Reportedly, Canada has plenty of eggs. For Canadians.
And the U.S. doesn’t have enough. Down here, we have what might be called an ‘egg crisis’ due to avian flu.
Millions of chicken have paid the ultimate price, in our effort to contain the disease. Not that the chickens volunteered to pay the ultimate price. We make those decisions for them.
When you sell plenty of eggs, you can sell them for less money, and still pay for your kid’s college tuition.
When you have fewer eggs, like we have in the U.S., you have to jack up the price per egg. College is not cheap in the U.S.
President Trump has repeatedly said that there’s nothing that he needs from Canada, so I assume he eats cereal for breakfast. But some of us eat eggs, typically with a couple of strips of bacon and a slice of toast.
Lately, I’ve been focusing on the bacon and toast. It’s getting to where eating eggs for breakfast, on a daily basis, is more expensive than college tuition.
The hard truth is, the U.S. is scrambling for eggs. We’ve been appealing to countries that normally don’t supply us with eggs. Germany. France. Spain.
Even Denmark. But presumably not Greenland.
Turkey has committed to sending 15,000 tons of eggs to the U.S. from February through to July. (No doubt we will supply them with weapons in exchange.)
How about Canada?
Canadians seem not too happy with President Trump lately. You know, tariffs. And threats of tariffs.
But even if they liked us, they couldn’t fill the hole left by avian flu. Even if Canadian farmers were able to ramp up production, the country has a national supply management system geared to producing only enough eggs to meet domestic demand.
We have a very different philosophy in the U.S., which is “encourage corporations to balloon up to a size where they cannot fail”. Except, then, they fail.
Farmers have avian flu in Canada as well, but what they don’t have is industrialized egg farming. Here in the U.S. — in states like Iowa — egg farms average two million birds. And one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. Or flock.
Canadian egg farms average about 22,000 laying hens per farm. If one farm gets infected, that’s too bad for the farmer, but it’s not like losing two million birds in one fell swoop.
But maybe not all of the two million birds have to die? Maybe the U.S. government can spend some of the money they’re saving by laying off scientists and cutting scientific research budgets at universities, to hire some recent college graduates to find a cure for avian flu.
But maybe even that is too expensive.
Famous anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who now runs the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services — suggested that, instead of ‘culling’ the birds that turn up sick, farmers could allow the virus to run its course, and we would (hopefully) end up with a few chickens who are essentially immune to the virus, which could then be bred into millions of immune chickens. The idea, taken up by the Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, worries scientists and veterinarians alike, but those people are always worried about something.
Or, we could switch to cereal for breakfast. Like someone we know.