Eggs US – Price – Chart

> built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency

I think framing it as an either/or is a bit of a mental trap. They are sometimes in opposition, sometimes not.

For example, those farms which were not resilient are not maximizing their profits, since they've had more than a year of warning of avian flu. They were operating to minimize work and costs, not maximize profit, and they are losing out on a ton of it right now.

Those operations which built with resilience, or got lucky, are swimming in profits right now.

The issue with that reasoning is that it fails to take into account that risk is a commodity now. It's often more profitable to go for short term profit and offload your risk to an insurer who amortizes that monetary risk in a pool containing a bunch of other industries.

For critical services like food production, that's a problem. "Well, we don't have food, but it's okay because screw production went well" doesn't make sense socially, but our system makes it so monetarily.

I don’t think of it this way. I think the conventional producers were acting to maximize expected profits at the cost of increased volatility in outcomes. Most years these practices have been more profitable.

I'm not sure in what sense you mean risk is a commodity, and why it's a problem. I'm also unsure what changed to make it so now, as opposed to having ever been so.

Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. Those who did not take risks into account lost their bet. Eggs are priced higher for some, but are pretty much available everywhere still, and have not dipped below some sort of minimal level of availability. In California, past shortages were far far worse than this one, and even then the egg shortages were in no way catastrophic to the economy or health of humans.

Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine. Instead, our abundance of high calorie food is the biggest risk to the health of Americans.

So I would like to understand your point a bit more if you have the time to elaborate.

Conventional producers have been working to contain things like this for year. They don't all succeed, but this isn't the first time eggs have got expensive because of a bird flu, and they have been paying attention to what works. They don't remodel all barns at once to fix the issues, but they have been remodeling barns over the years to prevent this issue.

> Conventional producers have been working to contain things like this for years.

Sure. My point is, what optimizes for average production and profits doesn't necessarily optimize for worst case production and profits. There is a level of care that doesn't pay off most of the time.

> Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully.

I don't know why you're saying this. Imagine I'm investing.

If I "take risk into account" and select stocks anyways, I may lose a bunch of money one year. But I expect to make more on average than bonds.

Looking at a year where bonds excel compared to stocks doesn't mean that I failed to "take risk into account."

Likewise, a conventional producer of eggs that has now had a significant downturn in production may be having a bad year, but this doesn't mean that they're not following a profit maximizing strategy or not taking risk into account.

> Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine.

I think this is making the same kind of mistake: looking at today's outcome and assuming that reflects the risk picture.

We're not observing too much famine right now. But we could certainly have a more of a risk of the most catastrophic possible famines now because of things like monoculture, critical links in production, climate risk, etc. Just looking around and saying "all is great today" or "conventional egg producers are having trouble today" or "stocks are down 15% for the year" does not capture the picture of risk, particularly for rare events.

The best we can do is try to interpret sentinel events like this one and think about what else can happen.

I think the assumption they're making is that we want to guarantee a certain reliability of food, and that even if we have perfect insurance that pays out when there isn't enough food, we just have money, and no food.

That's a theoretical problem that could occur, but is extremely unlikely. The worst we'll see is what we have now (eggs are spendy) or a certain type of food disappearing for awhile (tomatoes one year were gone from almost all fast food places).

If we have to substitute one food for another for a year or two that's an inconvenience. But preventing famine by trying to guarantee that the price of eggs doesn't go up is likely far, far down the list. Better that money be spent on improving the supply chains and if necessary bulk storage of long-lasting caloric sources (cheese and flour reserves, perhaps).

Here's an idea. Let's get a large proportion of our calories from inefficient animal sources. Then if there is a widespread crop failure we can eat the breeding stock and then the animal feed.

That's generally what happens in Africa. It doesn't work as well in North America because consumers here are too rich to switch to barley and oats when wheat is expensive.

The problem in the USA is we produce about infinity billion times the calories we need.

If food was a problem in the US we wouldn't be putting corn in our cars or our cows.

Yes, ethanol is the American equivalent. If we ever have a food shortage due to widespread extreme weather or similar, the president can nix the ethanol mandate to eliminate the food shortage.

The world does not have caloric food insecurity. We might be insecure in terms of specific nutrients or specific foods, but the modern world is not insecure in terms of human food calories.