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?

To my mind there's no question that it's swung too far. But it's very easy for me to live in the country and say "oh I get all my fresh produce from the local farm!" when there are cities of millions of people that need feeding too. Scaling while retaining resiliency is not easy.

I live in a city and buy most of my fresh produce, meat, and dairy from local farms.

Which is not scalable for the entire big city. My parents are organic market gardeners, and there is simply no way that model could scale up enough to feed that many people cheaply.

Food budgets would have to go back to the 1940's or earlier - where they were a significant fraction of take home pay. Now they are almost a rounding error comparatively.

I don't necessarily think that would be a bad thing. A lot of the asset price inflation like homes can be tracked to food and consumer goods taking an increasingly lesser portion of the family budget. Re-balancing this seems wise to me.