Yes, egg prices, as a percentage are going up a lot, but as an absolute value? I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46. That isn't, by any measurement, a lot of money more than I would have paid a year ago.
Some restaurants are up charging for egg dishes although it's not widespread.
It's not the most back braking price fluctuations but it's one of the most obvious. I think the shortages are a lot more apparent than the prices themselves. And the fact it's fluctuating means it's on your mind even more as you wait out another sad, eggless week.
It’s not just the eggs, all grocery prices have gone up massively post covid. But eggs prices are easier to spot because they are super inflated thanks to bird flu, and are easy to understand as a necessity.
You don't think a family of 4 can get through a dozen eggs in a single meal?
> I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46.
This is literally your least expensive option and it's over the arbitrary $3-5 range you yourself defined.
And the eggs haven't been selling out before winter storms -- there haven't been any serious storms that anybody has "prepared" for, just regular snow. There's been absolutely no increase in price for milk or bread or anything else.
This is entirely because of bird flu, it's supply and demand, it's not price gouging.
I don't know why you're trying to convince yourself that the empty shelves at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are due to winter storms, or why you haven't noticed that eggs are $9 at your local bodega. Trader Joe's in Brooklyn even has signs explaining that the empty shelves are because of shortages from suppliers.
Again -- it's bird flu, pure and simple.
Now you can't buy a dozen of eggs in the stores around here for less than $6.
We go through a lot of eggs. That is a very big increase when you add it up throughout the year.
Interestingly, when my grandparents were really short on money in the 20th century, they resorted to eating only eggs to get by. It remained a healthy diet option for poor people until recently.
However eggs are high in a) Sat Fat b) Cholesterol.
Sat Fats cause increased LDL, and while dietary Cholesterol for many folks doesn't cause a rise in LDL, for some people who tend to be hyperabsorbers, it does.
So the knee-jerk comment that gets added anytime someone cautions about a high-egg diet isn't very accurate. I very politely suggested testing, and also said that if everything turns out OK then it's fine.
Also, the remarks people make about having “too many” eggs are such that you would think eating a large quantity of eggs would be the equivalent of ingesting arsenic, which is provably false with n=1. You only need 1 counter example to prove a universally quantified statement as false.
There was a historical situation involving tomatoes where people believed that they were inherently poisonous (because of past incidents of lead poisoning due to the tomato acid interacting with the lead in pewter plates). As I heard, one man observed that horses ate raw tomatoes without problems, so he had ate a tomato raw and was not poisoned, proving that they were not poisonous contrary to popular thought.
A more recent such case occurred at CSHL involving mm294 bacteria, where one of the research scientists licked a petrie dish containing mm294 bacteria to demonstrate that they were benign. I had heard the story as an intern at their DNA LC west years later. Some people initially expected him to become ill, but the matter had been accepted as settled in favor of the strain being benign when time passed and he did not. This is presumably why their education branch where I had been an intern used that strain to teach genetics to children (as they presumably believed that the children could not harm themselves by ingesting it should they breach laboratory protocols).
That said, the advice against eggs seems to be a relic of the highly debunked food pyramid, which catered to commercial interests rather than public welfare. I did not believe the health care providers who insisted on following the food pyramid in the 90s and history has shown them to be wrong. I will not believe remarks against eggs when they are contrary to actual empirical evidence. I have history on my side on this.