yeah…
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.
If the growth goes away, people have to wonder what they are getting in exchange, in any system, not just capitalism. For example, this is the same expectation people have from the Communist Party in China. Most people will agree that givint up their freedoms was worth the huge improvement in quality of life.
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.
I would wager that some American demographics are a lot more selfish than others… I digress, because it doesn’t change two facts:
Media has long manufactured consent (even lying in doing so 🤯, see: Iraq) for various attrocities committed by the united states government, regardless of popular support.
And second, the gutting of social security by bypassing budget approvals (infraction of sep. of powers) and kidnapping of students based on ideology and without due process (just authortarianism) are part of the same issue currently afflicting the US. If for some reason individuals drive a cudgel between these issues, they’re more than either ignorant to or complicit with the issue they whatabout over.
But on that, given your anecdote is taken from a livestream chat, you may be underestimating just how much astroturfing takes place. We’ve known part of the playbook is to completely overwhelm our media intake, desaturating perceived potency of headlines and happenings. I would go as far to take wedging issues like that to be another tactic… as we’ve seen that strategy successfully work to drive flimsy democrats to 180 on LGBT rights.
If you assume the worst of the people you will need to work with, you won’t get to influence them enough to understand the nature of the issue at hand
Yeah, why don’t we just let the electoral college choose our next president again next time? I’m sure they’ll pick the best kin…president possible. I love how democracy works! We suffer so a hand full of people can make the right decision. Sometimes the hard decision. Like say we were brown and the decision was to fall or not to fall into an abyss. The electoral college would quickly see the situation and rescue us. Thanks to the electoral college the potholes get quickly filled and my kid’s school is not closing soon.
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.
Get a load of this nerd READING like a massive NERD. Just join the rest of us free thinkers in judging by the cover.
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.
Stop bringing logic to these rage baiters. The vibe gets weird.
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.
1 year old seems like a crazy long time. I thought most chickens were harvested in like 6 to 8 weeks.
I’m under the same impression, but I assume that since they arent meat chickens that they need the extra time to grow big enough to he harvested?
^France banning culling
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing
^in ovo sexing. Kind of like an abortion
Awesome. Thank you for the source. I knew of the technology a long while ago, but I had no idea that France and Germany both enforce its usage.
The best option is still to stop eating animal products, but this is still a win for overall animal welfare.
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.
You can get 15 at ~2,55€ where I live
What sick, uncivilized, heathen place is that where eggs sell by the 15!?¿! Infidels!!!
Different size cartons, that was the best per kg
Well in the USA they were about over $2/dozen in previous years and rose to an all time high of over $8/dozen a little while ago, so the 2.5 to 3.5 seems a bit inconsequential.
We had so many eggs this week the dogs got one as a treat lol.
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.
Don’t know about anyone else, but I was thinking they are an excellent, versatile and easily prepared protein source, dense with nutrients, which does not involve the taking of a life.
Edit: I’d been thinking of dumping social media entirely, due to the discouraging number of trolls, self-righteous moralists, snarks and ideologues, but thought it would be reddit that went – it really has become depressing to consider the future if redditors are indicative. Guess it’s not just reddit, mmm?
For the amusement of folk jumping to firm conclusions, I have raised chickens, lived on the Indian subcontinent (and you left out the fate of the Eid cows among Muslims – the streets run with blood), eat a lot of beans, and will remember in future that it is wisest to stick to my own company rather than set off people who don’t think I know how to use a search engine.
Tata.
Ohh but ii absolutely does involve taking many lifes These chickens do not tend to live long as they are cruelty breeds.
Get some chickens.
Chickens are just fragile anyway even free range. Go ahead and try to raise your own and tally up how many die between sexing to get female chicks and just environmental deaths. Of note, I’m no vegan, but the idea that egg eating is somehow morally superior to meat eating is kind of silly to me. Like milk, the things you do to create the conditions to collect plenty of it ain’t without harm and death.
It’d frankly be pretty wasteful to raise eggs or milk without occasionally eating whatever you cull. See India’s starving abandoned urban cattle eating trash for a practical example of that.
Edit; OP deleted their account citing me as a major reason when I never even replied to them, lol. Some folks get defensive about the damnedest things.
I remember my wife got hired by a neighbor to check on their backyard chickens for the weekend when they went out of town. She ended up slightly traumatized because one of them got eaten by a hawk or something between checks.
Weird to cite Indian cattle eating garbage as the example since they’re revered and autonomous due to Hindu faith. That’s as they intended and has nothing to do with farming.
It has everything to do with farming. Indian states can’t cull cattle by slaughter but produce an immense amount of milk and have female productive cows having a male calf roughly every 36 months(really less than that, but we’ll be conservative). Where the hell do you think these male calves are going if they can’t be slaughtered or killed? They’re largely “naturally” removed by starvation and dehydration. Real humane. They’re certainly not all ending up in sanctuaries. Same with the majority of unproductive female cattle. With a productive cow producing a calf roughly every year over their four to five year production period and the natural lifespan being around 20 years there’s a mathematical problem here that results in starving urban cattle. That or we entirely replace India’s human population with cattle.
There is definitely less chickens being killed per gram of protein of egg compared to meat so I don’t want to attack you, but there are a lot of chickens being killed because of how the industry is organised. I googled this for you:
"Typically, layer hens are killed after about a year of laying due to a decrease in their productivity. Because these hens are raised as a group with other birds of the same age, productivity can be evaluated on a group basis and not based on the individual bird. For this reason, even if an individual bird is still producing well they may still be culled simply because their cohort of hens has dropped in productivity.
… there are two different kinds of chickens: those raised for their meat and those raised to produce eggs. In chickens raised for meat, also known as “broiler” chickens, there is no differentiation based on sex, as these chickens are not generally allowed to live long enough to produce eggs. When it comes to birds raised for laying eggs, male chicks are unable to lay eggs, so serve no purpose in the industrial system that has produced them. Male chicks are routinely killed before they can grow to be more than a few days old." (https://www.farmforward.com/issues/animal-welfare/chick-culling/)
If you’d like to take less life’s, consider adding beans to your diet.
Here is another article: Eat Beans, Not Beings—10 Reasons to Stock Up on This Superfood https://www.peta2.com/lifestyle/beans/
They also have environmentally friendly packaging.
Uh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
We kill like 7 billion chicks annually because they are male and therefore can’t produce eggs.
I agree with you on the other points, but our farming industry is bonkers and full of killing.
Perhaps if you only buy your eggs from a local farmer or produce them yourself, but due to capitalism that’s not an option for every person
you’re going to be disappointed with the whole doesn’t involve taking a life thing, at least I hope you will be.
Yup, we kill billions of bacteria when we cook those delicious gametes.
“I didn’t even want those eggs in the first place and besides, they’re probably sour.”
Yeah war on eggs!! You’re a traitor if you eat eggs!!!
The amount of manufactured consent is too damn high!
Yep eggs are cheap because chickens shit them out profusely. It only takes a small flock of 4+ birds to make more than a family needs. I know several people with backyard coops and pens who have more eggs than they need, giving them away.
tl;dr: Is this meant to normalize higher egg prices?
Protein replacement for poor people who could not afford meat. I don’t know what to recommend now. No one wants to live on beans, that’s misery personified.
What’s wrong with beans and lentils?
They’re disgusting, not a source of all amino acids and give you diarrhea. Fuck em!
Lentils are the way: it’s cheap and pretty tasty as a stew or a curry !
Im sorry but lentils taste like dirt.
You’re meant to cook them
My sister once brought back lentils from a trip to Paris. These ones are different she said. These are special delicious lentils. They tasted the same as the disgusting lentil casserole I was fed as a child. Anything becomes edible with enough hot sauce and cheese but lentils always taste like dirt.
Man that must suck to have the lentils-taste-like-dirt gene, like 25% of the population does, apparently.
I just posted this link on another comment but the content validates me being considered a spammer imho
Eat Beans, Not Beings—10 Reasons to Stock Up on This Superfood https://www.peta2.com/lifestyle/beans/
what we do to the animals is misery personified.
Eat or be eaten.
lol
