America’s Egg Crisis: Why I’m Not Panicking

Since January this year, a large-scale avian influenza outbreak has triggered a severe egg shortage across the United States. With eggs in short supply, many supermarkets have imposed purchase limits, and shelves are frequently bare. Meanwhile, egg prices have skyrocketed in response. Americans, long accustomed to cheap eggs every single day, are grumbling loudly.

This scene feels oddly familiar — after all, the last egg shortage was only two or three years ago. But for me, all of this has been news on social media and online forums, because I haven’t been affected myself. During the egg crisis in 2022, the ten hens in my backyard were at peak laying, collecting six to nine eggs a day, so we sailed through it unscathed. This time round, there are no hens still laying in my backyard, but because I know all the small organic farmers within a radius of several dozen miles who sell directly to consumers, my family’s four to five dozen eggs each week have never once gone unsupplied.

Even two days ago, I saw Valori — whom I call my egg lady — still advertising in our local community group that she had plenty of eggs to sell. Her organic free-range eggs go for $6 a dozen, less than comparable eggs at the supermarket.

I live in a small ranching town in Texas. I checked the local supermarkets, as well as a few in a larger town nearby with a population of around 120,000 — whether it was the most basic eggs, or organic or free-range ones, there was still a reasonable supply. Prices had ticked up slightly, by around 50 cents a dozen on average.

This shortage seems to have hit mainly California and the big cities of the East Coast. But even within California, it depends on where you live. My good friend Maya, who lives in central California, told me that her neighbour keeps backyard hens, and she has always bought eggs from her — at $6 less per dozen than the supermarket. Her neighbour’s hens are free-range outdoors, unaffected by the avian influenza caused by intensive farming, so she never worries about running out of eggs. Every supermarket around her had already put up signs reading “Two cartons per customer, please.”

My friend Nichole, who lives in central Pennsylvania, said she had just been to the supermarket, where even the most basic conventional non-organic eggs were going for $9 a dozen. “I simply couldn’t believe my eyes.”

Nichole, like me, has her own local “egg lady”. The two egg ladies are a world away from each other, but their standards are identical: free-range outdoors, fed organic feed. The price is even sweeter: $4 a dozen. Neither production nor price has been touched by avian influenza. Nichole says she is grateful her egg lady didn’t take advantage of the shortage to jack up prices, and is still selling eggs to her at the usual rate.

I checked in with the farming enthusiasts in my online circles, and the picture was strikingly consistent: those of us who had long ago established a local egg supply chain have been barely affected by the shortage.

As for the root cause of the American egg shortage, I have a clear answer: this is something that will inevitably recur time and again with intensive farming and centralised supply. Every recent egg shortage in the United States has erupted in an intensive factory farm. Modern people are always inclined to sing the praises of industrialised farming, treating it as a godsend that delivers cheap meat, eggs and dairy. Yet safety and hygiene scandals keep erupting in industrialised farming, laying bare just how fragile the modern food chain really is — and still, most people seem to cling to industrialised farming with something close to religious devotion.

As one of the minority who has turned away from supermarkets, I keep my own hens and buy free-range eggs from small organic farmers, driven by two main considerations.

The first is health. Long ago I came across study after study showing that the various nutrient levels in free-range eggs are far higher than in eggs from hens reared indoors. To cite just one example: in 2014, German scientists found that eggs from free-range hens contained 3.76 times more vitamin D3 than eggs from hens kept indoors.

We ordinary consumers can hardly be running lab tests on our eggs for nutritional content or veterinary drug residues, but our taste buds can serve almost as well as the instruments. Over the past four or five years, the eggs at my table have either come from the hens in our backyard or been bought from small farmers nearby who practise organic regenerative agriculture. On the rare occasions when I’ve had to buy eggs from the supermarket — even ones labelled organic — my children have complained that the supermarket eggs taste flat, lacking that rich, savoury flavour.

Why are supermarket eggs — even organic ones — so lacking in flavour? Look at the “business model” behind each, and the answer becomes clear. If I buy eggs from a supermarket, only a small fraction of the money I pay ever reaches the person who raised the hens. In this economic and logistics model, the only incentive farmers and poultry keepers have is to cut costs relentlessly in pursuit of maximum profit.

And as egg industry associations continue to lobby for changes in labelling standards, the labels on supermarket eggs have become little more than meaningless selling points. Take “cage-free” and “organic” — they sound lovely, but in reality, most supermarket eggs bearing those labels are produced in tightly sealed, factory-style environments; after all, they only need to meet the bare minimum of legal and certification requirements. Then they go through chlorine-washing baths and long-distance transport. In terms of nutritional value and taste, such eggs simply cannot compare with those from my own backyard hens.

The German study mentioned earlier lends further support to this point. The scientists conducted their trials using eggs from hens managed strictly under both indoor and free-range conditions, yet the free-range eggs they purchased from supermarkets turned out to have very low vitamin D content.

But if my money goes directly to the small farmers around me, I cut out every single middleman. Only in a model that directly rewards high-quality farming practices do farmers have the motivation to sustain high standards of husbandry.

And I believe that even setting money aside, for someone selling eggs, whether their customers are local people or not makes a world of difference in mindset. Wherever I go to buy eggs from a nearby farm, I can see the hens’ living conditions and what feed the farmer is giving them. That is a direct form of oversight. But more importantly, I believe that any producer feels a far greater sense of responsibility for food safety and quality toward “neighbours” who live in the same community. When a farmer’s customers are all strangers a thousand miles away, the sense of responsibility between those who produce food and those who consume it inevitably drops to almost nothing.

In fact, I think that very distance is the single biggest cause of modern food safety and quality problems. The people who produce food and those who consume it are strangers a thousand miles apart, with an enormous, complex supply chain wedged between them. In this model, food producers simply do not care whether the pesticide residues in their food will poison consumers, and consumers do not care whether the pesticides used will contaminate the land or endanger farmers’ health.

Second, because I hold to the principle that food production and distribution must be decentralised, and I believe that whether we look at food quality or economic justice, we should support small farmers more, rather than multinational food capital and the downstream links in those supply chains.

I believe that eating is a political act. For ordinary Americans, no matter how loud the quadrennial election headlines out of Washington may be, no matter which party takes power, nothing matters more than paying attention to one’s own local food ecosystem. During this egg shortage, most people simply sat and waited for the farming industry to return to normal, yet very few were willing to do what my friends and I have done — to stop depending on chain supermarkets as their sole source of food and take a little action to support the small farmers around them.

Let me close with a small incident from three years ago, one that solidified a conviction in me: only farming practices that follow nature are the true key to preventing poultry diseases.

Three years ago, my local friend B and I each had ten backyard hens. Mine were free-range in the backyard, kept within movable fencing that we relocated to a fresh patch of ground every few weeks. I bought a chicken coop to give them shelter at night, but it was one that could be shifted along with the fencing. My friend B, to save time and effort, had built a fixed coop that could not be moved, so the hens had very limited space to roam. We fed our hens the same organic feed and kitchen scraps.

Compared to an intensive poultry farm, the space in B’s coop was already generous — each hen had close to a square metre of room to move, with good light and ventilation. But when the summer heatwave hit, nine of her hens fell ill and died in a single blow, while my hens, ranging completely free outdoors, came through Texas’s scorching summer unscathed. Not one fell sick.

My experiences have only deepened my conviction: top-down policy, legislation and industry regulation alone cannot deliver food safety, let alone prevent the next egg crisis. Only when more people wake up — using their own money and actions to build a localised food system for production, transport and supply that is less vulnerable to domination by big capital — will we find a way to survive egg crises and the increasingly frequent food shortages that lie ahead.

Unless otherwise stated, all photos are by the author

Editor: Tianle