JD Vance was roundly mocked online over a trip to the supermarket where he bemoaned the steep price of eggs — and botched the photo opp.
The Republican vice presidential nominee stopped by a supermarket in Reading, Pennsylvania, with his sons over the weekend to illustrate how grocery prices have been impacted by “Kamala Harris’s policies” when he claimed a dozen eggs cost $4.
The problem? When footage of the visit emerged, Vance was quickly called out by viewers who spotted the price tag of a dozen eggs behind him was actually $2.99.
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Exactly. Egg prices have gone up in large part because factory farming is unsustainable and we’re starting to see that with flu outbreaks. Who’da thunk.
Yes, eggs should be from small farms with 12 chickens max each, that should solve everything, quality control, diseases and the high prices on eggs.
Same with everything else, factories make shitty products, you should rather order from a craftsman.
/s
PS:
Oh yes BTW, AFAIK the flu outbreaks started in nature, not on farms.
Edit:
The ignoratum around here is staggering.
I never argued that we shouldn’t improve the conditions for chickens, but to argue we can have production in mostly any kind of farming today that isn’t heavily mechanized and factory like is extremely ignorant. How else do you feed 300 million people in USA or 700 million in EU efficiently?
I’m downvoted for speaking the truth, and seemingly most people here wants to live a fantasy denying reality.
I personally buy organic eggs, and never from cages, but even that is factories, they just have slightly better conditions.
I know people who have their own chickens laying eggs, but even they can have diseases, so regulation for having your own has been increased a lot here (EU) lately for that too.
You do what you want, but to claim it’s feasible to get rid of the “factories” is wishful thinking.
We can however improve the factories, so the chicken get better conditions. And we’ve been doing that already since the 60’s.
Zoonotic diseases require frequent contact with large amounts of animals with large amounts of workers to have enough opportunity to make the difficult cross-species jump, so yes, factory farming is 100% the problem and giving both the animals and the people caring for them more space and making sure the workers have the time to do things right would make a huge difference. You’re making a reducto ad absurdum argument by intentionally using absurd quantities and time periods that are not required to accomplish this goal.
I’m no vegan by far, but I’ll definitely grant them that the modern animal product industry is unsustainable on numerous levels. Also whether or not humans are “meant” to eat meat, we’re definitely not supposed to eat this much. There are aspects of other agriculture that are similarly so, however. A good example is produce such as avocados and citrus fruits that require a tropical climate but that spoil relatively easily meaning they have to be quickly transported to other areas to be consumed. They should be a relatively rarely eaten delicacy in places they don’t normally grow, not something you can just pick out of a giant pile at the supermarket.
Plastics in general are another great example. You can’t make a biodegradable anything that does what plastic does because not being biodegradable is exactly what makes plastics so useful to the modern lifestyle. They mean you can package something in a way that will stay sealed and fresh through all kinds of temperature and humidity changes when especially moisture is exactly what you need a biodegradable material to respond to. Plastics mean you can get exactly the flavor of doritos you’re craving from the gas station at 2am. Plastics = convenience and that’s the one thing that will be the hardest for all of us to give up.
Saving the planet and treating other humans better is just going to require a radical change in (particularly) western culture where we’re used to just getting whatever we want whenever we want, and while the rich are certainly the most egregious offenders, one of the biggest ways they’ve suckered the rest of us into going along with it is by getting us addicted to small-scale versions of their unsustainable consumption habits.
You’re making a reducto ad absurdum argument by intentionally using absurd quantities and time periods that are not required to accomplish this goal.
OK, how many chickens are required before it becomes an industrial production, and not just hobby level?
Is it less safe to have a few hundred than a dozen? The answer is obviously yes. So the problem claimed in the post I responded to, exist with everything above hobby level production.
So I stand by the argument as valid. And the post I responded to as naive.
- Unlike the similarly awful 2014 outbreak, you correctly point out that these outbreaks are originating in the wild. And keeping chickens in awful, inhumane conditions where they live in their own filth jam-packed among thousands of other chickens is basically the perfect vector for a pathogen.
- Getting chickens out of factory farms is a good unto itself, but I doubt you’ve ever watched any footage or done any research to familiarize yourself with the sorts of horrors you pay for when you buy eggs from a factory farm. Let alone based on your callous attitude that you would actually care about those horrors.
- Weird strawman that the two kinds of farms that exist are late stage capitalist hellholes where billions of chickens go every year to live a life of unfathomable torture… and your Aunt Betty’s backyard chicken coop where every chicken gets a wacky name and their own posts on Facebook documenting their antics.
My mother raises hens and a dozen birds can actually make so many eggs that our entire family has trouble using them all. A bird lays on average one egg a day, and pasture-raised eggs are so rich as to be almost unpalatable to eat directly.
I don’t think every farm needs to have some strict limit like that, but more numerous, smaller, more localized farms would be better for everyone in almost every way. Better environmentally, more humane to the birds, people get fresher and higher quality eggs, and more people are employed. Also more limited damage from diseases, droughts, and so on.
Our current system isnt just bad because “factories bad.” It’s bad because it’s heavily centralized and top-down controlled. This is much cheaper to operate and funnels money towards the owner much better, but is so much worse in every way that local farms are better.
We’re making millions of birds suffer and getting shittier, more expensive product because of it so less than a dozen people (the real bad eggs) can stay filthy rich.
more numerous, smaller, more localized farms would be better for everyone
Either those farmers would make a lot less money, like barely being able to make a living, or the price of their products would have to be way higher than what we pay today. Like not just a few percent, but a factors higher.
My mother raises hens and a dozen birds can actually make so many eggs that our entire family has trouble using them all.
And?
Do you really believe I don’t know that?
pasture-raised eggs are so rich as to be almost unpalatable to eat directly.
WTF? That’s bullshit.
Maybe you are confusing them with eggs from free reigning ducks, which IMO taste awful. But from chicken they are really really good.
On the other hand, I can get free range eggs cheaper than your factory made ones in the most expensive parts of the EU, and our population is greater than that of the US, we are feeding more people, yet I can safely eat them raw without the risk of salmonella.
Free range are only marginally better than cages at best.
Sorry, I was thinking of what in English apparently is called barn eggs, which is not really better than cages.
Free range is the best condition for chickens. And absolutely what we should buy.
But this production has problems, like chicken pecking each other way more than “good” cage conditions, because they are kept in larger groups. And is still a factory/industry when at a scale which is needed to fill demand.
