health.
As for enzymes, we know various foods stimulate enzyme production and in their absence that enzyme will reduce or even vanish — sometimes permanently. What you eat with your eggs and steak, whether it’s with the meal or 12 hours later, very well could protect you from what harms others. This kind of thing is researched and there’s growing evidence for its importance, but it isn’t clear who/when/what happens since nutrition is so incredibly diverse. I can’t wait until we understand protective mechanisms (enzymes or otherwise) better. I suppose the best known is antioxidants, but there must be so many more.
Finally, there’s the genetic factor question. We know there are hyper responders to saturated and trans fats. Are there hypo responders? I haven’t read up on that. If so, the greater body of evidence would indicate that most people are not hypo responders at all, and that saturated fat intake (animal or plant) can easily become excessive and harmful.
All of this is to say that I doubt there’s a one size fits all in any case, but since saturated fat appears to become harmful in most populations, I think people should be careful and if it’s an option, so regular blood work. I’m also not aiming to be contentious or argumentative; I find this stuff interesting as hell and love to discuss it (and learn things — I’m by no means an expert and I don’t have all the data).
>If you were getting that much egg and beef from McDonald’s you would likely be buried in the ground by now.
This is my hunch too, when i really got serious about my diet and health I was worried eating all these eggs and meat was going to cause issues so made sure to get blood tests etc. This sort of started me down the rabbit hole of realizing that almost every single thing I had ever been told about nutrition was either misleading or just flat out wrong.
The gut biome stuff is fascinating to me and it feels like it's so underexplored. Can't wait to see what kinds of things we learn about it.
One reason I don't think i'm as optimistic as you is that it feels like society doesn't want us to understand this stuff. Between the billion dollar companies influencing regulations, massive marketing budgets of these food-poison companies, and then even the populace doesn't want to know the truth. Everyone just wants to cope and complain and do stupid fad diets instead of learn or change anything.
There are so many internal and external forces pushing us to take the immediately gratifying path of least resistance.
We already know (and have known for decades) that a diet including mostly whole foods based around mostly plants seems to yield populations with far less disease and longer lifespans. It may not fit everyone, but it would certainly work for most people currently suffering. We don’t need to know more about gut flora and protective enzymes to help them; we need to stop hurting them with an overly permissive health industry and sabotaging food processing industry. We’ve had generations of normalizing this stuff. We have intelligent people talking about how statins are game changers and various weight loss drugs are revolutionary. It’s a sort of tragedy to me that we aren’t focused on making these things redundant and eliminating the root problem. It’s like we’ve simply accepted excess and the innate self-abuse of our lifestyles.
couldn't agree more, I hope we can move to a situation where at least these processed food companies are viewed the same way tobacco companies are (they've even become one and the same in the case of Kraft haha). I had a period in my life where I lost 50 pounds over the course of a year or so and the disappointment people felt when they asked how and I just said "I ate less and exercised more" instead of "1 weird trick" really discouraged me
He was a chain smoker who had had multiple serious heart attacks before taking office. He quit cold turkey to save his own life, then lit a cigarette the minute he stepped out of the White House. Smoked until it killed him.
There have been several studies that have shown eggs to be healthy. There are several studies that show they are unhealthy. Bias is a real problem in nutrition science.
There are zero interventional studies that show eggs to be unhealthy.
In other words no one has given eggs to one group, observed another group not eat eggs and shown that eggs CAUSE a negative health outcome.
Instead people have made statistical calculations on food questionnaires that are highly unreliable.
Also people have fed eggs to people and measured various blood levels and made a educated guess on what the long term effects could be.
If a study by Kelloggs shows eggs to be unhealthy how can it be trusted?
Likewise if members of the study are animal rights activist, vegans or some other ideology that could in one way or another effect their judgement that study shouldn't be trusted. Especially if it is not a interventional study. Of which there are none that show poor health outcomes.
> There have been several studies that have shown eggs to be healthy. There are several studies that show they are unhealthy. Bias is a real problem in nutrition science.
Mostly because "healthy" is a bit subjective.
If some study finds a correlation between egg consumption and a +1% chance of developing a rare cancer - who really cares? When you look at how rare the cancer is, when you might develop it, and the small increase in probability - you're looking at maybe a -1 day life expectancy for a life-time worth of consuming eggs.
Why is living 1 less day "unhealthy" - especially compared to all the other ways one can be "unhealthy"?
It's just such a nuanced topic people have a really hard time reasoning about it. For example, Drinking Alcohol every day clearly increases your chances of developing disease.
Drinking zero Alcohol actually decreases the likely hood of you living to a ripe old age.
Is it that Alcohol is healthy in small doses? Probably not. Perhaps people who drink a glass of wine once or twice a month have a less stressful life than someone who never drinks.
That's why nutrition studies are so hard to be done right. You have to literally watch them consume it and you need a control group and it needs to take place over years.
There are books written about Bluezones that say eating meat shortens your life yet HongKong has the both the highest life expectancy and the highest per person meat consumption in the world.
You really have to take every single claim and study with a big giant grain of salt and a whole lot of skepticism.
>Drinking zero Alcohol actually decreases the likely hood of you living to a ripe old age.
There could also be confounding factors here, which is that people who drink no alcohol may have other factors in play. i.e. There might be a health-related reason they don't drink anything.
e.g. They may be people who are alcoholics that have ceased drinking. They may have drunk heavily in the years before, but being asked "How many units of alcohol do you drink in a week" they would answer 0.
They may be on (serious) medications or have medical conditions for which they are strongly recommended to not drink.
Most people who switch to a mostly red meat diet do see a rise in blood cholesterol. I certainly did.
The real question is, does that even matter?
High cholesterol is also associated with longevity. The ratio of cholesterol is more important. The ratio of waist to shoulder width is more important.
Also your blood a1c is more important for bad outcomes than high cholesterol.
The secondary question is if the quantity of cholesterol in a food causes the body to have higher cholesterol, or if it’s more complex than that. Because yes, per gram eggs have many times more cholesterol than red meat. But what if it’s something else present in red meat that increases metabolization or production of cholesterol? We just don’t really understand the body well enough to say for sure.
Avian flu is killing chickens. You don't see it because no-one likes to put pictures of mountainous piles of culled chickens on people's television screens.
December 2022 news article says 52,695,450 chickens killed in the US alone. About the same number in Europe. 10 million in Japan.
My wife has a cottage baking business and would buy 15 dozen eggs from Costco Business Center. Already high, a few months back in cost about $45 for the box. Just last week it was $110. She doesn't recall but it fairly certain the box was between $20-30 before inflation hit.
However she said they had chicken legs that were .49/lb which is a great price but hard to reconcile with the narrative that avian flu is the cause for the price increases. Why are broiler chicken cheap but eggs from layer hens not?
I don’t know whether to be amazed at this agricultural feat that brings cheap, tasty, high-protein meals to the masses of humanity, or sickened by an abomination of nature that turns a living thing into a bio-engineered fast-growing blob. I guess both?
Yes but it’s a fuzzy term, what I meant was more in the “animal” realm of living.
Just to give an example, I (and I think most humans) feel negatively about deforestation or destruction of plant life because it is destroying or profaning something beautiful. It’s like burning art.
Same with the chickens. I’m not sure I consider factory farming immoral, and I definitely don’t consider killing animals for food immoral. I grew up raising chickens (laying hens, it was a family hobby and not a business)and don’t feel any moral or aesthetic issue with killing them. I also hunt and fish a lot, my freezers are full of wild game whose lives I personally ended.
Still, certain kinds of factory farming, like the raising of chicken-blobs, disturb me because they take something I find beautiful and make it ugly. Not sure what to make of the disturbed feeling tho, it’s not a moral condemnation or political position.
> I definitely don’t consider killing animals for food immoral.
This is a highly interesting standpoint-- would you consider it morally problematic to kill more intelligent animals for food, like dogs?
What about human children (younger than a year? younger than 6?).
Is there a line for you somewhere? Where approximately and why?
This is drastically different from myself and most meateaters I know which concede moral problems with killing animals for food in general but ignore them in favor of enjoyment of food, so I'm very curious about how your framework looks like.
The line Peter Singer draws, which I found quite elegant, is "things that can suffer". You can have aesthetic opinions about what we do to plants, but a major difference with what we do to chickens is that the plants don't suffer.
I’m not convinced the elegance here doesn’t derive from imprecision. I have some opinions about which sorts of life forms can suffer, but I don’t really have a justification for them, and there are people out there who honestly seem to believe that (for example) bugs don’t suffer, or lobsters don’t suffer. This seems like a fairly ridiculous proposition to me, but hey, it just depends on how we’ve anthropomorphized lobster thoughts, I guess.
Oh there is certainly imprecision, but I don't think that's where the elegance comes from. Especially given that most actual moral quandaries you might find yourself in are clearly not in the grey areas, and so the few that you do encounter can relatively easily be dealt with via either "better safe than sorry" or "worth the risk", depending on your personal inclination.
I do a good deal of baking, and I buy a lot of my supplies from Costco. I also have spent a fair amount of time very diligently tracking my family's grocery expenses. (I have a spreadsheet of almost 3 years of just about all groceries we bought.)
In 2019, I picked up 15 dozen eggs for $8.69, and the 5 dozen was $8.99 at that time. (There were times when they didn't stock the 15 dozen, so I had to opt for 5 -- a much more expensive $1.80/dozen but still reasonable.)
Yeah I understand that, I do shop there often. It took me a few re-reads to understand how relatively similar pricing for 15 dozen and 5 dozen eggs in 2019 at the same store helps to compare inflation measurements.
Summer of 2017 in small-ish town Iowa I was buying eggs at Aldi for $0.37/dozen. When I moved to a "large" Iowa town the price was suddenly around $0.55.
I recently went to buy eggs at a higher end store and the only eggs available were cage free, but would have been less expensive than generic eggs.
After three years ending ~EOY'19, I stopped tracking all these data. (It turns out combing every grocery store receipt and manually typing, categorizing, and calculating the data takes a lot of time.)
I can't say how my experience tracked or would have tracked inflation, but I can say that even before the pandemic, I did see wildly varying prices on things. Costco's large vanilla extract was once around $10 (though this was before my spreadsheet, so I don't have dates/exact prices). It was up to $35 in '18, then down to $30 a year later, and just a few days ago, I noticed it for a little over $20. But 25# of flour used to be around $6-7, and I bought a bunch the other day for ~$12. So some things up, others down.
> 15 dozen eggs from Costco Business Center. [...] Just last week it was $110.
Might I suggest buying eggs from a normal grocery store or other alternative source? That's $7.33 per dozen and unless you have some very unusual situation, a dozen eggs can be had for less than half that price at a grocery store.
Where? I live in a poor rural area and every grocery store in town (and we ain’t talkin Whole Foods here) has even generic eggs for more than $5/dozen. Thank goodness I have my own chickens.
$5/dozen is still a lot less than the $7.33/doz at Costco that OP was mentioning.
Canada, under $4 cad per dozen which is about $3.20 USD. Saw about $4.39 when I was in San Francisco last month, I (perhaps wrongly) made the assumption that similar would be available elsewhere.
I am in California. Yesterday I bought the organic cage free vegetarian fed brown eggs at Safeway, they were $5.99 I could have spent less for the plain white eggs, and this is at Safeway which is not known for their low prices.
Possibly availabilty, in our Denver Suburb, Kroeger and Walmart shelves are nearly always bare. We've had to resort to buying 5 dozen at a time at our Costco...which I don't like, because it takes awhile to get through them.
I buy a dozen eggs for $3-5 in the middle of San Francisco. If your wife is paying double that, that too for bulk orders, then she is definitely doing something wrong. She can literally shop at Whole Foods and save money.
I've seen egg prices all over the place in my area. Ironically, the high end stores seem to have lower egg prices right now. I'm guessing the huge industrial type farms are getting hit hardest while the smaller farms, offering true free-range and other marketing gimmicks are largely business as usual.
If the chickens are dying from avian flu, they can still be consumed as food assuming they live long enough to develop but you will miss out on the ongoing egg production of the laying hens.
Healthy or not, a chicken can only give it's two wings once. Laying hens produce eggs repeatedly for as long as their bodies allow.
Broilers actually only live to be 9 weeks old, so their business cycle is very short. The old layers are labeled stew hens when you can find them at the store.
Broilers are different breeds than layers and “spent hens” tend to only get eaten by farmers, etc, because of the raised risk of deboning error and undesirably tough meat
They apsolutely make excellent stock. I'm Hungarian and spent hen stock is quite commonky eaten in Hungary. Unfortunately spent hen is quite hard to source in the UK, where I am now.
Isn't it convenient that we discuss inflation like it only affects us 1 year at a time? All these articles shouldn't be saying 60% they should be saying 5 to 6 times more expensive from before the pandemic.
Actually there’s more. On Jan 1st several more states laws about animal welfare went into effect whereas before essentially only California had those requirements. The supply of eggs meeting those requirements had not been ramped up to meet the step in demand. I expect that disruption will be temporary.
Because the seller of those eggs can raise prices while they are (at least for now) in possession of an item which has excess demand relative to supply. You could look at this as compensation for early adoption of tighter regulations, as a natural variation in the prospects of their business, or as evil price-gouging. Which you choose to focus on is a choice that will vary from person to person.
Because when my generic store-brand eggs are sold out, I will be looking to buy your Pasture Raised Organic eggs.
Or: the only reason I was buying generic eggs in the first place was that they were half the price of your Pasture Raised Organic eggs. Once they are almost the same price, I might as well buy Pasture Raised Organic eggs.
Because the company you are buying from what doing the minimum to achieve the "Pasture Raised Organic" label, which is not a very high bar. These laws impact them just as much as the "budget eggs".
To be a "free-range" or "pasture-raised" chicken you simply need access to the outdoors. So, these animals are kept in the same cramped, feces-filled hothouses that the "budget chickens" are, but there's a tiny hole in the side of the barn where they can access a tiny bit of grass. That's it.
There is no incentive for these companies to do anything above the bare minimum; you will never find a large-scale egg supplier that raises chickens in the idyllic environment you may picture in your head.
I hate HN sometimes. You are being downvoted for being one of the only people in this thread that has actual direct experience on this matter due to political beliefs.
Organic/Free range labeling is almost an outright scam. Very few operations (almost guaranteed to not be one you see in your grocery store) are what people imagine when they see this marketing. Most operations you could not tell the difference between chickens raised for that label vs. the "factory farm" operation across the street.
Source: family is organic market garden farmers, sells free range eggs. Organic labeling is one of the biggest scams I've ever personally witnessed.
If you actually care about this (almost no one does, they just say they do), you need to buy eggs direct from the source. Period. There is no other way to get what you are imagining.
They're all basically the same. Different labeling groups have different requirements, it doesn't really matter. The fact of the matter is that the business is going to do whatever it takes to make as much money as possible, and that means less space and freedom for the animals. You can come up with as many requirements as you want, but the egg producers, like any business, will do as little as they possibly can do to meet them. It's just not possible to treat these animals with empathy when your job is to take from them as much as you can while giving them as little as you can.
As bare as these requirements are, they only exist because without them there is literally no reason to try. And even with them, there is only the incentive to legally meet the requirements, nothing else. The labels are for us, not the chickens.
Because now people like me who didn't care about organic or not are buying any eggs available. In our store all the vegan substitutes were sold out too (never seen that before). We ended up buying a carton of egg whites, which was all that was left.
But then we went back the next day and they had a few dozen eggs.
> So why then are my Pasture Raised Organic eggs increasing at the same rate as budget eggs.
Why would a seller sell them for any less than they can get? Farms tend to be incredibly low margin businesses, so selling below market is just utterly silly.
Prices are set at the margin, they are not set by cost of production other than to act as a floor where companies outright go out of business.
Not seeing that here in LA. The organic brown eggs seem to be holding price pretty well. I thought it was just slow movement and that the next shipment would have higher prices but so far so good.
As an athlete who eats like a highschool linebacker (in Colorado), I've been watching eggs prices climb up $0.50 each week for a dozen, then jump $3 in one week. Now there's none on the shelves at all.
At least in California it was more like "We voted for this in overwhelming numbers because industrialized animal cruelty does not align with our society's values."[1]
Unfortunately for the chickens, a government is supposed to serve the interests and well-being of its citizens, not that of its livestock (insert joke about there being no difference).
Maybe the majority of the citizens wants to live in a society that is kinder to animals? (That said citizens might not fully appreciate the knock on effects that will have on costs is a separate question. Do people actually want to be kinder to animals if it means eggs cost twice as much?)
Well those people can already buy free-range chickens. This is preventing people who'd rather pay less for cruelly-treated chickens from making that choice.
Given that it's a democratically elected government that made the regulation I don't think there is anything the "people who'd rather pay less for cruelly-treated chickens" can do here other than try to lobby for the rule to be reverted or moving somewhere where animals can be treated "cruelly" without repercussions. It's not always only a question of free market.
Treating the short term adjustment effects of a new rule as the same as the eventual steady state impact of the rule makes arguments against new rules seem deceptive and misleading
Why would you suspect that? It’s a commodity experiencing a supply disruption. Prices for lumber, shipping, oil etc have all already come down significantly from the peak.
It didn't the last time a bird flu impacted the egg supply. Inflation will continue to be a factor, but I expect it will return to near-normal levels, at least.
This bird flu is not the same as before. Before it was flu from the wild and the strains were quite mild. The current very sickmaking flu started inside farms and escaped into the wild. Millions of farm birds and wild birds are killed by it. Ofcourse, farms get it now from the wild birds, and ofcourse they blame the wild birds :)
This strong flu will not be gone in a while and it speaks for the position that current large scale farming is not sustainable.
The price of feed went up significantly too. Maybe not for whatever garbage industrial egg producers feed their chickens but definitely for small farms.
There’s a difference between inflation and a price hike within one industry
Of course inflation is permanent. The mechanics of money would break down otherwise. When money can deflate, money becomes an investment vehicle like crypto did and we know how bad that is.
When there is a threat of inflation, it forces people to transfer money instead of hoarding it. That is the entire purpose of money.
Now, about the price hike… is it permanent? Probably not when there are 160,000 competing poultry farms.
Not just the competition between poultry farms either, but competition with any other protein a person can eat. The closer eggs gets in price per calorie to meat (or nuts, cheese, etc), the less people are likely to choose eggs. There’s plenty of food out there, and a large part of the historic popularity of eggs has been their cheap price.
It's called the ratchet effect. The government doesn't like giving your money back. That's why taxes almost never go down, either - e.g. the "temporary" income tax that only affects the richest 1% of people..
Both the marginal [0] and effective [1] tax rates have been trending downwards since WW2 with relatively little deviation from that. Pus this doesn't take into account all the ways wealthy people can avoid creating taxable income in the first place that generally aren't possible at lower income levels.
Means I'm gonna have to interview prep hard next year to jump ship to a better paying company if I can and if the market allows for it, as my current one isn't in a hurry to do any salary adjustments and it hurts.
Food, electricity, heating, all went up from minimum 30% to nearly doubled. Luckily my rent and doctor's bills went up only 10% so thank God about that.
'always permanent' seems redundant. Japan certainly has not had permanent inflation. Starting in the mid-1980 up until recently it has wavered quite a bit.
It would be nice to see more people allowed to keep backyard chickens (hens at least, since roosters can be noisy). Since getting some at our place I’ve been surprised how fun they are to have around and easy to care for. Our compost from the kitchen goes to them too, which could help people divert scraps from the landfill or from being picked up (big gas usage) for municipal composting. Their waste is also great fertilizer for gardens.
I'm a huge proponent of backyard chickens and had them for years, but they are, generally speaking, not a "more cost effective" way to get eggs, at least in north america if you are feeding them mostly store-bought feed. Then again, this change in egg prices may change that.
But they're great for redundancy (more & varied egg supply reduces the impact of supply chain shocks), to get the best quality eggs you can, and because it's just fun & rewarding.
I am curious about that statement. Feeding chickens store bought food that is. I grew up with chickens being the garbage disposal. They will eat anything and everything. They are the cheapest animal to raise for food. (Except maybe cattle on the old west when you could parasite off the public land.)
The argument against backyard chickens would be health considerations i'd say, not cost. Curious.
Eggs are very, very cheap. Building materials and time are not. Obviously the upkeep costs for laying hens is super low, but it's the startup cost that turns most people off the idea. Eggs are about $3/dozen where I am. You have to eat a _lot_ of eggs before it's actually a net positive endeavor, probably many, many years worth.
My parents have a coup on their hobby farm which my dad built on the weekends. It looks great and the eggs taste even better. That said, they were never under the impression this was a way to _save_ money, the math just doesn't make any sense.
Can confirm. I am in New England. The startup cost was about $1000 for me, including coop, coop reinforcements, chickens, feed, and various misc equipment. I have 8 hens and basically if I sold a year’s worth of eggs I could break even. That’s sold, not eaten, because I could sell for roughly double the grocery store price.
So realistically the difference is that I get fresh eggs every day, I never run out, and they are fun.
What did you spend $1000 on? I just bought some wooden beams and wire mesh. The chickens eat whatever we didn't finish the night before. Though I usually scoop in some extra rice or pasta knowing we have chickens.
They lay their eggs in basically anything. Mine sit in a Aldi crate on it's side.
Spent $150 on 8 chickens from a reputable farm, which included their starter kit (heater, feed, feeder, water, etc.). Was overkill but they made it super easy. Could have saved some money on Tractor Supply chickens but also got cool breeds and all great layers.
$600 on the largest coop Tractor Supply sold. It is just barely big enough for all the chickens but it does work.
The rest on reinforcement hardware since I have hawks and foxes all over my property. Metal mesh and wood to reinforce all around the coop. Also things like sand to fill the bottom of the coop, anchors to keep it down, etc.
Over time I spent a bit more to replace some bullshit hardware of the coop.
I could have saved some by building the coop from scratch but also this one has a nice design that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own without seeing how the chickens actually behave.
Most "back yard" chicken operations do not have adequate area to graze more than a bit. Even if you do, you'd probably need feed to get eggs regularly. I've never heard of anyone raising layers without feeding them.
At least in my experience, we don't produce enough food alone for the chickens. They certainly get 100% of our food waste, but they would starve if we didn't supplement them with store-bought food.
They are probably not "worth it" when accounting for the care required, but I get feed for about $20 a bag and a scratch block for $20 every 3 months or so for 4 chickens who generally give me an egg/day each. 4x30x3=360 => 360/12=30 dozen eggs so that works out to less than a dollar per dozen which is below market cost 5 years ago.
I just did some very casual back of the envelope math for my backyard flock. Assuming worst possible outputs and highest monthly costs, it works out to the equivalent of $5/dozen. In my area, roadside stands and/or grocery store “free-range, organic” eggs have been more than $7/dozen for years now. My gut tells me that over the time we’ve had these chickens, our actual break even would be closer to $4/dozen once our startup costs (coop, feeders) were repaid. We eat them, we don’t sell them, and we have fun with the chickens so I haven’t tracked any of it very closely.
I'm sure you recognize the same dynamics we have in our small flock - we had 7 birds, then later went up to 10. There is a down time for the molt, and production is slower in the winter. These birds are now essentially three year olds, so I expect there to be a drop in production. Yet all that said - we're still conservatively averaging 3 eggs a day. So you extrapolate out an average of 100 eggs / mo (again - even that is really conservative) and $50/mo on feed/supplies (and let's be real - that's generous, it's probably more like $30/mo typically) and the numbers play really well for backyard chickens.
That said - we have had a lot more coop expenses than expected, because our neighbors wanted to be jerks about it and I wanted to keep the peace. So realistically the "savings" we would have had in egg costs have likely been eaten up or significantly reduced by having to rebuild / move our coop.
They're only cost effective if you raise them cheaply, like free rotten pop up camper with plywood tacked on as a coop and letting them get a proportion of their calories from your yard that you also don't mow. And that's why they're not allowed everywhere "upscale".
They eat so much that I don’t think you could. In the wild, a chicken lays an egg every few months to once a year. Domesticated laying hens lay an egg a day or so. Imagine how much energy it takes to convert bugs into a 60 gram egg.
Yes. It is always a good idea to rotate them over different areas to give the land a chance to repopulate (and their excrement helps attract bugs in the meantime). A lot of people have a coop that has two doors on opposite sides to different runs for this purpose.
You can lay eggs without a rooster, but if you do, one of the hens will become dominant and needlessly bully the other hens. This will stress them out and you’ll get health issues in your hens.
The value of a rooster from me experience is protection. Last week I went out to close up the coop and found blood all over the place. Turns out my poor rooster (Cluck Norris, natch) was covered in blood and had clearly been in a tussle defending the hens from a predator. Perhaps a cat or a bird of prey. He is totally fine now and I am quite thankful that he was there.
Yeah, we get fox, opossums and weasels here. The roosters do a good job of fussing their day up.
For the opossums, it's a stand off, the rooster just acts tough and makes a lot of noise so you can hopefully show up and scare it off. Weasels are annoying as they'll destroy eggs. Fox are particularly problematic though. They'll easily kill a rooster and are very quiet and conniving.
I'm glad it works well for you. My grandpa (when he was alive) and uncle swear otherwise. Might be because they have significantly more chickens than that.
Sometimes a hen will actually transition into a rooster, with spurs, rooster coloration of the feathers, humping of other hen, calling other hens when a treat is found, etc.
While I'm all for people having chickens, they do need to have lot size requirements. If you think your neighbors dog is noisy in the morning, just wait till they have a flock of chickens.
Our neighborhood has 7000 sq ft lots. My old neighbor had 3 hens and a rooster. Technically, I don't think the rooster was allowed. One day the rooster stopped crowing and I was happy. Other than his early morning call, we never would have known they had those birds except the few times I saw them get out and walk down the street.
I've been sitting on an acre in a city that allows backyard chickens,
thinking about it but doing nothing.
I think this is the catalyst I need to get started on a coop. If anyone has any plans or pointers for a coop, or raising chickens in the SW, would be much appreciated.
We're on half acre and do a flock of 6 in an enclosure behind the shed. My main piece of advice is get all the infrastructure before the birds. Pay someone to build you an enclosure. Hardware cloth, NOT poultry netting/chicken wire. You need a few nesting boxes and a dry roost for them to sleep. Look up "deep litter method". Woodchips are free, high carbon bedding chicken poop is high nitrogen. The result is incredible compost. Anyway gl.
You really don’t need much for a coop at all. When we bought our property it had a tool shed that we converted and it turned out to be way too big for our flock of 12. You could honestly use a large dog house. There are lots of plans online and Reddit has a very good chicken community with answers to any questions you might have.
All that to say: the minimum threshold for starting backyard chicken keeping is very low. I’d recommend jumping in as cheap as possible and upgrading later if you find you enjoy it.
You can buy pretty cheap coops at stores such as Tractor Supply that will house half a dozen chickens or so. They're great for people starting out because a number of things, that you might not be aware of, have been integrated and thought through. Also, backyardchickens.com is a popular site for all kinds of advice that we've used to research different chicken matters. In short, it's pretty easy to keep chickens, but you have to do it regularly and with love.
just make sure you have a good lock on your coop and the bottom is closed off (aka not just a frame sitting on the bare ground). raccoons are very good at getting into coops.
Correct me if I am wrong but bird flu is spread between birds in a flock, and so industrial, heavily concentrated flocks are breeding grounds for bird flu? So backyard chickens being more diverse, smaller flocks, would increase food security and reduce spread?
Maybe they're illegal in the suburbs, but if they're illegal in US cities then that clearly isn't enforced, I can find backyard chickens in any city I go to (not especially common in most neighborhoods, but they're there).
I'm curious how Costco is weathering the storm better than others. Typically Aldi is the cheapest place for me to buy eggs, but they're almost $5 a dozen for basic eggs. I've seen even more at other grocery stores (Publix was several dollars more a dozen). The cage free eggs were $7/2 dozen ($3.50/dozen) earlier this week at Costco.
I'm in the Southeastern US in a suburb of a major city.
I usually go to the Mountain View Costco. From the /r/bayarea subreddit they've only been out of eggs a few busy days since the Covid-19 pandemic started, but prices have risen from under $3 for 2 dozen to $5.99 for 2 dozen over the same time period.
I didn't realize us Canadians had it so good: agriculture oligopolies have kept our prices so much higher than the US that when we get similar absolute jumps the percentage increase doesn't look so bad. I don't think I've seen 6 bucks for 24 eggs in a decade. Same story for just about every basic.
Most people do this, this isn't unique to Costco or Southwest Airlines. That's why future contracts exist. Although it rarely guarantees a delivery, it does allow you to hedge against increases/decreases as a company.
You can take a look at APU0000708111 and see how crazy it's been the past 2-3 months.
Much of the rise seems to be caused by avian flu resulting in the deaths of about 10% of chickens in the US. That would not be a uniform 10% at every farm.
Some farms will have lost a lot more and some will have lost less or none.
I think that most retailers have contracts with a specific set of farms to supply those eggs, which will only be a small subset of all egg farms.
It could simply be that the farms Costco has contracts with happen to mostly be ones that haven't been hit hard with avian flu.
Yea, I noticed this same thing a couple weeks ago in a relatively small Michigan college town. Used to buy eggs at Aldis for 65 cents not that long ago.
One thing we never seem to consider is that the price of eggs we've become accustomed to is really, ridiculously low. Maybe eggs should cost $5 per dozen. If you didn't know the price of eggs historically, I bet you would consider that a steal!
You know it’s funny that you mention that. I switched to really high end eggs that taste delicious. They were $8 a dozen in 2020 and have stayed at that price.
There must be something that they do different in their business that makes these eggs less susceptible to the problems the other egg producers are having.
Avian flu is killing chickens. You don't see it because no-one likes to put pictures of mountainous piles of culled chickens on people's television screens.
December 2022 news article says 52,695,450 chickens killed.
Cream prices have more than doubled. At Target, the 32oz Heavy Cream that was $2.99 in Oct 2021 is now $6.49. And there's a cream shortage in any case. Inflation and supply chain issues.
Really? Oat milk is $6 a gallon here, and I'm pretty sure it has been roughly that for a long time. At least since I started buying it. Cow milk is about $4.50.
Can't really substantiate this tho as I can't find online charts of oat milk prices lol
I don't think this is 'inflation'. A few companies have realized that there is effectively no consumer protections when it comes to price gouging, they will continue to raise prices until they experience some pain in this regard.
The issue is an anti-trust issue and consolidation.
It seems kind of unlikely that companies are just now becoming aware of this fact. It might be the case that their expectations for what the American consumer will take have shifted, though…
Go to your local farmers' markets, find the egg person, -they might even have pictures of their chickens living in not-misery-, ask them if they deliver, get an appropriate amount of eggs for your household delivered twice a month. my guy has raised prices a little, but not like what's in this thread. good guy.
Eggs also last a lot longer than people think. You can buy a 24 or 48 pack from your grocery store and store it for at least a month past the date printed on the box with no problems.
I’m just a backyard chicken farmer in rural America, but my input costs have remained steady. I’m feeding the same high-quality feed and grain supplement. I have cut back on meal worm treats - too expensive - but my chickens get daily fresh vegetable scraps. My hens are now way past their viability from a commercial perspective - but we still get more eggs than we need. Where I feel the pain at the grocery is butter - prices have definitely more than doubled, discounts/ coupons seem rare. I stood there with another shopper the other day and it was clear neither of us knew what to do, pondering our $6+ fate for generic brand stuff.
Is this what passes for new, disruptionary journalism these days? That felt like a half-researched blog post and added zero analysis or context. It was basically a string of unconnected tweet-style factoids.
$40,000 for every man, woman and child was printed for corona stimulus. $13 trillion total. If you're wondering why all this inflation happened, it's pretty simple cause and effect.
Ham, bread, etc.. have all gone up 30%. Which means at least half of the 60% increase in the price of eggs can be attributed to inflation. That is significant.
It looks like Biden's contribution is about $2 trillion to families and individuals. Counting the previous administration: another $2 trillion to businesses, $1 trillion to state and local, and $1 trillion to healthcare and other programs, for about $5-6 trillion total.
Worst case, that's about $18,000 per capita for 332 million people in the US. Best case, more like $6,000, since much of the stimulus was in the form of payroll loans that businesses were supposed to pay back, although much of that has been forgiven. Without knowing more details, the best I can estimate is the logarithmic mean, which is about $11,000. Spread over 3 years, that's just under $4,000 per capita per year.
Note that this is less than the $3,000 per year that I got in Pell grants to attend college in the late 90s, when money was worth about twice what it's worth today. At a $23 trillion US GDP, there's $70,000 per capita to play with, so $4,000 extra per year would raise per capita income by 5.7%. High yes, but not much higher than a typical 3% inflation. Especially when much of the world was out of work for a year or two during the pandemic.
The real culprit is corporate price gouging and speculation:
I noticed that Google and even DuckDuckGo have ranked this information so low that hysterical headlines totally dominate search results. It will be interesting to see how investigative journalism traces these knee-jerk headlines to their sources. Although I doubt that any titans of industry or politicians will be unmasked before the next election.
Capitalism still works. You can only price gouge where you have a monopoly and unless you're proposing some massive intra/inter-industry wide conspiracy the answer is still simple inflation.
You aren't wrong, let's start with that. But I think we might be talking past one another.
I did a deep dive this morning on the Federal Reserve's contribution to inflation, and it looks to me like interest rate hikes contradict quantitative easing. I think they had no choice but to lend more money during the pandemic, or else we might have faced the total loss of personal savings and a global depression. So they made up for that by raising interest rates later in an attempt to slow inflation. We can argue about the amounts, but their $7 trillion contribution just isn't that much when measured against the US's $23 trillion GDP IMHO.
I also stumbled onto an interesting insight. Most of our economic policies since Reagan have followed Milton Friedman. That's where the Fed's quantitative easing comes in, because it's based on the quantity theory of money (QTM) from David Hume and John Stuart Mill:
Keynesian economics (an alternative approach) rejects QTM and says that inflation comes from demand-pull and cost-push. To me this is self-evident, because even with no change in money supply, prices will rise due to increased demand when supply decreases because people are out of work.
Just so we're both on the same page, here's an alternative interpretation of inflation from the Reserve Bank of Australia, which examines demand-pull, cost-push and inflation expectations instead of QTM:
Although they practiced quantitative easing in 2022 just like we did, and reached a similar 7% inflation rate. Which seems to indicate that they had no choice, meaning that inflation was structural outside the US too, and not due to a specific economic or political approach.
Notably, China began flirting with Keynesian economics in the late 90s. Here's an opinion piece from fee.org, which hosts the one I found supporting your initial argument:
So you say that capitalism still works, but this data challenges that assumption on a number of levels.
IMHO the financial elites of the world are effectively gamblers who make long bets on how this will all play out. Based on these figures, where are they most likely to place their bets for the best return? China and the developing nations it influences.
The propaganda against progressivism, socialism and communism is a knee-jerk reaction to the two lost decades we've had in the time since, as US wages have stagnated and we've lost our industrial capacity, including the closing of 70,000 factories, which began when the George W. Bush administration did nothing to stop outsourcing, and pretty much endorsed it to enrich its wealthy contributors with short-term gains:
The US is gradually losing its petro-dollar dominance and will probably lose its global policing and empire-building abilities by the middle of this century. We'll have to start producing and paying our own way again, not just run huge trade deficits and continue importing cheap goods. A similar thing happened when England lost its colonies.
So now we're colonizing ourselves in the search for cheap labor. At least we were until the pandemic, but people woke up. Now we see how wealth comes mostly from being born with it or skimming it from workers. A point proven every day by our leading billionaires.
If wealth doesn't come from hard work or saving, that creates cognitive dissonance. Which is the best explanation I can find for stuff like the former president's election.
And that's the real danger in all of this. Not that the US might adopt democratic socialism, but that exploited and disenfranchised workers around the world could elect authoritarian leaders in a misguided attempt to thwart their oppression, which could lead to WWIII.
So price gouging doesn't come just from monopoly, but from the wealthy elites created by those monopolies who effectively control our government now. They're the conspiracy. They could use their wealth to alleviate human suffering, but they're still asleep. In other words, there's nobody at the wheel advocating for progressive change who has the means to actually enact it. Only outreach and organizing can do that. The fate of the world quite literally depends on it.
Anyway, I'm well outside my wheelhouse here, and we're below the fold so nobody will probably ever read this anyway. But I hope this clears up my position. I have no terse way to defend it, because the evidence is vast and suppressed by the mainstream media and wealthy elites who don't benefit from a reduction in wealth inequality.
Edit: I re-read your original comment, and maybe we both agree that it would have been more effective to just give everyone the $40,000 directly? Just like during the housing bubble popping in 2008, when people needed a few thousand dollars to make their mortgage payments, but the government gave the money to the banks instead, which prolonged the recession. To not print the money is not a viable option IMHO, for the reasons I stated above.
It's a long response and I appreciate you putting the effort into it. Half way through you start making some predictions that I don't quite agree with. A lot of your argument hinges on trade which I don't as a huge deal for the US. The import/export ratio is 0.77 which is fine, there is a deficit but it is relatively low compared to GDP. Actually if you take imports/exports and compare it to GDP, US is one of the lowest in the world.
This is important as it really underscores what a small part trade is to our economy compared to other nations. America's manufacturing output is still at record levels despite less people working in manufacturing. That is part of why our GDP is so high, the productivity of a single person is constantly increasing with technology.
I also disagree the 'elites can use their wealth to alleviate human suffering'. The elites, billionaires, etc.. do not have enough money between them to pay for better hospitals, schools, fair laws, etc.. They also don't have the ability to control prices as they're constantly competing with each other. They are a lot less powerful than you think.
The changes happening in society are more often than not capitalism itself balancing limited resources the best it can. Society is massively complex, way out of scope for any single human to understand or control. The fed and legislature printing money disrupts that self regulating process.
Ya I kinda winced after writing it. I tend to reason about things divergently and tie together different concepts, but economics has a way of turning into epicycles the more deeply it's analyzed. Most of the time it seems like people almost reach a common understanding, or agree to disagree, then incorporate what they've learned into their mental model for the next debate. It evolves.
What triggers me about this stuff is power imbalance. After I got out of school, I moved furniture for 3 years in the early 2000s around the time of the Dot Bomb, 9/11 and wars in the Middle East. I worked harder physically than some people do over a lifetime. But I had no money. Then I had a job repairing computers for 3 years during the housing bubble pop. I repaired up to 3-8 computers per day, 6 days per week sometimes, and I had no money. I've had countless software projects fail to generate income, and again, I had no money.
Meanwhile I watched my employers throw around vast sums. It costs more to fill a semi truck with fuel than to pay lumpers to load and unload it all day. Heating a warehouse costs a small fortune. My bosses bought the strip mall we worked in while we were coming up short in pay $100 every month. I experienced the endless insults inflicted on labor firsthand.
It wasn't until I was exposed to New Age philosophy in the late 2010s and the pandemic that I started getting over myself. I realize now that my struggles were something that I chose to take on for their experience in this life. I let others dictate my time and didn't communicate my needs or set boundaries, and learned the hard way how personal growth works.
What I'm getting at is that we all let the wealthy be wealthy at our pleasure. We could turn the tables at any time, but we don't. Why is that?
So what I mean about elites alleviating suffering, is that they could do it without doing anything at all, simply through messaging and culture and doing the shadow work to understand why they hoard wealth to such a degree. They could steer us away from subjugation and exploitation towards egalitarianism and self-actualization. But they're ok with skimming 3/4 of productivity from their workers. And it's not even always their fault, because that's just how business works under capitalism. They're every bit as trapped as we are, if we look at metrics like leisure time. In fact, they may be even more trapped, because their material comfort blinds them to the plight of others. Which touches on the religious aspect of all of this, how for whatever reason humans tend to put themselves in The Matrix to live up to external expectation. That's a lot to unpack, so I'll leave it at that.
Good point about trade, I agree that something has always bothered me about people harping on about the trade deficit. Probably what's going on is that we don't have an economic measure for stability. Countries love to do business with the US because it's reliable. They make the products and get paid, so it may be worth doing even at a loss. We forget how difficult it is for them to make money locally. But in fairness, we also forget how our lack of fair trade policies impacts their ability to do business. Again, it evolves.
The fed bothers me too, for what it's worth. I don't think it's right that some people are able to print money arbitrarily, while others are stuck in zero-sum games. Like, why should banks get bailed out while we all have to go bankrupt? That's fundamentally discrimination against the poor, performed under the guise of protecting the poor from economic downturns. We can't stop the banks, and maybe they won't let us have UBI, but maybe we could vote for the government to provide low-interest loans of perhaps $10,000 to create competition. Or maybe that would create its own problems, I don't know. But access to capital is literally the single most important thing under capitalism, and that's being denied to millions of hardworking people in our society right now for.. reasons.
Anyway, I have no real argument to make here. It's been good chatting, and thanks for not jumping all over me about some technicality I overlooked! I like to think of this stuff as breadcrumbs for further thought, not solutions wrapped in a bow.
Giving away money doesn't cause inflation. Printing money does though. If he was printing money specifically to finance this it would be causing extra inflation.
> Using the relationship in Figure 1, we calculate this as an increase of the PCE price level from 295.7 to a midpoint of estimates of 300.2, plus or minus 0.9.
> Expectation of additional debt forgiveness programs evokes a moral hazard incentive for college students to take out more loans and for universities to increase tuition rates.1 To the extent that inflation is inherently persistent, any initial price level increase would also lead to sustained inflation over the near future.
Wouldn't it be lovely if it was for every one of those people, realistically it was per.
In a vacuum it might be simple cause and effect, but nothing about the global situation in the past few years is simple. Money printing certainly had a part to play in inflation, but peeling it off from all the other factors and labeling it as the main culprit is kind of just mental gymnastics.
I always thought for a superb, tasty package of nutrition, eggs were ridiculously cheap. Now that more producers are getting into the free-range business, prices have naturally (no pun intended) risen. However, the recent bird-flu epidemic (maybe it's even a pandemic at this point) has resulted in large chicken culls and driven prices up. There's nary an egg case to be seen at Costco, a thing I haven't witnessed in 25 years.
Well, is it just eggs? Or is everything 60% more expensive? That will be a problem. I know that when I go out to eat, the bill seems to be about twice what I remember it being even a year ago.
Well, the inflation of the last year is not a secret. But this article is specifically about eggs. For the end consumer, it is of course a product that by itself is consumed only in moderate quantities, although fried eggs for breakfast is a much more common thing to have in the US than in a lot of other Western countries.
However, eggs are of course used in the preparation of a lot of other products that are regularly consumed (pasta, baked goods,...). Thus an increase in the price of eggs alone would have an effect on the price of those products too, but with eggs being only one of a number of ingredients, that would still be a moderate increase.
The raise in prices you see is across the board is due to _everything_ having become more expensive, not just an after-effect from pricier eggs.
But does it have the beefy smell which will be very odd in baked goods that is not savory, like bread? I recently broke down a tenderloin and came away with nearly 3 pounds of clean beef fat: pure white, firm, no connective tissue. I thought of freezing it but couldn't come up with an application, and it would be one more half-ass attempt to up-cycle something that has no modern use, so I chucked it. It's supposed to be very good for fries, but I have reclaimed duck fat for fries already. There's also a lingering doubt in my mind whether or not animal fat, especially beef fat, in our diet contributes to arterial plaque and :waves hands: things like that.
Next time you break down some beef you could try a taste of the melted tallow and see what you think. Mine doesn't taste beefy (IMO) but I go through some effort to filter it so that it keeps for a long time.
I talked to a farmer yesterday who said (at least in the US) it is bird flu. For some reason, the layers seem to have been hit harder than the boilers.
When bird flu shows up in an area, the only way to stop it is to cull the entire flock. Broiler chickens go from hatch -> slaughter in as little as 8 or 9 weeks. Hens need closer to 5 months before they start laying eggs. It just takes longer for the stores of hens to be replenished.
I was just in Vegas and the Flamingo didn't even have their birds out in display because of avian flu. The different bird species (including flamingos, natch) are all quarantined from each other somewhere else.
In pre-covid 2020, some grocery stores around here would have eggs for $0.80 a dozen from time to time. Typical prices were $1.00 - $1.20. Now it's not uncommon for them to be $5.00 a dozen. At the stores here they are be about 2x what they cost last year - not 60%.
I've put off getting chickens because eggs have been so cheap, but it's probably something I'll be doing soon.
If you can get them. My local trader joes has been completely out of stock of eggs for about a month now. So much so that they moved the display to another fridge so that they could use the space for other items. That other fridge is now sitting there empty as well.
I've been using flaxseed and tapioca flour egg replacers for years- they're easy to use and cheap. They're also great if you're looking to reduce cholesterol. This could be a time to shine for egg replacement products like JUST Egg, however it is quite simple to make your own at home.
At Trader Joe's the eggs have not budged on price, however the supply is limited. If you want eggs, you have to get there within an hour of opening, and you're limited to 2 dozen per person. They're likely paying the same amount wholesale and simply getting fewer eggs to sell for retail.
I think the cheapest near me in Boston is Walmart, where it was about $4.39/dozen a week or so ago (seems to be $4.85/dozen now) , but seeing a lot of local supermarkets where the cheapest is $6.49/dozen it really made me think back to pre-pandemic.
I think right around 4 years ago, maybe just before (52 months), I could get a dozen at ALDI for $0.69-0.79 at times. Though I bet if I went to ALDI today it wouldn’t be less than $4.
Inflation certainly hasn’t helped, and then with the 50 million plus birds culled, the difference has been stark. Takes time to recoup that stock of hens, assuming some of the smaller farms that were suppliers didn’t go belly up in the aftermath.
Only 60%? You lucky guys, here in Europe it's like 150% minimum if you compare best available promo before and now. I could buy 30 eggs before for 2-2.5EUR year ago in promo, now the cheapest 30 pack in promo is like 5.5-6EUR.
Life hack: weigh cartons of eggs (Jumbo and any other sizes), then calculate the cost per ounce (or whatever). Jumbo eggs are often a real bargain (but you may need to adjust recipes).
Genuine question. Does this mean that the average person can start a chicken farm today and earn massive profits? What is stopping an enterprising person from grabbing those profits?
The average person doesn't have room for a sufficient sized chicken coop. The average person doesn't have the wherewithal to get eggs to market. The average person can't efficiently produce eggs in any sort of quantity to satisfy market demand. The average person hasn't invested in quality control nor in packaging. Simply put, the average person can't do much to take advantage of any short-term pricing issues. In the long term this will settle, so any short-term investments that the average person will make will not be recooped (see what I did there).
The entire worldwide industry is dealing with a pathogen (bird flu). There is a large upfront capital capital cost to acquire industrial scale chicken raising equipment and facilities, plus time to raise the new chickens (6 months from hatchling to maturity).
In that time we could very well go from scarcity to glut with current producers as bird flu works itself out and they regain capacity. And it’s not like you wouldn’t be subject to your flock(?) of chickens getting the disease.
That’s not too say there isn’t opportunity here (there might be) or that people aren’t reacting to it (my brother in law just repopulated his home coop), but in general agriculture is a highly competitive business with low margin’s and “obvious” profit opportunities are riskier than they appear.
This would only really be implied if the price increase was just because the current egg producers have increased their price to take more profit. If the price increase come because producer's costs have risen, there's no reason to believe a new entrant would be more profitable.
Of course you know the joke about two economists walking through a busy train station. One points out a $20 bill on the ground, the other says it's obviously fake, because if it wasn't someone would have picked it up already
Chickens grow relatively quickly. By the time you brought your new farm online, the existing ones would have recovered. Chickens grow exponentially, infrastructure grows linearly (if that) in money invested.
because building the infrastructure takes N period of time and X cost.
possible the infrastructure won't be complete before prices go down.
possible that prices will go down before you recoup the costs.
On the other hand, depending where you live and local rules, it is easy to have a few layer chickens for eggs. Having 4 or 5 chickens can mean 3 eggs a day which can keep you supplied. Costs would be a coop, food, water, and chicks. Layer feed where I live is 18 bucks for 50 lbs which can last for quite a while with that small number of chickens.
The same thing that created the shortage in the first place: USDA regulations. If you want laying hens for personal use, no problem. As soon as you go commercial you have to follow all the rules.
Edit: The takeaway is answering the post I'm replying to as to why anyone can't just start selling eggs.
Edit edit: Child's axe-grinding notwithstanding, I really am just pointing out that USDA regulations are why the average person can't just start selling eggs. That's merely a descriptive statement, and in no way implies "all regulations are bad," which is, frankly, a level of discourse posters here should aim higher than.
What is the takeaway from your comment, it’s unclear.
Edit: OP replied to this comment as an edit to their original, that makes it very awkward to actually respond to their reply. The reply also didn’t address the points because it amounted to saying “the take away is that I replied to someone”.
That comment appears to be an “all regulations are by definition bad!” viewpoint. Please explain What usda regulation caused the shortage? Was it new? If not, why did it not cause the shortage previously. Those clarifying details should be easy to provide presuming it wasn’t a knee jerk comment.
Irrespective of the content of any given regulation, it will slow down, cost money to adapt to, and therefore cause problems with supply.
You have to hire a lawer who follows these things, interprets them. Then you have to craft new changes in the way you do things (no matter what things you do or how) to adapt, and you have to also signal that so you won't get audited/inspected (which is a huge cost in time & resources even if there are 0 violations).
And that's before the cost of the actual regulation.
I like how regulations got rid of lead paint, got rid of LA’s pea soup smog, stopped rivers from being so polluted they’d catch fire, and brought back the American eagle. Just a few examples.
a reactionary “all regulation bad” view is too simplistic and doesn’t make for good discourses.
but what do I know, I must be biased because I’m not a fan of asbestos.
I assume it was to make me laugh, which it did. Nobody actually thinks "regulations are bad." The point that is being humorously made is that these things have significant trade-offs and you're pretending not to get it. And I have to compliment you on playing the straight man in the exchange, it wouldn't have been nearly so funny without your participation!
We saw the same thing in early LAN engineering when Ethernet fought it out with Token Ring. Oversimplifying a bit: Token Ring provided a highly regulated guaranteed delivery protocol with lots of complexity and overhead and Ethernet just spurted packets out onto the wire and let the nodes figure out collisions. Can you guess which one is considerably more performant and easier to implement? Even so, Ethernet still has plenty of rules and complexity, just considerably less than Token Ring.
> Literally half the political commentary in the nation talks like all regs are bad, not just a matter of trade offs.
Don't be so condescending and you might notice that commenters here are quite a bit above that level.
Since you mention, "Yes" could be a nuclear tier rhetorical slogan. "What do you stand for?" "Yes!" Who can't get behind that positive can do attitude!? I don't know what a regan is, but I'm happy to help him, her, or it out at my standard consulting rate.
I'd summarize it like so: while it is theoretically possible fore regulation to be net-positive, it is vastly net-negative on average and especially cumulative. And we aren't able or willing to figure out which ones are positive/negative beforehand, so zero new regulation would be the optimal strategy.
I think for the sake of the Science we should try random regulation too. Maybe one state could use USDA regulations and another could use whatever ChatGPT comes up with and we A/B test.
Plus, we need to hold all other variables equal, so we can be sure what the causation is. And best of all we should use the gold standard, randomized controlled trials. With this method, some states/countries get randomly selected to implement a policy, but they don't even know about it, and to make it double blind, we also don't know about it until after the trial.
> If you want laying hens for personal use, no problem
Actually, even then, you'll have a problem - not from the USDA, but from your local zoning board/HOA/anybody in the government your neighbors can get in touch with.
Yeah, it's not just eggs. My grocery bill has definitely been greatly outpacing the official inflation figures, which are already high. Double or triple that rate, I'd say.
I dunno what else is in the bucket they use to calculate it. Maybe that other stuff is cheap (TVs? Furniture? Other stuff I don't need to buy all the time, I suppose?). I've always felt like grocery costs were going up quite a bit faster than inflation, since I started shopping for my own groceries in the early '00s. Like, they definitely weren't rising at merely 2-3%/yr in the pre-Covid years. It's just super-painful now because the increases are so extreme.
Question is how you get people who aren’t seeing large price increases to join such an app. It’s easy to imagine a world where only the people above the mean in inflation search something like that out, giving off a false impression of numbers being cooked by institutions that use more complete methods.
Just have to add a bit of value in some way. For example, if I could just take a picture of my receipt after shopping, and a 'budget' is filled out for me automatically, so I can track my spending, I'd use the hell out of that.
Doesn't have to be much if a value add. Just something.
Apparently the reason the price of eggs is so high is because A LOT of chickens had to be destroyed this year due to avian flu. We're talking millions of birds. Fewer chickens, less eggs, higher prices.
I mean that the published answer. There is another narrative where due to weak central governments that aren't interested in protecting consumers, companies have realized there is quite a bit more meat on the bone when it comes to margin if consumers have no real choice.
Companies see the federal line that we're in an inflationary environment and raise prices re-actively.
The commodity business is usually intensely competitive. Single firms don't have the market power to set prices. If firms are colluding they are breaking the law and I guess might have to pay a fine in 5 years or something.
I'd wager closer to 80-100%. They were $2-$3 last year. Now they are $4-$6. Where do people get this data from? Can't be actually going to the supermarket and writing down a price...
Mostly true for factory farms, though it doesn't have to be that way. My buddy has 20 hens and the coop he built them is like the Taj Mahal. They have a nice big run to play in and in the summer they get lots of fresh plants and veggies.
Insulated, heated, lighting... they seem to be quite happy and the eggs are delicious.
I am aware. I made sure my kids are aware too, shown them videos as part of their home schooling curriculum, so they won’t be blindsided by it when they’re older. I also told them that’s why they exist and it’s fine and I don’t care, because that’s what I and the vast majority of humanity believe.
and now it's expensive too! Financial outrage > Moral outrage
You're of course welcome to your position, but it's going to drown in this sea that is mostly about the cost. Also, there are many options for both eggs and meat that are absolutely not torture, so you've kind of put yourself at odds right out of the gate.
My understanding is that egg farmers need insurance and insurance is only issued if you follow the rules which means packed hen houses. If you want to be more humane, you risk losing your insurance. This is from casual conversations with egg-farming adjacent people.
In 1966, the price of eggs rose to a level that President Lyndon Johnson judged, God knows how, was too high. There were two culprits – supply and demand – and Johnson’s agriculture secretary told him there was not much that could be done. LBJ, however, was a can-do fellow who directed the US surgeon general to dampen demand by warning the nation about the hazards of cholesterol in eggs.