Cracking the Case on Egg Corruption

0:15Speaker 1:A few weeks ago i was rudely awoken in the middle of the night by a terrible squawking ran outside my house to find a young possum oh possum if you're an annoying person had decided to spend the night in my chicken coop my chickens had woken up and somehow backed it into a corner where it was frozen in fear with its mouth open trying to look too scary to eat. In the middle of the night, in my pyjamas, I had to pull it out of the coop and then set it all out of the chicken's area and shoo it off. Every morning I feed my chickens from a barrel of treats I keep on my deck.

0:47Speaker 1:I take their layers, pellets and water. Chickens need a pretty specific protein percentage in their diets to lay eggs. They also need some grit and some calcium. It also provides them with seedy roms, which are fun toys for them, take care of their medical needs and of course to clean out their coop regularly. In return, My four girls lay me two to three eggs a day, an amount that varies by season and by their age. I have two Americana crosses, chickens that were bred to keep the colourful egg gene of the Chilean Araucana, but to remove its genetic tendency to produce chicks who would die in the shell. These chickens lay colourful eggs. My other two girls are Rhode Island Reds, who lay brown eggs. I've had chickens for most of my life. As a child, we had a much bigger coop in a part of a field with a big fenced-in run where the chickens could run around. We buried the wire fence to keep foxes out. When my cousins were smaller, I remember thinking it was very funny that they would go into the chicken coop using the chicken-sized door. I used to love going to livestock markets as a kid, and I still

1:44Speaker 1:sometimes do when I get the chance. I like the shows as well, where you can see all the breeds of chicken and how different they are. I'd always beg my parents to let me save up my pocket money to buy some kind of exotic poultry. I like having chickens in part because it just feels like part of living for me, but also because I think it's really important to remember where our food comes from. which is to say that all food comes from the soil, the sun, the sea, and from things that turn those things into something we can eat. Lots of our food in this country comes from animals, and it can be very easy to forget that if your food comes in boxes and packages.

2:17Speaker 1:Every chicken has a personality, and every egg comes from a chicken, with a unique and different way of being. I think most of the eggs I've eaten in my life come from a chicken that I also fed and cared for. For a long time, I didn't eat eggs because my chickens didn't lay them, I didn't really want to buy them and not know where they came from. I'm very lucky in that regard, and it's not something that everyone else has the opportunity to do. I have a place where my chickens can live, I have time and little money to feed and care for them, and I guess I'm comfortable around animals and knowing that I can take care of them. Most people who eat eggs have a more transactional relationship. They go to a shop and swipe their credit card and they get a box of eggs. The box makes a series of claims that can be hard to verify. and the eggs all look the same. Some people prefer to go to a market, meet the person who looks after chickens, get their eggs from them, and they pay a little bit more for that.

3:10Speaker 1:Over the past few years, the cost of this transaction has somehow become a topic of national political concern.

3:17Speaker 2:Eggs!

3:20Speaker 3:I'm getting the eggs.

3:21Speaker 2:Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control.

3:25Speaker 3:The price of eggs in the US has reached record highs recently. A dozen cost about $ 5 on average in January. Now Elon Musk has taken aim at the previous administration. There was an insane slaughter of 150 million egg-laying chickens ordered by the Biden administration, he posted.

3:40Speaker 1:If you cast your mind back to early 2025, before you'd heard of Gregory Bovino, And before Mike Lee had begun his pathetic attempt to sell off our public lands by inserting his bullshit little riders into big bills, the price of eggs was a big deal. In large part, this was due to an avian influenza outbreak and the resulting culls of flocks that were not invented by or unique to the Biden administration. Obviously, if you have fewer chickens, you're not going to get as many eggs.

4:05Speaker 2:As winter approaches, health experts are raising new concerns. about a resurgence of bird flu.

4:11Speaker 1:New York's governor shutting down live poultry markets for one week over growing concerns of bird flu.

4:17Speaker 2:The virus is HPAI, highly pathogenic avian influenza, first detected in 1996, decimating wild bird populations, then spreading into the world's food supply.

4:31Speaker 1:And the longer this virus persists, the more species it persists in. So we don't know what's going to happen.

4:36Speaker 2:The spread of bird flu in livestock is hitting consumers in their wallets with egg prices soaring.

4:43Speaker 1:The high prices were also sustained by giant egg corporations acting like a giant egg cartel. Now, we can talk about how we should have managed infectious diseases like avian flu in our animals. And I'd like to at some point because the culling approach was used in the UK when I was a child and seeing whole herds of cattle killed out for BSE was a massive trauma for rural people. and one I think is often forgotten or brushed off with far too little concern today. But today, I want to talk about eggs, their prices, and what that means for human and animal welfare. In March of 2025, as Elon Musk, the world's most divorced man, was ripping apart the federal government with a group of poorly socialised tweens that he'd hired, the DOJ sent notice to several major egg producers saying, that they were required to preserve documents as part of an investigation by the Antitrust Division into egg price fixing. Specifically, as a DOJ would later claim in a civil lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Iowa, the egg producers were conspiring to inflate the daily price quotations of Erna Barry, a market reporting company,

5:50Speaker 1:in order to bump up the wholesale price of eggs. Let's take a step aside from the fact that this seems to undercut Trump's repeated claim that somehow Joe Biden was personally responsible for the much bemoaned $ 5 a dozen eggs and look into what it tells us about where our food comes from when three giant corporations, Calmain Foods, Vesova Holdings and Hickman's Egg Ranch can buddy up and run an oligopolistic egg cartel. I got pretty deep into this DOJ complaint in preparation for this episode. But to understand it, I think you probably have to back out a little bit first, understand a little bit about the egg industry. The DOJ breaks it down by saying, quote, eggs are produced by egg producers. That is a weird way of saying chickens. But I think that starting point tells us a lot about the capitalization of our food chain. Fundamentally, in America, the eggs come from the egg factory. And it just so happens that chickens are one of the inputs that go into the factory to make the eggs come out. Now, Some of these big producers do not have enough eggs on hand to supply all of their orders,

6:54Speaker 1:so they have to buy more eggs on an exchange. Think of this as kind of eBay for eggs. The biggest egg exchange is Egg Clearinghouse Inc. It was set up in the 1970s as a way to bring the wonders of a free market to the output of our poultry. When it was set up, its board included the founder of Calmain, the largest egg producing company in the US. The idea was that a national market would stabilise egg prices, help buyers find sellers, and ensure that the market cleared through a blind bidding process in which egg buyers only find out who they are buying eggs from after they have completed the transaction. In a Boston Globe piece titled, quote, Unscrambling the Egg Market Across the US, a very funny, very punny headline published in 1978 and written by Daniel J. Corcoran, we get a sense of what this looked like in the 1970s. Raymond F. Delano was the general manager of ECI.

7:47Speaker 1:and ran the operation from his basement in Durham, North Carolina, along with his digital equipment core computer with four, gasp, video display terminals. Now, in addition to being on some Thunderbird shit, Raymond also changed how the quality of eggs was determined. Previously, they were graded. Large, extra large, medium, etc. And the number of each size in a case was determined. But old Ray came up with a new idea. Weighing them. Later in the process, the eggs are graded by size at the wholesaler and placed in retail packaging. Throughout this process, Raymond there at Mission Control never sees an egg or a chicken. He just sees his four GASP video display terminals.

8:28Speaker 1:The idea here is pretty classic 1970s shit, right? More information, easier comparison, more buyers and more sellers. A perfect market that should clear at the national clearing point. It's the stuff you learn in Economics 101. before they spend the next three years teaching you excuses for why it never works like that. Earn-a-Barry takes anonymized data from this exchange and produces an aggregate daily price quote based on region and size. Earn-a-Barry gets information for direct trades that occur outside of ECI. Those Earn-a-Barry numbers are, in turn, used to determine the prices paid in contracts for large egg companies that they have with retailers or restaurants. The complaint goes on to detail how, from 2022 to 2025, the three giant egg companies conspired to submit a large number of bids, often in the hours leading up to Erna Barry publishing a price quotation, and many of which they knew would not be successful. If you're old enough to remember bidding up something your buddy was selling on eBay, this is a very analogous behavior. Don't you love capitalism?

9:29Speaker 1:Talking of how great capitalism is, it's time for a commercial break. Now, Big Egg might be good at extracting the most money from consumers, but as it turns out, they really suck at crime. Here's one example. Quote, Hickman's CEO. repeated his request early the following morning on December 20th, emailing senior executives from CalMain, Versova and others, stating, quote, Please consider posting strong bids early and often. The market reporters don't get in for another hour, so it would be good for them to see diverse bidding upon logging on.

10:18Speaker 1:and a barrier is more likely to increase its price quotations if it observes higher bids from a variety of market participants. Hickman's CEO later emailed again, stating, quote, Hurry, there are only 16 bids on ECI right now and 15 of them are ours. Shortly after that email, all three defendants collectively submitted dozens of bids on ECI, most of which were at premium prices. Another choice quote from their emails, quote, As a group, we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often. Amazing stuff.

10:48Speaker 1:We have created machine politics for eggs. Having conspired and created an enormous paper trail linking their texts and emails to immediate changes in bidding behavior, the conspirators then changed their behavior when the DOJ and more than a dozen state attorneys general came knocking. At the same time, the Trump administration... tried to re-establish the pecking order of egg regulations in a court case in which it argued that the Egg Products Inspection Act pre-empted California's state laws on the sale and shipment of eggs from hens confined in certain cruel conditions. The Trump administration argued that, quote, California has effectively prevented farmers across the country from using a number of agricultural production methods which were in widespread use and which helped keep eggs affordable. Are you keeping up here?

11:35Speaker 1:That's still not Joe Biden who is responsible for egg price increases. The California laws in question, if you're wondering, began as 2008 and 2018 ballot initiatives that mandated birds to be given enough space to extend their limbs and move without touching another animal. That 2008 initiative impacted eggs from California farms. It's more or less why you see cage-free eggs everywhere now. A decade later, Prop 12 gave new minimum size requirements, one square foot, and prohibited the sale of battery eggs from other states in California. Battery eggs, if you're not familiar, are the ones produced under the most intense and cruel conditions. The Trump administration didn't stick the landing on that one, but they hadn't put all their eggs in one basket. At the same time they began this court case, Elon Musk, a man whose own children hate him, began tearing apart the very apparatus that would normally respond to an outbreak of avian influenza. So instead of dealing with an outbreak that had by that point already killed someone and mutated into a disease also impacting cattle, people at these federal agencies had to beg

12:39Speaker 1:someone with massive Reddit mod energy to let them keep their job. The Trump admin cancelled a contract with Moderna for an avian flu vaccine in humans in May of 2025 and announced a five-pronged strategy to combat avian flu that included deregulation of biosecurity, looking into a vaccine for birds and exploring import options. Vaccination comes with an acceptance that the condition is endemic and that can create export concerns, which Y has historically not been the choice. But this is all part of the Trump administration's war on what were now $ 6 boxes of eggs. I used a handy tool on the St. Louis Fed's website to graph egg prices against the Consumer Price Index. I am not someone who likes studies or cares about economics, or indeed graphs.

13:24Speaker 1:But I'm pretty sure I determined that eggs went up in price more than inflation did over the last decade or so, with spikes in 2015, 2024 and 2025. Egg production fluctuates less, peaking at $ 113 billion and dropping to $ 105 billion in 2025. The market is not a perfect reflection of supply and demand. It is a thing that can, as we have seen, be manipulated by corporate interests. But I think looking at these graphs and statistics can rather obscure what's going on here. At some point, long before old Ray fired up his four screens and started selling eggs by mass, eggs went from being a thing that your chickens laid or your friend's chickens laid to a massive commodity. It's easy to forget when our presidential candidates are arguing about egg prices, when I'm fairly sure that neither of those candidates had been to a grocery store this millennium, that each of these eggs is laid by a chicken that had a whole life, and that often that whole life can be spent without seeing the sun.

14:23Speaker 1:The way we get cheap eggs is maximizing efficiency. Here we are back with economics 101 shit. Limiting inputs and maximizing outputs. Limiting cost and maximizing revenue. What this means is cramming the most chickens into the smaller space and trying to get the most possible out of them in terms of eggs. That's just the economics of it. But at a scale such as this, it's a purely economic question. And I don't think it should be. I don't think we should see this just in terms of agricultural production methods, as the Trump administration called them, but also in terms of our ethical obligations to other living creatures. Eggs don't come from a box or a store or a factory.

15:04Speaker 1:They come from a chicken. Chickens, in the way we know them now, have been selectively bred for so many generations that their lives and ours are intertwined. If we let all the horrifically treated battery chickens out tomorrow, things wouldn't end well for them. That doesn't mean they don't have the right to be treated with some basic dignity and decency though. I've been around animals, raised for food and eaten my whole life. When I was little we had sheep and we ate lamb When I got a bit older, I spent a lot of my time on my own and with my dad shooting rabbits and pigeons.

15:54Speaker 1:We ate plenty of those as well. In my travels around the world, I've eaten all kinds of stuff. In the jungle with the Mbara, I ate the eggs that came from their chickens that ran around the common areas of town. And when my host offered it, I ate chicken too. I think there's a fundamental difference between eating animals and acknowledging that they were, until very recently, sentient beings. and arguing about the price of animal food products in a way that totally ignores the thousands of lives that are going to be impacted by that conversation. We could substitute any number of products for eggs here, but eggs are the one that somehow entered the presidential election cycle in 2024, and which were being pumped up by the megacorporations like they were the latest cryptocurrency, and I just don't think that's how we should relate to our food.

16:37Speaker 1:Upton Sinclair once said that he'd aimed at the public's heart, but somehow hit their stomach. And that's somewhat like how I feel about this issue. Where there's abuse for animals, there is often abuse of people too. I don't want to bombard you with horror stories of exactly what happens on a battery chicken farm. Because you're probably driving to work in the morning right now. Chickens are kept in conditions which are inhumane. They don't see the sun and they're cooped up so tightly that many have their beaks trimmed so they can't attack each other. Think anyone who has raised animals or been around them a lot knows that they can suffer. and that in these conditions they do suffer. But so do people. In 2023, the DOJ prosecuted a poultry processor, the exclusive Poultry Inc., a supplier to Ralph's, Aldi, Grocery Outlet and Cisco, for child labour abuses and wage theft. The company used children as young as 14 to debone chicken and drive heavy machinery. In 2017, a DOJ prosecution for labour trafficking revealed that Trillium Farms often employed children who had come to the USA being

17:40Speaker 1:promised an education and the American dream, and who instead were forced to live in dilapidated trailers and work 12-hour days de-beaking chickens, cleaning their coops, and loading and unloading animals from crates. While they worked these long days, they paid rent for their shitty trailers and tried to pay off the smuggling fees that brought them to the US. It's a modern-day form of indentured servitude. The person accused of smuggling them pled guilty, but Trillium Farms... who paid millions of dollars for child labour, well, their parent companies were sober. Remember the big three egg giants colluding to hyperinflate prices earlier this episode? That's one of them. Aldo Leopold spoke about a land ethic in a quotation I read in another episode, and I think we need a food ethic in a similar way. Unless you hunt, fish, grow, gather or farm your own food, that food comes to you through working people. Sometimes that food also comes from animals.

18:40Speaker 1:I know it can be hard to make ends meet right now. I know it's not getting any easier. I know that many of you don't have the space, time or money to raise chickens and grow vegetables or fish and hunt or whatever. I know that making rent each month is a struggle for so many Americans right now. I also know that while we went through all of that, some giant corporations who totally control our food chain decided to hyperinflate the price of eggs, abuse animals and force children to work in horrible conditions. A friend once called me an anarcho-cottagecore lifestyle influencer and that comment has lived in my head ever since. I don't want to come on here and tell people they all have to go out, buy chickens and have a little garden. People did that when egg prices went up and I think a lot of those arrangements ended pretty badly for chicken and chicken haver.

19:27Speaker 1:But I do think we need to seriously think about how we engage with our food and the animals that form part of our food chain. Right now, far too much of the production and safety of our food is in the hands of giant corporations who take advantage of workers, consumers, and animals. If I eat an egg, or better yet, if I give an egg to my neighbours, I know that egg came from a certain chicken. Merrill Peep or Victoria Peckham, for example, might lay a large or different coloured eggs from another chicken. I know what I fed her.

19:58Speaker 1:I know she had access to clean water and a safe place to sleep. I know that if a coyote tried to hurt her, I'd keep her safe. And in exchange, I have these eggs. Admittedly, it's hard to know if a chicken consented in that exchange. But as eggs go, I'm happy with mine. And I think a world in which everyone knows that eggs came from a happy chicken is a good one. It's also a world fundamentally at odds with the hyper-capitalism of our food system right now.

20:23Speaker 1:To me, there is something very grounding about having animals around. About the daily routine of caring for them and the little interactions with them. About them coming to trust me a bit more over time and me understanding each of their little unique personalities. I think you can make a case for no animals in agriculture. But at least right now, I think the case I want to start with is for a more cooperative understanding of our lives as animals.

20:46Speaker 1:For seeing them as an end in themselves, not as a means to an end. I think it's difficult to do that in conjunction with a system where eggs are treated like an electronic exchange, based on raw tonnage, and pumped up in price like the latest meme coin. I think arriving at a more cooperative and kind way of feeding ourselves is difficult. And I don't think I have all the answers for you in the next few minutes. But I think that we all need to reflect on the way we talk about food right now. And the many voices and considerations that are absent from that conversation when they should be centered in it. I hope you've enjoyed another sad episode of my podcast. I do want to make some of these more fun for you all.

21:25Speaker 1:And I want to make sure we approach things like skills, equipment and planning for being in the outdoors. I don't want to do that in a shitty listicle way. Because shitty listicles and content-driven commerce are what killed the ability to have serious conversations about the outdoors in far too many publications. That and VC buyouts and everyone working at those publications being a wealthy white man in Boulder. But I digress. I'd love to hear from you about questions, concerns, or ideas you have. I don't care if you've never been camping or if you've guided for 40 years. Please reach out. NaturalCausesPod at Proton.me That's a Proton mail address if you want your email to be encrypted. You'll need to send it from a ProtonMail address too.

22:04Speaker 2:Thanks.

22:08Speaker 4:Natural Causes is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for Natural Causes listed directly in episode descriptions.

22:23Speaker 1:Thanks for listening.