No it’s not
It’s one of theost clearly visible symptoms of the disease, currently.
Yeah, 2 dollar cartons produced by egg factories with 20 chickens in a small box is also not right, doh, and yes, it got us where we are now.
But eggs shouldn’t have to cost 13+ USD either and at this point, that IS Trump’s fault. He could have and should have jumped on this, break up the big factories, push for smaller free range places, etc, but instead he is playing tyrant and war games.
My Canadian free range, grain fed eggs are way cheaper than the cheapest factory farmed American eggs…
Maybe look at your president if you don’t like the prices ?
I don’t know about the rest of you but every carton of eggs I see says “cage free”. Maybe that’s a regional thing, but it seems consumers have voted against factory farms. I don’t know if the term means anything and perhaps the first step is to make it so
Cage free sounds pretty good but if you look into what their lives are like it’s still really not great
“Cage Free” - Chickens are instead crammed into a large windowless enclosure and have essentially no room to move around.
“Free Range” - Large windowless enclosure has a small door that leads to a small patch of dirt that none of the chickens use.
Fucking thank you. We need the prices of eggs to be higher. Ethics has a cost
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-us-1.7450654
It’s not an unsolvable problem. Eggs in Canada are cheap and have remained cheap. The problem is with unchecked capitalism.
America is in the find out phase when it comes to fucking around with letting capitalism min max ‘efficiency’ over resiliency.
At the cost of still having the factory farming the original article talks about. Animal agriculture’s many problems are often worse in the US but don’t pretend they don’t exist elsewhere
Canada, however, remains the Western leader in hen confinement, with 83 percent of egg-laying hens still confined to battery cages as of last year [2021] – 27 percent in enriched cages, according to Mercy.
https://sentientmedia.org/enriched-versus-cage-free-eggs/
[In 2024] over 81% of Canada’s hens remain in “enriched” cages, which offer minimal improvements over traditional battery cages, restricting natural behaviours like wing flapping, perching, and dust bathing.
Yeah, factory farming is still shit, but there is a structural difference with allowing farms to concentrate to the level that American farms do. When an infectious disease hits, you cull a far greater proportion of the population.
Supply management doesn’t solve all ethical issues with eggs and dairy, but it is still a better system than unregulated free market capitalism.
Fortunately humans dont need to eat eggs
Humans don’t need to eat eggs directly, but eggs are a primary ingredient in what many consider to be staples. The best breads I make all contain eggs.
Lol bread is stupid simple to use an egg replacer
Correct, but what I’m saying is while people don’t NEED to eat eggs, eggs and egg protiens are already in a MULTITUDE of staple foods.
You have to go out of your way to exclude egg.
Fortunately as the price of eggs goes up, the opposite becomes true.
Using egg replacer will become the norm. That will.make foods healthier, cheaper, and less damaging to the climate.
If you know a baker that’s still using eggs, ask them to stop.
Yeah, fortunately fuck off.
You wanna talk about the ethics of eating meat, do it in a thread that cares and wants to talk about it.
Like my fucking god, you realize that you are exactly the Republican, abstinence-only, sex educator; butting your head into a conversation about harm reduction right?
You think your pithy dumbass comment will suddenly convince everyone to be vegan? No? Well then guess what, it’s not the clever solution you seem to think it is.
My, what passion. Hope you saved some for matters unrelated to enslavement/consumption of the innocent/defenseless creatures.
Google what harm reduction is if you need to hear yourself type so badly.
Amusing projection, but I was more keen on offering a moment you might pause and reflect on how you’re spending your time. I wish more people had, when I was an omnivore.
And much of the world is heading that way - not away from it. Think of it only a US problem at your own peril
The article is literally entirely about how Canada’s supply management system prevents us from moving that direction.
The article also doesn’t say they couldn’t or wouldn’t intensify operations any further. They talk about the state today, not down the line in the future
Going back to the original article’s idea, People demaning lower prices tends to put pressure on them to do so whenever prices rise for any reason. Regardless of being diseases related
See also the UK who’s historically claimed how they do things differently and now has over 1000 megafarms
The article also doesn’t say they couldn’t or wouldn’t intensify operations any further. They talk about the state today, not down the line in the future
Yes it does. It literally says that our supply management system is designed to spread out production across regions so that you can’t ever have that many eggs produced in a single place.
If you’re saying ‘well maybe Canada will throw out it’s supply management system and do something completely different’ then sure, literally anything can happen in the future, that’s not a meaningful point. The point is that Canada’s supply management system prioritizes production being distributed over greater areas which inherently leads to smaller farms and helps to prevent the spread of disease, and is a better system than the American one of mass concentration and racing to the bottom.
A supply chain management system is not the strong protection you might think it is. Factory farming has continued to consolidate with it in place. Especially with it being something that most all egg farms are not involved in to begin with
The number of chicken farms has declined 88 percent; while in the same period of time in the United States, the number of dairy farms dropped by 88 percent.[34][3] Supply-managed farms represent 8% to 13% of all farms in the country.[194]
[…]
Hall Findlay says that even with supply management, "[t]here has been more consolidation in dairy, poultry and eggs than in almost every other agricultural sector
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_and_poultry_supply_management_in_Canada#Policy
Clearly you can do stuff to bring agricultural prices down, BUT with the bird flu going around don’t expect miracles in egg prices. If somehow, magically, high egg prices are the only negative effect we will encounter related to bird flu, we are extremely lucky.
Well clearly a bait and switch article here.
The author doesn’t even get that nobody is actually demanding cheap eggs as a solution to any problem.
Pointing out “Where are the cheap eggs?” is a sarcastic question on several levels. We know that cheap eggs are meaningless, we know that the Executive Branch can do fuck all about the prices of eggs, and eggs are currently more expensive than before.
Maximizing profit got us into this mess. The problem isn’t with charging less.
The article makes good points about how corporate farming has introduced cruelty and disease. But vaccinations exist, and eggs were cheap before there was mass corporate farming.
Or we could just stop eating animals and burning fossil fuels? Its not hard to stop these endemic diseases and climate change
Expectations that it should be cheap drive up that consumption. Per capita consumption has gone up. It fundamentally can’t work at mass consumption and production levels we see today
The process of producing animal products is inherently quite inefficient. It takes quite a lot of feed to do so at scale and you lose a lot of that energy
That’s going to always push you towards factory farming at scale because it’s horrifying but more efficient resource wise (still many magnitudes less efficent than eating plants directly)
For some examples, lets look at something like beef production. Your best case you would think of is probably something like only grass-fed production. But there isn’t enough land to support anything close to current consumption
we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
Why the focus on “efficiency” with food? The purpose of food in human culture goes way beyond caloric efficiency, and honestly caloric efficiency is the last thing we should consider when discussing food supplies. We don’t want to, nor do we need to, get into a race to the bottom where we destroy all food culture because it turns out that eating bugs is the most space and resource efficient way to create food.
Not to mention the unspoken assumption when we start talking about food efficiency that the human population of earth should be maximized because we want to be efficient in our food consumption, therefore we should restrict our diet to the bare minimum so that we can support more people.
it turns out that eating bugs
I just don’t understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?
I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some “they” is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but…?
This is not some trivial difference. I talk about efficiency because we’re talking about substantial portions of entire global resources. The difference is many order of magnitudes between any animal products and plants. It’s enough to change the entire environment of our planet
I think that deserves far more weight than “culture”. Because something is tradition is no good reason to keep doing something
Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
And that land for instance can come from places like the Amazon rainforest
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation
Forbid food exports, problem solved. Americans can grow their own food and enjoy their own burgers on their own land just fine.
This is not a problem of exports. The US eats way animal products more per capita. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough
The land usage itself isn’t free either. It comes with costs
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
And that’s not to mention the emissions which are enough to make us miss climate targets on their own if we ignore them. We must address fossil fuels and animal agriculture
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
(emphasis mine)
even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target
since fossil fuel emissions are unlikely to be eliminated entirely, the food system isn’t exactly the issue. it’s still fossil fuels.
your ourworldindata link relies heavily on poore-nemecek, a paper I don’t trust at all. do you have another source?
We can look at individual foods themselves
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/
We can look at other modeling studies. Here’s a review of modeling studies
Our review showed that reductions above 70% of GHG emissions and land use, and 50% of water use, could be achieved by shifting typical Western diets to more environmentally sustainable dietary patterns. Medians of these impacts across all studies [Including studies with just partial changes in consumption] suggest possible reductions of between 20–30%.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0165797&emulatemode=2
We can also look at some specific modeling studies in specific countries. Numbers will slightly different from global picture since it is going to vary based on how much animal products are consumed there
For instance, here’s one looking at France in particular
Vegans’ diet emitted 78% less GHG, required 53% less energy and 67% less land occupation than omnivorous’ diet. These results are in line with several recent works documenting associations between dietary patterns and a set of environmental impacts (GHG emissions, land occupation, and water use) in modelled and observed data (8,10,20)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352550919304920
Here’s another study modeling for Romania in particular (though does indirectly use some from numbers from Poore, Nemecek). Romania consumes roughly half per capita as somewhere like the US and still sees quite high reductions with removing all animal products
With the reduction of 100% [of animal products in diets], the largest decrease is observed, equaling a total of 11,131,127 ha, reducing land use by 733,898 ha compared to the 50% scenario and by a total of 1,067,443 ha compared to the baseline. This represents almost the cumulative UAA of two large-sized counties in Romania, Arad and Timis
Environmental impact data using life cycle analysis (LCA) often do not include measures of variance, and therefore the reviewed studies did not provide confidence intervals for environmental impacts.
this is exactly my problem with poore-nemecek 2018. this analysis, unlike poore-nemecek, admits that it’s a major gap in the methodology, but still suffers from this gap.
i don’t have acces to the full text of your third paper. can you provide it?
Primary source data were collected and applied to commodity production statistics to calculate the indices required to compare the environmental impact of producing 1 kg of edible protein from kidney beans, almonds, eggs, chicken and beef. Inputs included land and water for raising animals and growing animal feed, total fuel, and total fertilizer and pesticide for growing the plant commodities and animal feed. Animal waste generated was computed for the animal commodities.
the actual data isn’t exposed in this link. do you have the full paper?
Author wanted to write an article decrying the egg industry (rightfully or not), and “the price of eggs” is so hot right now.
