What’s the deal with eggs?

Maybe you noticed the same thing. It started when I was at Costco and there were no eggs, and everyone was talking about how there were no eggs but that they had heard there were some eggs over at another Costco. I just went and got some at Safeway. Then there were the social media memes about the high cost of eggs. And then, the eggs I usually bought at Costco were gone so I got the other brands of eggs that I didn’t usually get. Really, overall, just some simmering disruption of the egg market from the consumer perspective. What’s the cause?

The reason seems to be a combination of increases in fuel costs, feed costs, labor costs, and packaging costs that are pretty standard as inflation has soured post-pandemic internationally. But, the rising costs are apparently also due to the biggest bird flu outbreak in history.

“Bird flu” came up before in 2009 or something, right? I mean, based on media, that’s sort of it. We generally have a dim recollection of bird flu going back a decade, and today there’s something going on with eggs. Since I’m currently in that fog of recollection myself, I decided to dig into this a bit.

Influenza refers to viruses that cause infectious disease across a range of animals. Influenza A mostly impacts birds, a wide range of animals, and humans. B and C primarily infect people, and D cattle and pigs. Bird flu is always circulating in the wild bird population, and the US has the leading detection system to help prevent the disease from working into commercial and backyard poultry.

This outbreak has spread south via migratory birds to South America, leading to events like 10,000 pelicans dying in Peru. 10,000 pelicans! As humans, we tend to think of “the flu” as it applies to us. We get sick, some of us die, we wash our hands, maybe wear a mask, get medicine at the store. It’s easy to forget that animals deal with it too, suffer, die, or recover.

Here in the US, avian flu has infected backyard and commercial flocks or birds in most states. The CDC has a report updated each week. If one bird tests positive, producers kill the whole flock to prevent spread. Good thing we don’t do that with people, eh? “Well Dave, you’ve tested positive for flu, so…..we’re gonna have to kill ya. Don’t struggle. Don’t fight it. Shoot you? No, no, we’re either going to spray you with a suffocating foam or lock you in a hot room until you die over the course of a few hours or days.”

Because that part is tricky. A producer might have millions of birds at one site that need to be killed. How do you quickly and cost-effectively kill millions of chickens or turkeys? You can’t wring a million necks, or chop off a million heads quickly, or shoot a million birds in the head with a .22. You could flash-freeze them, but that would surely be expensive. You could maybe gas them into unconsciousness with the same stuff we use on people (sevoflurane and desflurane in combination with nitrous oxide), which would be nice for the birds, but then you’d need to buy the gas, have it shipped, have a gas-dispensing system, and all that, which doesn’t seem cost effective. Maybe that’s a future option that we, as a species, can help subsidize to minimize suffering.

So what do they do? There seem to be three main methods. The seemingly most humane one is to seal up barns and pipe in carbon dioxide, so the birds lose consciousness before suffocating. Another option is to spray the birds with a suffocating water-based firefighting foam. This results in the whole barn being filled with foam up to a few feet, and 95% of the chickens suffocating in the foam within 7 minutes, all of them in 15 minutes after the fighters get tired of trying to escape. If neither of those methods will work, or the flock is too large, producers will seal up the barn, stopping airflow, adding heat if they can to speed up the process of killing birds via heatstroke, a process that takes several hours or even days.

So, when avian flu strikes commercial flocks, there’s the loss of the birds to the producer and economy, which is significant. The suffering and loss of life from the birds’ perspective, which is also significant. Then producers have to clean that all up and get the barn running again. Think about that. You’re a producer and you have a million dead birds in 3 feet of foam in your facility. How do you get that place up and running again?

There’s a whole procedure for that, not easy to find, and the first step is to “thoroughly disinfect all carcasses with Virkon® S and remove for burning or burying.” Imagine that task. How the hell do you thoroughly disinfect a million or so carcasses with anything unless you submerge them in it? From there you have to remove all materials, disinfect all surfaces, disinfect HVAC systems, and a bunch of other things to make the facility usable again. The costs must be huge, no matter who pays for them. Do they have insurance for that? Does USDA reimburse? If so, is the amount satisfactory? Either way, of course, we all pay for it, either in taxes or prices.

There was an outbreak in poultry in 2014-2015 where they had to kill 50 million birds. This time they’re up around 52 million and counting.

So, tough one there. We like eggs and chicken. But there sure is a lot of work and suffering that go into putting it on that grocery store shelf. Just like a lot of things, no easy answer. But interesting to learn a little more about it than “I can’t find no eggs” or “eggs expensive.” Personally, I do eat chicken maybe once a month, and eggs a few times a month, and also eat egg whites. But I don’t really have access to a local farm so buy that stuff at stores. Coming away from this, I think I’ll do what I can to support cage-free chicken production and more humane culling of populations (no idea how to do that), in addition to “supporting” producers not losing their shirts in cull events - but are they all mostly large corporations who don’t feel it anyway? How are smaller facilities impacted?

There are farms that are making huge strides in raising chickens and other animals humanely.