https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-us-1.7450654
It’s not an unsolvable problem. Eggs in Canada are cheap and have remained cheap. The problem is with unchecked capitalism.
America is in the find out phase when it comes to fucking around with letting capitalism min max ‘efficiency’ over resiliency.
At the cost of still having the factory farming the original article talks about. Animal agriculture’s many problems are often worse in the US but don’t pretend they don’t exist elsewhere
Canada, however, remains the Western leader in hen confinement, with 83 percent of egg-laying hens still confined to battery cages as of last year [2021] – 27 percent in enriched cages, according to Mercy.
https://sentientmedia.org/enriched-versus-cage-free-eggs/
[In 2024] over 81% of Canada’s hens remain in “enriched” cages, which offer minimal improvements over traditional battery cages, restricting natural behaviours like wing flapping, perching, and dust bathing.
Maximizing profit got us into this mess. The problem isn’t with charging less.
The article makes good points about how corporate farming has introduced cruelty and disease. But vaccinations exist, and eggs were cheap before there was mass corporate farming.
Expectations that it should be cheap drive up that consumption. Per capita consumption has gone up. It fundamentally can’t work at mass consumption and production levels we see today
The process of producing animal products is inherently quite inefficient. It takes quite a lot of feed to do so at scale and you lose a lot of that energy
That’s going to always push you towards factory farming at scale because it’s horrifying but more efficient resource wise (still many magnitudes less efficent than eating plants directly)
For some examples, lets look at something like beef production. Your best case you would think of is probably something like only grass-fed production. But there isn’t enough land to support anything close to current consumption
we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
Why the focus on “efficiency” with food? The purpose of food in human culture goes way beyond caloric efficiency, and honestly caloric efficiency is the last thing we should consider when discussing food supplies. We don’t want to, nor do we need to, get into a race to the bottom where we destroy all food culture because it turns out that eating bugs is the most space and resource efficient way to create food.
Not to mention the unspoken assumption when we start talking about food efficiency that the human population of earth should be maximized because we want to be efficient in our food consumption, therefore we should restrict our diet to the bare minimum so that we can support more people.
Author wanted to write an article decrying the egg industry (rightfully or not), and “the price of eggs” is so hot right now.
