An advocacy group dedicated to fighting corporate agriculture monopolies on Wednesday urged federal antitrust enforcers to take action against egg producers that the group accuses of taking advantage of the bird flu crisis in order to raise prices, inflate their profits, and consolidate their market power.
Funny thing I noticed today when I did some grocery shopping.
For most of my life I’ve always just purchased store brand large eggs. I’ve never really looked at the price, I need eggs and they’re cheap, but of course I took notice today that my usual eggs are now something like $5.49/dozen.
Then I look next to them to the fancier organic cage-free eggs and they’re 4.99/dozen.
Almost like if you don’t keep thousands of chickens crammed together in cages they’re less likely to pass bird flu around.
The cage free ones are still crammed together prettu tightly, and it’s still just as much an issue with bird flu. Thar isn’t why they’re cheaper.
They’re cheaper because the people making the eggs (the people with the barns and the chickens, I should say) are under contract with those large distributors that buy their eggs at a set price and then sell them for however high a price they want. The people with the chicken barns aren’t even getting any extra money from the spike in egg prices.
Those cage free eggs in the non store brand packaging are from more local farmers who are able to set their own prices on their own eggs.
As far as bird flu goes, there’s no reason to think it’s more likely in a cage free vs caged environment.