Eggs US – Price – Chart

Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper.

This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.

This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.

Really raises the question - should vital infrastructure, like food production, be built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency? Have things swung too far in one direction?

> 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'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.

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.