My Opinion Monday: $8-A-Dozen Eggs? Not Today, Thanks.
$8 for a dozen eggs? When I saw Jane Black’s post in The Atlantic last week I could not believe that anyone would pay that price. As I mulled it over this weekend I realized that I wasn’t even sure why these eggs were superior to normal eggs. And after re-reading the article I’m not sure they are. Or at least, I’m not sure they’re any healthier than the best organic cage-free eggs from the grocery store (under $3 a dozen at my store). The difference is that these oval wonders hail from a small local farm that is not caught up in the industrial food mill. This means, for one thing, no government subsidies, making it hard for the small environmentally-aware farmers to compete with the big guys by offering comparable prices.
But more than just making it difficult to compete, I think it also makes it difficult for the average person to understand. Why are the eggs $8 a dozen? Because the farm is smaller? Because their methods for taking care of chickens are more involved? Because the farmer doesn’t qualify for big tax breaks?
Umm…can you explain it to me again? How exactly does this affect me, the consumer? And why would I want to pay $8 for a dozen eggs? Just to help the guy out? Unlikely!
This is a very complicated issue and trying to figure out where to put your $8 is not easy. But the tough decision is not restricted to the small versus big farm choice, or the sustainable versus non-sustainable, or the local versus non-local. We make these kinds of decisions all the time and it’s not clear to me how we do it.
Last week after a book club meeting I sat around talking food with four intelligent well-read moms. The conversation went through BPA, hormones in milk and the nutritional content of today’s apple. What was striking was that everyone in the group had a different take on what was safe and what was healthiest. We’d all read stuff but we must have read different stuff and come to very different conclusions.
If it’s hard to sift through the information and come up with clear answers to the questions, “What’s healthiest for my family? How safe are the foods I’m feeding to my child?” then how much more difficult is it to answer, “What’s best for society? What will improve the health, safety and well-being of the nation?”
I don’t have answers to these questions. But I do have to decide if I’ll spend $8 on a dozen eggs. I really want to but I know that I won’t. I know that the issues are important but they just aren’t affecting me enough in a way that I see and understand on a daily basis. And if they’re not affecting me, a conscientious intelligent person who reads about it all and somewhat understands it all, then it’s not clear to me that this kind of food-revolution will succeed. I wonder what it would take to make me pay that price? What would it take to make you pay $8 for a dozen eggs?
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Ironically, I’m writing about this subject too this week, only in the form of $7 a gallon grass-fed, cream line milk: http://fastcheapandgood.blogspot.com/2011/09/make-your-own-sour-cream.html
Lately, I have decided on my minimum qualifications for a food product, then I buy the version (there is usually only one) that meets those, regardless of price. If I have options, I try to get the cheaper one. So, I garden like a fiend so I get my veggies cheap, and we buy our grass-fed beef at the farmers’ market a little at a time with squirrelled-away extra money,so we have it in the freezer. That’s also where we get our organic, free-range eggs for $4 a dozen.
Please don’t show the original $8/dozen article around our farmers’ market! :-)
Wow, you sure have an efficient system going on. I have to say that part of my problem when it comes to organics is that I never find myself with quite enough time to properly plan things out beforehand and/or to look around the grocery store/farmers market to really figure out what’s best to get. I have a quickly scribbled list and I run around there like a fool. Maybe I just need to try to find the time to plan….
The most I’ve paid was $4/dozen, for eggs from a girlfriend’s chickens. Another mutual friend has a different local source that is the same price. And oh, they are so worth it! I didn’t believe I’d notice a difference the first time she gifted me a few. My tastebuds aren’t discriminating enough to note small differences, but boy, the difference wasn’t small at all! My preparation of choice is poached with no seasonings, and the flavor and texture of her eggs was so superior that I hoarded them only for poaching, using my cage-free supermarket brown eggs for omelets and other cooking. But no, I wouldn’t pay $8/dozen, either!
Wow Audrey! Those eggs sound fantastic. Can you tell me where you get them from? I’d love to get some for us to try.
I know exactly what you mean. I bought a whole, frozen, organic, cage-free, properly raised and well-fed chicken from our local traveling Farmer’s Market. (I know, right? Traveling Farmer’s Market, brilliant idea!) I paid $24 for that chicken. I was a bit resentful over that price, I mean, really! But I paid it and took the chicken home. It smelled fantastic after I carefully roasted it. I couldn’t wait to eat it. Imagine my chagrin – it was too tough to eat. It was like it was made of the rubber they make those indestructible dog toys from. I literally could not get my teeth into the flesh of the drumstick. I feel like a damned fool for paying $24 for a correctly raised, but inedible chicken. I did get some stock from the bones, but that was it. I never visited the traveling Farmer’s Market again.
Oh! What a terrible experience. You’ve actually reminded me of another issue with farmer’s markets. I do love them and buy all kinds of things when I go. But part of the beauty, and part of the problem, is that there isn’t always consistency. Unless you find the same vendors at your market and start to develop a relationship with them, you really don’t know what you’re going to get or how good (or bad!) it’s going to be. Shopping at the grocery store leaves us with fewer surprises. But I’m reluctant to say that that’s a good thing.
My question is how would you know if the $8/dozen eggs your buying is way different from a $3/dozen eggs?
Maybe raising our own chicken will be the answer to this problem, but honestly, I won’t buy the $8/dozen eggs. I still go for the $3/dozen eggs because a $5 dollar is a big difference for me.
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You’re right. I don’t think you could tell the difference. I suppose that when you guy things in the grocery store you have to assume that the labeling (organic, free0range, etc.) is true and accurate (or hope that it is, at least!). But when it comes to buying food at the farmer’s market, you really are just trusting the salesperson and/or the market itself which sometimes does check into the validity of claims. I know there was a farmer’s market near where I used to live that had a guy who sold veggies in boxes marked with local names but the produce turned out to be coming from all over the world. He was buying it at the same wholesalers that the stores were buying it from :(.
Eight dollars is extreme but like you said; it’s the extreme examples that get you thinking. I have thought of keeping my own chickens but at the moment I don’t think I can keep anything else alive in this house. Something else alive comes on then other than the babes I can’t guarantee anyone else’ well-being :)
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I know exactly what you mean! Every now and then I dream of having a couple of chickens. If I so much as mention it to my husband he just kicks off laughing at me. Oh well.
You totally made me think twice the other day when I was faced with a 6.00 brownie. I didn’t get it and I REALLY wanted a brownie.
I think $6 for brownies could be wroth it, if they were *really* good brownies.
I think the pricing issues around local food can be controversial and complex. I’m paying more (much more) for farm raised chicken than I would at a store, yet I’ve made a decision to support the farm and the person leading the project in this way and we’ll see where it all goes. I have the flexibility to make that investment, but not everyone does. I think CSA membership is overall a very good deal, although I haven’t done specific calculations. I get large volumes of food – far more than that money would buy at a supermarket. The down side is there is a lot of extra time invested in cooking and preserving the food. I would think there should be a happy medium with those eggs. That sounds like a lot of money – there are probably plenty of other admirable farms and farming practices one could support without paying that much for a dozen eggs, if that’s the motivation behind paying more.
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Tom, Thanks for the comment. I remember your post about your first farm-raised chicken. I think I drooled for days.
I agree that the CSA membership is hard. We’ve actually suspended ours while I’m pregnant (i.e., exhausted) and while our house is on the market (so chaotic with house-showings and all to be dealing with getting through that big box of gorgeous food that i cannot bring myself to waste). But it is so worth it when you have the time to do it.
The $8 eggs are an extreme example. But it’s the extreme example that gets me really thinking. I wonder if I would pay $6? Or $5? What is reasonable?
A lot. It would take a lot for me to spend $8 on local eggs when five years ago I used to pay $3 on local eggs…I just don’t happen to be local to that farm (or any others that I can get to) these days.
And by a lot, I mean that they would have to be the only eggs available, I wouldn’t be allowed to raise chickens in my own back yard, and I’d be absolutely desperate in a way I’ve never been before for eggs.
That’s how much.
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Yeah, I was thinking even if all the other eggs were somehow polluted i probably wouldn’t buy them. I’d go without somehow. Or just use them for baking, not for scrambling up for breakfast.
But then I wonder how much that just hast o do with our expectations that eggs are a cheap food. If eggs had always been sold at a rate that made us value them more, it might not be so ludicrous.