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310 points greenie_beans | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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yazaddaruvala ◴[] No.43109205[source]
Ok, so maybe a controversial opinion:

I've been buying local, pasture raised chickens for the last 10 years. I am very fortunate to have had the income to allow me to do so. I also don't eat that many eggs (roughly a dozen a month - so it hasn't been that expensive).

The price of my eggs was always between $8-$12 / dozen (including this weekend when I easily found and bought another 2 dozen). I get that I was buying "already expensive eggs", because apparently other people were buying eggs $2 / dozen.

However, to be frank, I'm not sure how people expect eggs to be so cheap. Taking into account the land, the water, the feed, the labor, the transportation all to create a dozen eggs, it must cost more than $2.

Clearly paying a little more for the eggs has allowed me to support farms which are robust to large shocks like this (both in terms of input costs and in terms of health of chickens). I really hope as a society we can all move away from the unsustainable farms and improve the economics of sustainable farming so that everyone can afford locally grown, healthy eggs for centuries to come.

In the meanwhile, there will be people who have to buy fewer eggs (either because of health regulations - or because reality checks will always exist like with market shocks right now).

Hopefully, after this crisis, through graduated health regulation we can cause a controlled increase to the floor price of unsustainably grown eggs, while also (through technology and economies of scale) reducing the floor price of locally sourced, sustainably grown eggs.

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1. maxerickson ◴[] No.43109898[source]
The store is happy to lose a dollar on the eggs to get you to stop there, it's not just about the production.