(Jakub Kapusnak via Unsplash)
“A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Oscar Wilde taught us. But in our current crisis of egg prices, have we learned anything?
Chickens and eggs have been on the menu of civilizations worldwide so long they have transcended their long-held status of dietary protein to become the most clichéd metaphor of riddles (“which came first”) jokes (“cross the road”) and all-around cowardice. Is there any other animal that can be fried, poached, or scrambled with other ingredients in both nascent and living, but strictly speaking, slaughtered, form?
So long as your precious one dozen is safely transported from store shelf to car seat to refrigerator shelf, nothing beats the convenience of eggs. Depending on how you like yours prepared, not even instant oatmeal takes less time to prepare. And yet nothing forces consumers to confront their relationship with a product quite like price. In the case of eggs we have political pressures put upon those supposedly in power. Yet we fail almost entirely to confront the implications of diet choices that put so much strain on farming and livestock conditions we rarely see or hear about.
Do we have the fortitude to admit that large-scale hatcheries contribute not only to the large-scale spread of avian flu that not only diminishes the supply of eggs, but also contributes to the misery of these birds while alive? Do we have the courage to ask the legitimate questions of whether or not a carnivorous diet contributes to the likelihood of future pandemics? In short, is the taste of an omelette worth not just the cost, but also the cruelty and the risk?
Depending on your age and generation vegan advocacy is either a foreign language, or eye-rollingly tiresome in its litany of self-righteous advocacy. There was a time not so long ago when publicity stunts by People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) drew praise and scorn in equal measure. For my part, I remember with misty nostalgia growing up in Salt Lake City among twenty-somethings who took their passion for animal rights to frightening, but strangely admirable, extremes. Local news reports of bombed fur factories, broken windows at leather stores, and vandalized burger joints dotted headlines during the mid-90s, before the time-sucking dawn of cell phone screens and influencers. A radical vegan diet often went hand-in-hand with radical, even violent, action.
In the wake of 9/11 a certain segment of Americans asked to what degree our status as an importer of oil from the Arab states of the Persian Gulf made us complicit. The mire of questions resulted in Michael Moore’s most incendiary documentary film, then answered by a mass of objections, accusations of misinformation, and disinformation. The price of eggs is not quite like the price of oil before the advent of electric vehicles. For the resourceful and the resilient, there will always be something else to eat for breakfast. Still, how interesting would it be if we let the high price of eggs direct our thoughts and actions beyond the simple matter of cost?
