US Egg Shortage: Why I’m Not Panicking

Since January this year, the US has faced widespread egg shortages due to avian flu. Because of the scarcity, many supermarkets have introduced purchase limits, and stockouts have become frequent. Meanwhile, egg prices have soared. Americans, accustomed to cheap eggs every day, have been voicing their frustration.

This scene feels familiar; after all, the last egg crisis occurred only two or three years ago. But for me, these are merely news stories from the media and the web, as I haven’t been affected personally. During the 2022 crisis, the ten hens in my backyard were at their peak, providing 6–9 eggs a day, so I weathered the storm easily. This time, I have no laying hens in my backyard, but since I am well-acquainted with organic smallholders selling direct to consumers within a few dozen miles, my family’s weekly requirement of 4–5 dozen eggs has remained steadily supplied.

Until two days ago, I saw Valori (whom I call my ‘egg lady’) advertising in our local community group, saying she had plenty of eggs. Her organic free-range eggs sell for $6 a dozen, cheaper than the equivalent in supermarkets.

I live in a ranching town in Texas. Looking at the supermarkets around me and those in a larger nearby city of 120,000 people, eggs—whether standard, organic, or free-range—are still relatively plentiful, though prices have crept up, by about $0.50 a dozen on average.

This shortage seems mainly concentrated in California and major East Coast cities. But even within California, the experience varies. My friend Maya, who lives in central California, says her neighbour keeps backyard chickens, and she always buys from them; the price is $6 a dozen cheaper than the supermarket. Her neighbour’s chickens are free-range outdoors and unaffected by the avian flu that plagues intensive farming, so she isn’t worried about running out. Meanwhile, every supermarket around her has put up signs saying ‘limit of two cartons of eggs per person’.

A friend in central Pennsylvania, Nichole, says she just visited the supermarket, and even the most basic non-organic eggs were $9 a dozen. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes.’

Like me, Nichole also has her own local ‘egg lady’. Though they are far apart, both egg ladies follow the same standards: free-range outdoors with organic feed. The price is even more attractive: $4 a dozen. Neither production nor price has been affected by the avian flu. Nichole says she’s grateful her egg lady hasn’t taken advantage of the shortage to hike prices, continuing to sell to her at the original rate.

I checked in with the farming enthusiasts in my social circle, and the consensus seems clear: those of us who have already established local egg supply chains are barely affected by the shortage.

As for the root cause of the US egg shortage, I have a clear answer: this is an inevitable, recurring event caused by centralised farming and supply. The recent crises in the US have all erupted in intensive factory farms. Modern society is used to praising industrial farming, believing that the cheap meat, eggs, and dairy provided by industrialisation are a boon to humanity. However, the frequent safety and hygiene incidents in industrial farming have long since exposed how fragile the modern food chain is, yet most people seem to maintain an almost religious obsession with industrialised agriculture.

As part of the minority, I abandoned the supermarket in favour of raising my own chickens and buying free-range eggs from organic smallholders, primarily for two reasons.

First is health. I read several studies long ago showing that various nutrients in free-range eggs are far higher than those in industrially raised eggs. For example, German scientists found in 2014 that the vitamin D3 content in outdoor free-range eggs was 3.76 times higher than that in indoor-raised eggs.

As ordinary consumers, we cannot simply go around testing for nutrients or veterinary drug residues, but our sense of taste can act similarly to an instrument. Over the last four or five years, the eggs in my house have either come from my backyard hens or from local organic regenerative farmers. On the few occasions I’ve had to buy from the supermarket, even those labelled ‘organic’, my children complain that the supermarket eggs do not taste as good or as rich.

Why is it that organic supermarket eggs lack that richness? If you look at the ‘business model’ of the two, it is easy to understand. If I buy eggs from a supermarket, only a small fraction of the money I pay reaches the poultry farmer. In this economic and logistical model, the only incentive for farmers and producers is to continuously cut costs to maximise profit.

And while industry associations lobby for legislative changes to standards, the labels on supermarket eggs become meaningless selling points. For instance, ‘cage-free’ and ‘organic’ sound wonderful, but most supermarket eggs with these labels are produced in cramped, factory-like environments; as long as they meet the minimum legal and certification requirements, it is considered sufficient. After being soaked in disinfectant and transported over long distances, such eggs cannot compare in nutritional value or flavour to those from my own backyard.

The German study mentioned earlier confirms this from another angle: while the eggs used for experimental testing were strictly managed as indoor or outdoor, the ‘free-range’ eggs purchased from supermarkets had very low vitamin D levels.

But if my money goes directly to the small-scale farmers in my community, all the middlemen can be cut out. It is only in this model of direct reward for high-quality farming practices that farmers have the incentive to maintain high standards of husbandry.

Moreover, I believe that regardless of financial return, whether a seller’s customers are local residents completely changes their mindset. No matter which nearby farm I buy eggs from, I can see the environment in which the chickens live and what feed the farmer is giving them. This provides a form of direct oversight. More importantly, I believe that any producer is more likely to feel a sense of responsibility for food safety and quality when their customers are “neighbours” living in the same area. When a farmer’s customers are strangers thousands of miles away, the producer’s sense of responsibility toward the consumer inevitably dwindles to almost nothing.

In fact, I believe this distance is the primary cause of food safety and quality issues in the modern world. The people producing the food and those consuming it are strangers separated by a vast and complex food transport supply chain. Under this model, the producer does not care whether pesticide residues in the food will poison the consumer, and the consumer does not care whether the use of pesticides will contaminate the land used for food production or harm the health of the farmers.

Secondly, I hold the belief that “food production and distribution must be decentralised”. Whether from the perspective of food quality or economic justice, we should provide more support to small-scale farmers rather than to multinational food corporations and the downstream links in their supply chains.

I believe that eating is a political act. For the average American, regardless of how noisy the Washington election news is every four years or which party takes power, focusing on one’s own local food ecosystem is far more important. During this egg shortage, most people simply sat idly by, waiting for the poultry industry to return to normal, yet few were willing, as my friends and I were, to stop relying on supermarket chains as their sole source of food and take action to support the small farmers in their own communities.

Finally, I want to share a small incident that happened three years ago. This experience solidified my belief that farming methods that align with nature are the only fundamental way to prevent avian diseases.

Three years ago, both my local friend B and I had ten backyard chickens. My chickens were kept in the backyard using mobile fencing, which I moved every few weeks. I bought a coop to provide them with shelter at night, but this coop could be moved along with the fencing. To save time and effort, my friend B built a fixed, non-mobile coop, which severely limited the chickens’ range of movement. We both fed our chickens the same organic feed and kitchen scraps.

Compared to intensive poultry farms, the living space in B’s coop was quite generous, with each chicken having nearly one square metre of space, along with good light and ventilation. However, when the summer heatwave hit, nine of her chickens suddenly fell ill and died, while my chickens—which were kept entirely outdoors in the open—survived the Texas summer heat without a single one falling ill.

These experiences have further convinced me that top-down policies, legislation, and industry regulations alone cannot ensure food safety, let alone prevent the next egg shortage. The only way to survive egg shortages and the increasingly frequent food scarcities of the future is for more people to awaken and use their own funds and actions to build a localised food production, transport, and supply system that is less susceptible to the control of large-scale capital.

Unless otherwise stated, all images are by the author

Editor: Tianle