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It’s Weird That Eggs Were Ever Cheap
Americans’ egg addiction has been made possible only through billions of dollars of
technological
and infrastructural investment, as well as the immiseration of billions of animals.
The Atlantic
By Annie Lowrey
Feb 27, 2025 | 906 words | ★★★★★
Contemporary laying hens are likely descended from dinosaurs. (When you eat a dino-shaped chicken nugget, you eat the present injection-molded into the shape of the past, the child in the shape of the grandparent.) Humans began domesticating the birds thousands of years ago, and Christopher Columbus brought them to this continent in 1493.
Around the turn of the 20th century, as the supply chain started to transform, so did the chicken and the egg. Selective breeding cleaved the broiler bird from the laying hen, the former specialized to grow fat thighs and breasts, the latter specialized to pump out eggs. Chicken farming became an industry of its own, and egg farming another.
Specialized farmers moved their flocks indoors, reducing mortality rates. They figured out that lighting their barns spurred the birds into laying more eggs, and into laying them year-round. One farmer who rigged up a 50-watt bulb noted that his hens were “cackling and behaving in liveliest fashion,” laying eggs at all hours, as recounted in Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History. Farmers started to lift hens off the floor on wire-mesh systems, making barns easier to muck out and tamping down infection.
A spate of agricultural innovations helped move the newfound bounty to market. Multiple inventors came up with the egg carton early in the 20th century, meaning farmers no longer had to use baskets and crates. Conveyor belts, incubators, sandblasters for cleaning, and egg-grading machines for measuring helped commoditize the product. The nascent industry piggybacked on innovations in the meatpacking industry. Companies transporting sides of beef in refrigerated trucks and warehouses began accepting eggs too. Advances in chicken-rearing, sanitation, shipping, and packaging, as well as advertising, brought consumers around. By the 1960s, many Americans were eating commodity eggs, rather than ones produced by local farmers or hens in backyard hutches.
Industrialization made eggs cheap. But it came with a cost, particularly for the animals that produced them.
Male chicks have no role in egg production, so they are gassed, threshed, or crushed after hatching. Female chicks have their beaks trimmed without anesthetic. Once grown, most are placed in battery cages, each bird allotted 67 to 86 square inches of space, smaller than a piece of printer paper. In these crowded conditions, laying hens cannot preen, move around, or spread their wings. The wire in the cages is slanted to let the eggs roll out, making it hard for the chickens to settle.
Many birds on industrial farms show obvious signs of distress, afflicted by injury, osteoporosis, liver disease, and prolapse, as well as depression and social derangement. When their egg production drops, generally when the birds are a year or two old, they are gassed and turned into poultry meal, a main component of dog food.
The egg-production system imposes its own costs on consumers. In the 1970s, the country had thousands of small-scale egg farms, vying to win over customers with competitive prices and fresh quality. Today, 150 firms produce 95 percent of the country’s eggs, and a single one, Cal-Maine Foods, accounts for 20 percent of the market. The industry has consolidated vertically as well as horizontally. Two companies supply 90 percent of chicks. A single firm sets benchmark egg prices, hampering price discovery in the market. Consumer advocates and the courts have found evidence of price-fixing, price gouging, and “antitrust conspiracy”—made invisible on grocery-store shelves thanks to creative packaging and brand differentiation.
Of late, the centralization and industrialization of the industry have intensified the bird-flu crisis. The largest commercial egg producers own millions of birds. A single laying house holds as many as 350,000, serried into wire crates and stacked on top of one another. The virus spreads rapidly in such environments. USDA rules obligate farms to cull an entire flock if a single bird is infected; the government then compensates the farm for its losses. The culling policy helps stop the spread of the lethal virus, but the compensation policy reduces farms’ incentive to invest in smaller-scale, more humane, and safer animal-rearing practices that would limit the need for workers to kill so many birds in the first place.
Some egg producers have managed to eke out higher earnings despite the spread of bird flu, perhaps thanks to cartelization. From 2022 to 2023, retail egg prices tripled, noted Angela Huffman of Farm Action, a nonprofit advocating for small farms. She pointed to data indicating that prices would have gone up only 12 to 24 percent in a competitive market.
This week, the Trump administration laid out a five-point plan to get egg prices down: financing on-farm biosecurity upgrades, providing additional funds to farmers who have to cull their flocks, investing in bird-flu vaccines and therapeutics, eliminating regulations, and increasing foreign imports. Administration officials have critiqued the USDA culling policy, suggesting that vaccination and biosecurity measures should render it unnecessary.
Of the proposed policy measures, increasing imports would likely be the most effective. But Trump is waging a global trade war at the moment, and as the coronavirus pandemic demonstrated, companies need time and money to adjust their supply chains. “The system for egg production is both complex and time sensitive,” Emily Metz, the president of the American Egg Board, wrote in a statement. “It’s going to take a sustained period” for supply to catch up with demand.
Consumers aren’t happy, but the chickens are the ones really suffering. At least for protein-loving breakfast eaters, there are always beans.
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——新英文外刊，每日精选优质外刊文章，文章高质、话题丰富、时效新鲜，始于2016年3月。
