Eggspensive

I bet no one has talked about this in my year away from Substack :)

Let’s Make A Deal

Since I have not been lurking a lot on Substack lately, forgive me if this topic is dead to you. I will get right to it and believe that for many of you this will be a different angle on eggs than what you’ve heard. If this just turns out to be a few minutes you won’t get back, I apologize in advance.

First, Let’s Agree On Something

One of my goals as I am in my sixties is to avoid becoming a crotchety old man like Clint Eastwood in the movie Gran Torino. Clint brings an earnestness to the phrase “get off my lawn”. I sometimes fear that the way I see the world is a narrower angle than I would like. I try to understand other’s perspective but sometimes that is hard. If any of my posts seem out there or from too narrow of an angle, please let me know. I try to ignore writing about stuff I haven’t thought through. The eggs thing, from near the beginning of the “inflation” we associate with them has seemed idiotic to me and the solution obvious. What has come to pass in the years since the H1N5 virus joined our world is not surprising. Life finds a way.

Some Oldies

Whether eggs or chicken, Americans are in love. I wrote about both of them in early 2023. If you are obsessed with gallus gallus domesticus, you might enjoy these.

Gallus Gallus Domesticus

Eggs

In one of those old posts one of my favorite Substackers checked in on the poll about how many eggs you eat in a year with an amazing / disturbing estimate. Now that eating eggs is something we must budget for, I will ask the same question I did a couple of years ago. I expect the counts will be down.

Chicken Living

Everyone knows eggs are expensive and I think most of us know there is a bird flu that is affecting the health of the bird flocks. In human history there has likely never been a worse time to be a chicken.

• Being a layer hen was never easy but after domestication at least they likely lived outdoors and had a coop to chill out in. Nowadays it is very tough. We raise a specific breed of chick and birth them in vast numbers. Life’s lottery for them is if you are born male, you are euthanized that same day. The females move on and become layer hens. In that circumstance they were fed and cared for and kept alive until their peak laying years were behind them. What makes this very moment in time so tough is the hens don’t often make it through their peak laying years thanks to the H1N5 virus.

• On the flip side for the special breed of optimized chicken we raise for meat, life is a full court press. Broilers and fryers get about 7 weeks. Roasters closer to 13 weeks. Free-range broilers for those of you with heightened awareness usually get an extra week and an organic broiler (Whole Foods?) gets about 12 weeks.

Domesticated Animals Were Doomed Anyhow

However you slice it, I would suppose if animals beyond us could read, the domesticated animals would not be fans of the Bible and might try to destroy every copy. That passage from Genesis 1:26:28 literally, in the case of the chickens, cooked their goose:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,

The story of chickens and hens turns on that unfortunate word dominion I suppose. The domesticated animals couldn’t catch a break from the beginning since the Torah was written on parchment made from the “right” animal, usually a calf, goat or deer. Any way you slice it the early books were not good for them.

My Take On Eggs

For a long time, I have believed the worst feature of humans is we get stuck. We’ve got these amazing brains but we also have the primitive early brain in the back. Once stupid s#$t gets into our heads thanks to anger, impulse, outrage — all the stuff we get from our primitive brain, change becomes very hard. The story of why eggs are expensive is pretty simple — quite a lot of us have stupid stuff stuck in our heads. I hope this is news to many of you or I have wasted your time. You won’t hear this from the people you entrusted the nation to last go-around or this time.

1. The layer hens live close together. The H1N5 bird flu is a wonder of nature.

2. It has been with us now heading into 3 years. Avian influenza outbreaks have been with us before — this one figured out how to survive winters.

3. H1N5 has a good chance to be a perennial virus. There are only a few things you can do with a virus (1) catch it and hope you survive or (2) hope it magically disappears (3) consult microbiologists and make a vaccine.

4. In the US we’ve figured out a 4th option. Try stuff like horse cream, take an anti-malarial or just attack microbiologists for making vaccines.

5. So what happens in cycles all around America with eggs is

   1. chicks are born and raised to mature layer hens ( we kill half because they are male)

   2. the layer hens start laying eggs — we hope for this window to be a long time. Often a flock suffers an outbreak of avian influenza. We often kill the whole flock and start all over again.

   3. no more layers — need for layer hens — return to step a

Each time (c) happens supply and demand kicks in and prices go up. This will continue. People will periodically write about it on Substack or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram. When Biden is President it is his fault. When Trump is President it is his fault. Neither of them are right — in fact it is shocking to me that the most advanced nation on earth has been stymied by egg prices. For now, this is merely a fault of IGNORANCE and the unwillingness to adjust your beliefs that are stuck in your head.

There are a GROWING NUMBER of places on Earth that have not accepted this idiotic cycle we are in with eggs. What do you think they’ve done?

1. They just want to raise eggs reliably. Earlier we discussed the three things you can do with a virus. Only option three can break the cycle we are in (vaccines provide immunity to viruses). Any other approach is mythology or faith / hope (belief in something absent evidence).

2. For about 4000 years since we wrote it down, we’ve largely embraced the dominion doctrine. Viruses / disease were punishment. We need to mend our ways. A guy named Edward Jenner back in 1797 was the turning point. He encouraged us to stop thinking things like viruses were punishment — they were just living things called viruses. Most challenges we face in life simply require us to change our thinking — not as easy as it sounds unfortunately.

3. Jenner created the first vaccine. They are the answer to viruses. I’m glad he didn’t have any horse cream.

4. So here’s the punchline. A growing number of countries around the world are vaccinating their birds (yeah they work despite what our soon to be HHS Secretary RFK Jr believes)

5. Prices have returned to normal and the flocks are not facing cycles of culling. I call it progress. The French are getting back to enjoying omelettes.

6. In some countries where they have been vaccinating the birds for a while, prices have returned to well under $1 a dozen — Make Eggs Cheap Again (MECA).

If you want to learn more about Edward Jenner, here’s another oldie.

Our Finest Hour

The Poll

So now that eggs are a luxury item, I thought the same poll I did last time could be interesting again.

The Real Fun

How high do egg prices get before we start doing economic substitution? Let’s get into that in the comments. How high do egg prices get before we just say meh. Around Thanksgiving I made a bunch of cookies of all sorts. Most every decent cookie recipe I know calls for eggs. I tend to double most recipes — lotsa eggs.

I still eat eggs but not as many as before. The picture I chose today was soft boiled. I rarely bothered to make soft-boiled eggs and thought they reach their zenith when offered in a perfect ramen. Almost a bit luxurious. Anyhow, since (1) I eat less eggs (2) have a contraption that makes egg prep easy with no mess (3) that has a soft boiled option — they’ve become my go-to way to make eggs. How about you? My favorite ways to make eggs now are

1. Soft boiled

2. Poached

3. scrambled with lots of stuff in them

4. hard boiled

5. baked in a cookie or a cake

The first four are the options with my egg maker. Everything else gets a pan dirty and requires extra prep.