yeah…
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I’m so fucking sick of hearing about egg prices. It’s the least important thing happening in this dumpster fire of a country right now. I still eat eggs everyday by the way. It costs like $2 more each week. Oh no.
It’s important because it’s the central promise of our system. Capitalism/Liberal Democracy/Whatever, it doesn’t promise equality, or world peace, or spiritual enlightenment: It promises that you can buy cheap consumer crap, and now it can’t even deliver that.
Exactly. Capitalism is only tolerable as long as the material conditions of the working class improve decade after decade. The average worker has been in steady decline for 50 years, but over the last 25 years nearly the entire working class has been suffering.
But hey! We aren’t talking about innocents now being slaughtered by our operations halfway across the world (again)… almost like a recurring theme…
The media is just playing to the electorate there, I’m afraid.
I watched the YouTube stream of a recent Maryland townhall: dark blue state, all Democrat Representatives and Senators speaking and taking questions, hosted by a Democrat county executive. Someone got up and confronted them about the immigrants abducted by ICE being held in Baltimore Harbor and not allowed to see their lawyers. Multiple people in the live chat started complaining that they weren’t discussing real issues like Social Security and Medicare. … Even though they had discussed it earlier. Americans are fundamentally selfish.
If you really think about it a ton of things are way too cheap so in a lot of scenarios it’s way cheaper to buy something new compared to repairing something old.
Think of a nail for example, from digging up some rocks that contain a bit more iron than other rocks, process them through many stages many of us (including me) have no idea, just to ship them around the planet. But if you have a bent or really messed up nail, everybody would just throw that refined material away because it’s cheaper than a cent.
Link to the actual article. It’s a good read, and in no way does it try to justify the raise in egg prices. It talks about the history of chicken and egg farming in the 20th century, the supply chain needed to bring as many eggs to consumers, and is critical of how the growing demand led to factory farming and horrible conditions for the chickens.
Stop bringing logic to these rage baiters. The vibe gets weird.
For such a long article it’s really disappointing they didn’t at all go into how chicken farmers themselves are ratfucked by contracts with processing plants and live below the poverty line if they don’t have a second job.
John Oliver had a good episode on it. It’s been almost 10 years (holy crap) since I’ve seen it, but I remember it being pretty accurate from my experience.
Also, apparently they started uploading full episodes because they uploaded this full episode last year.
I am not all that knowledgeable on the US egg industry, but wouldn’t this mainly just the small scale farmers that would be struggling?
As it mentioned in the article, the large companies will have the leverage to raise the prices (article describes it as cartelization). And are then encouraged to keep the scale with compensation and I guess subsidies.
My knowledge is more related to the meat side of things than the egg side honestly, but here’s a citation: 70 percent of chicken farmers with no other job live below the poverty line. That’s not people who work on a chicken farm (although they’re certainly not paid well either), that’s the people who own it.
These farms may technically be ‘small scale’ in that they aren’t owned by a giant corporation, but they often contain multiple times as many chickens as their European counterparts, in more crowded conditions, which is part of why disease spreads so fast.
For meat, the reason the farmers are in this mess is because separate companies buy and process the chicken, and they won’t buy from you if you don’t follow their arbitrary and frequently changing guidelines. They also don’t pay a given amount per pound, they pay you depending on the yields other chicken farmers got on their farms. And the farmers don’t have another place to sell their chickens, it’s these companies or nothing, as 20 companies control basically the entire US market.
Only female chickens makes egg. Male baby chickens gets throw in the meat grinder alive.
Praise to the EU. Male chicken shredding has been outlawed since 2022!
Edit: I was pattially wrong about this. The ban is only in effect in some of the members. Namely: Germany, France, Italy Luxemberg and Austria The EU itself is still in the process of deciding on such a law.
So what happens to them? Just a slightly more humane death before they reach a week old?
As far as I know most get sold to meat farms where they’re raised to about 1 year old with the other meat chickens and then slaughtered for meat. Still far from ideal, but way better than being shredded right after birth.
Get a load of this nerd READING like a massive NERD. Just join the rest of us free thinkers in judging by the cover.
that’s capitalism for ya
thank god you were here to defend it by pointing out the details about how the title is really correct not just sort of correct
Nice ad hominem.
The screenshot puts the title of the article out of context, and incorrectly frames The Atlantic as defending late stage capitalism. The body of the article is a review of the history of egg farming.
One could argue that Capitalism doesn’t have this problem and that the current USA is much closer to how the USSR and China opetate.
Canada has eggs. EU countries have eggs.
10 eggs in my EU country is from 2,5 to 3,5€, depending of the way they keep the chickens.
I suspect that in some countries supermarket cartels are using the American egg shortage being in the news to increase their margins.
One could also argue that the USDA killed like 12 million chickens under Biden.
Clearly not enough. Bird Flu kills 90% of infected birds, if culls and management had been more efficient then it wouldn’t have spread as much as it has.
I believe even as far as January over 134 Million poultry in the USA had perished and another 111 Million birds between February and March.
Canada, despite sharing borders and markets, has seen much lower casualty rates because their farms are smaller, about 25k birds average compared to US farms as large as 1 Million birds.
Whatevers going on in the USA is because of lack of government intervention, and it absolutely will continue to get worse under Trump.
Luckily there have been no new major outbreaks in March, leading to a decline in price, for now.
