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.
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 =\
> "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.
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_
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.
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 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.)
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room.
The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist
Coke gave millions to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation - both directly and through front groups like the American Beverage Association.
This picked up in 2011-2013 - when the Farm Bill and soda taxes were under consideration. https://nutritioninsight.com/news/cspi-report-criticizes-big...
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...
https://twitter.com/calleymeans/status/1609929026889711617
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.
Don't do Reddit, folks.
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 =\
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.
https://www.drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/lyndon-bain...
Unrelated:- I regard him as one of the best presidents.
Edit: No, this is the same text, under the name of George Will from the day before: https://nypost.com/2008/12/29/lbj-the-egg-czar-other-govt-he...
Weird...
Dead Comment
This hasn't been true for 18 years.
December 2022 news article says 52,695,450 chickens killed in the US alone. About the same number in Europe. 10 million in Japan.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140076426/what-we-know-about...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/11/business/bird-flu-japan-chick...
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?
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.)
Is there a typo?
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.
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.
https://abc7.com/egg-prices-in-california-avian-flu-bird-cag...
Deleted Comment
https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/pybshellegg.pdf
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.
Dead Comment
Although I suspect in short time we'll find out that the price hikes due to "bird flu" and "inflation" become... permanent.
I think there are normally ~400 million egg laying hens in the US and they've had to kill at least 44 million (filtered by 'table egg' and summed) [2]
[1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000708111
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/data-map-commercial.html
This strong flu will not be gone in a while and it speaks for the position that current large scale farming is not sustainable.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
The argument against backyard chickens would be health considerations i'd say, not cost. Curious.
Source: I come from a farming family.
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.
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.
I'm in the Southeastern US in a suburb of a major city.
Let’s pretend Costco needs 100 eggs.
Normally 500 eggs are produced, but this year only 300 were produced.
Costco has a guaranteed contract and receives their 100 eggs. Everyone else who hasn’t paid yet fights over the remaining eggs and prices rise.
Southwest Airlines was also known for fuel agreements that hedged against sudden price increases.
You can take a look at APU0000708111 and see how crazy it's been the past 2-3 months.
I think Costco locally sources their egg suppliers in some capacity which would explain these regional differences.
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.
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.
December 2022 news article says 52,695,450 chickens killed.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140076426/what-we-know-about...