Eggs aren't expensive enough

Speaker 1 A New York City bodega recently started selling what they're calling loosey eggs. Instead of a dozen or a half dozen, you can buy a little bag with three little eggs in it.

Speaker 1 The idea got a ton of attention.

Speaker 2 It's not loose cigarettes, but loose eggs drawing people to Pamela's green deli.

Speaker 3 He says the idea to sell the loose eggs came after seeing customers being forced to leave a full carton on the counter.

Speaker 4 Currently, New York State requires eggs to be sold in packages. And while the price of eggs is cracking wallets right now, Rodriguez tells us he just hopes to help his community one day at a time.

Speaker 1 Eggs are too expensive. Ask anyone.
Ask the President of the United States. The eggs, because I'm hearing so much about eggs, you'll figure it out.
You got to figure something out fast. But on today,

Speaker 7 explained, Vox's Kenny Torello is actually going to make the case that eggs are too cheap.

Speaker 1 Get a load of this guy, will ya?

Speaker 9 Support for today's show comes from AT ⁇ T, the network that helps Americans make connections according to AT ⁇ T. When you compare, there's no comparison, AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 11 Support for this show comes from OnePassword. If you're an IT or security pro, managing devices, identities, and applications can feel overwhelming and risky.

Speaker 11 Trellica by OnePassword helps conquer SaaS sprawl and shadow IT by discovering every app your team uses, managed or not. Take the first first step to better security for your team.

Speaker 11 Learn more at onepassword.com slash podcast offer. That's onepassword.com slash podcast offer.
All lowercase.

Speaker 1 Kenny Torella, senior reporter at Vox, our man on the meat beat. It's been a minute.
What is going on with the bird flu?

Speaker 12 The bird flu is really bad. You know, this outbreak, which has been the worst in U.S.
history, it began in early 2022 and it's only getting worse.

Speaker 14 According to the USDA, avian flu has been confirmed in 146 flocks in the past month, affecting more than 20 million birds.

Speaker 16 The U.S. Department of Agriculture is calling this multi-year bird flu outbreak the largest in U.S.
history. The impact hits close to home.

Speaker 17 Dozens of state and federal agricultural workers dressed in biohazard suits, sanitized boots and gloves are assisting in the euthanization of the entire flock here, 100,000 ducks.

Speaker 12 This strain known as H5N1, it's a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza, or bird flu, which has been highly lethal to birds raised for meat and eggs like chickens and turkeys.

Speaker 12 You know, more than 20 million egg-laying hens were killed, either because they became infected with the virus or they were killed to slow the spread of the virus.

Speaker 12 To put that into perspective, that's 6% of America's egg-laying flock.

Speaker 1 Is that why the eggs are so expensive, Kenny? I don't want to make this about the eggs when you just said 20 million of our friendly chickens have died, but is that why the eggs are so expensive?

Speaker 12 That's really the only reason why eggs are so expensive, aside from food inflation. The bird flu has led to egg shortages across the country.

Speaker 12 You know, some stores are even placing limits on how many cartons consumers can buy.

Speaker 18 Can someone explain to me why people are going crazy for eggs?

Speaker 19 Eggs are now so valuable, they become a target for thieves. Pete and Jerry's organics had to beef up security after thieves stole 100,000 eggs from their farm in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 12 And the average price for a dozen of eggs is double now what it was before this outbreak began three years ago.

Speaker 20 All right, guys, today is a day. I know they are going to to be $1.99 today.

Speaker 13 Chickens must be on a strike or something because baby ain't no way six eggs is $4.99.

Speaker 12 The high price of eggs, it's not the only problem related to bird flu because it's increasingly affecting other animals.

Speaker 12 Scientists detected bird flu in cows for the first time ever in the United States almost a year ago. And since then, it's infected almost 1,000 dairy cow herds.

Speaker 12 But it's also infecting and killing other mammals like sea lions and seals, and it even killed a cheetah and a mountain lion at a zoo in Arizona not too long ago.

Speaker 1 I don't love it.

Speaker 12 Yeah, there's not much to love about the bird flu, especially because it's now hitting humans.

Speaker 1 I don't love that at all. Tell me more about that.

Speaker 12 Yeah, almost 70 people in the U.S. have tested positive for bird flu since the spring of 2022.
You know, we're not doing mass testing, so it could be higher.

Speaker 12 But most of them have been people who work with poultry or dairy cows, and most cases have been somewhat mild. But there have been a few cases that have stood out and have concerned experts.

Speaker 12 For example, last month there was a woman in Louisiana. She had exposure to a backyard chicken flock and also some wild birds.
She got the bird flu.

Speaker 12 She was hospitalized, and tragically, she passed away from the virus.

Speaker 12 And in November, a 13-year-old Canadian girl who had no known exposure exposure to wild or farmed birds or dairy cows, she developed a really severe infection and was hospitalized for weeks.

Speaker 12 She recovered, but it's still a mystery as to how she got it.

Speaker 1 But we're not at like, you know, the pandemic threat yet either. I don't want to freak people out.

Speaker 12 No, we're not.

Speaker 12 The most important thing to keep in mind here is that almost all of these cases, again, were connected to people who work directly with animals or were exposed to animals who had the virus.

Speaker 12 At this point, this virus is not going from person to person, which is one of the key ingredients for a virus going from one that just circulates among animals to the next global pandemic.

Speaker 12 H5N1 may never gain the ability to transmit from human to human, but the more that it circulates among people and animals and large farms, the more opportunities that it has to evolve and develop the capacity to become more severe in humans and be able to transmit from person to person.

Speaker 1 Well, our fair president, I don't know how much he's said about bird flu. I don't know how much he cares, but he certainly has promised to bring down the price of eggs.

Speaker 1 The eggs, because I'm hearing so much about eggs, you'll figure it out. You go through this somehow.

Speaker 1 And since they're intrinsically related, Let me ask, how's that going so far?

Speaker 12 It's gotten off to a rocky start. You know, Doge and the Trump administration fired a number of employees who monitor bird flu, realized they made a mistake, and then hired them back.

Speaker 12 But in bigger news, today, Brooke Rollins announced a big plan in the Wall Street Journal to fight bird flu and try to bring down the price of eggs.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, Brooke who?

Speaker 12 Brooke Rollins.

Speaker 12 She's the new secretary of agriculture who has not much of a background in agriculture, more in conservative think tank tank policymaking, but she does have a new five-point plan to tackle this crisis.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, what are the five points?

Speaker 12 Point one is to put $500 million towards increased biosecurity on farms.

Speaker 12 That includes things like more protective gear for farm workers, requiring them to shower before entering and leaving the facilities. And this could help.

Speaker 12 It's worth a shot, but this has also been a main tactic of the Biden administration. So we'll see if it helps.

Speaker 1 Okay, $500 million for some cold showers. What else?

Speaker 12 Increased funding for farmers who have to call or kill their flocks. Again, this is more of the same.
This is something the Biden administration has done for the last three years.

Speaker 1 Okay, anything fresh? Anything new?

Speaker 12 Yes and no. I mean, one point of the plan is to import more eggs, which is what the Obama administration did during the 2015 bird flu outbreak.

Speaker 12 Then there are some other ideas like trying to roll back cage-free egg laws, which we're seeing some states already trying to do, and vaccines, which is actually welcome news.

Speaker 1 Well, I know President Trump has a history with, you know, vaccinating millions of Americans, Operation Warp Speed, TBT, COVID-19, et cetera.

Speaker 1 But his new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Floride Kennedy, hates vaccines. How does he feel about vaccinating chickens, though?

Speaker 12 Well, thankfully, you know, that's the purview of the USDA. So RFK Jr.
has no oversight over whether birds get vaccinated. Of course, I am worried that if this does start to transmit to more humans,

Speaker 12 he will have oversight over the development and distribution and approval of vaccines for

Speaker 1 people.

Speaker 12 But at least right now, it's in the USDA's hands as to whether we start vaccinating egg-laying hens.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we've got five points, Kenny, ranging from more showers for people working on these chicken farms to vaccinating millions, hundreds of millions of chickens potentially.

Speaker 1 Do we have any idea when this five-point plan from Brooke Rollins would go into effect? I mean, we've got the Wall Street Journal op-ed. When do we see the money moving?

Speaker 12 It's unclear. There's not a lot of specifics as to when and how this money will be deployed and how fast they'll act on things like expanding vaccine development.

Speaker 12 So it's more of a wait-and-see situation like the last few years have been with bird flu.

Speaker 1 Okay, but this issue isn't going anywhere. What's cooking in the meantime?

Speaker 12 So some states are taking matters into their own hands.

Speaker 22 Tonight, the Nevada Department of Agriculture has suspended the state's cage-free egg law.

Speaker 15 As the price of eggs continues to climb, one state lawmaker has introduced legislation that will repeal Michigan's new law requiring all eggs sold to be cage-free.

Speaker 12 The idea here is that by suspending this cage-free requirement, it'll give grocery stores more flexibility in where and how they source their eggs.

Speaker 12 But it probably won't work.

Speaker 12 You know, there was one ag economist at the University of Arkansas who said that suspending these cage-free standards could quote-unquote very slightly address the egg shortage in Nevada, but it could exacerbate it in other states because the national egg supply is just so limited.

Speaker 12 So if you shift more to Nevada, you got to take it from another state. Huh.
Yeah, ultimately a big part of the problem here is factory farming itself.

Speaker 12 You know, a typical egg factory farm operation will house hundreds of thousands or even millions of genetically similar animals in just a few barns.

Speaker 12 And in these barns, the animals, they're in their own waste, they're breathing in toxic fumes from their manure, they're overcrowded.

Speaker 12 And all of this comes together to stress them out and weaken their immune systems. And

Speaker 12 one historian who studies animal disease, who I talked to, said that these kinds of conditions create the perfect opportunity for a microbe or a virus like H5N1 to effectively spread through a lot of hosts.

Speaker 12 This doesn't mean that reverting back to the farming that we had a century ago where chickens were raised in small flocks on small farms would fix the problem of the bird flu spread.

Speaker 12 You know, farmers have always been battling disease outbreaks on farms. But the expansion of factory farms really exacerbate the risk.

Speaker 12 And because these farms are so big and have so many chickens, if the virus affects just a few really big farms, it can send a shock to the egg supply overnight, which is what has been going on for the last several months.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the culprit is factory farming, but also the norm is factory farming.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and it rarely grabs the country's attention. We don't really talk that much about factory farming.

Speaker 12 You know, we're only doing this show because of this outbreak and how it's affected egg prices and the egg supply.

Speaker 12 But there are millions of people in rural America who have been dealing with the public health effects of factory farms for decades, and many have been sounding the alarm, but no one's really been listening.

Speaker 12 So I spent the last several months talking to them for a series for Vox.

Speaker 12 And you're going to hear from them when we're back on Today Explained.

Speaker 8 Support for Today Explained comes from ATT.

Speaker 10 There's nothing worse than needing to make a call and realizing you can't connect, says ATT.

Speaker 7 And of course, every wireless provider will claim that they're the best, but ATT says ATT has the goods to back it up.

Speaker 8 According to Root Metrics, AT ⁇ T earned the best overall network performance.

Speaker 10 While the other guys are busy making claims they can't keep, AT ⁇ T says they're making connections on America's fastest and most reliable wireless network.

Speaker 26 No matter if you're at a concert, a huge sporting event, or just out enjoying nature, you can post when you want to post.

Speaker 8 Don't post when you're enjoying nature, guys.

Speaker 10 Keep it in control. Call when you want to call and rest easy knowing that no matter where you go, AT ⁇ T has got you covered.

Speaker 9 When you compare, there's no comparison.

Speaker 8 AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 23 Based on Root Metrics, United States Route Score Report 1H2025 tested with best commercially available smartphones, smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types.

Speaker 29 Your experiences may vary.

Speaker 8 Root Metrics rankings are not an endorsement of AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 26 Support for J Explain comes from AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 10 There's nothing worse than needing to make a call and and realizing you can't connect, says AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 29 And of course, every wireless provider will claim that they're the best.

Speaker 8 But AT ⁇ T says AT ⁇ T has the goods to back it up.

Speaker 24 According to Root Metrics, AT ⁇ T earned the best overall network performance.

Speaker 10 While the other guys are busy making claims they can't keep, AT ⁇ T says they're making connections on America's fastest and most reliable wireless network.

Speaker 21 No matter if you're at a concert, a huge sporting event, or just out enjoying nature.

Speaker 26 You can post when you want to post. Don't post when you're enjoying nature, guys.

Speaker 10 Keep it in control. Call when you want to call, and rest easy knowing that no matter where you go, ATT has got you covered.

Speaker 9 When you compare, there's no comparison.

Speaker 8 ATT.

Speaker 28 Based on Root Metrics United States Route Score Report 1 H2025 tested with best commercially available smartphones, smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types, your experiences may vary.

Speaker 8 Root Metrics rankings are not an endorsement of ATT.

Speaker 6 Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. What's QIIME? Chime is different.

Speaker 10 Chime is a financial technology company that wants you to embrace each and every dollar.

Speaker 6 When you set up direct deposit with QIIME, you can get access to fee-free features like overdraft protection, or they say you can get paid up to two days early and even more.

Speaker 10 Speaking of no fees, Chime says that when you open a checking account with them, there are no monthly fees and no maintenance fees.

Speaker 6 And with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals.

Speaker 10 Not to mention, although I will, $47,000 fee-free ATMs.

Speaker 8 You can work on your financial goals through Chime Today.

Speaker 6 You can open an account in two minutes at chime.com/slash explain. That's chime.com/slash explain.
Chime feels like progress.

Speaker 28 Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank, banking services and debit card provided by the bank or bank NA or Stripe Bank NA. Members FDIC.

Speaker 28 Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission payment file.
Fees apply at out-of-network ATMs, bank ranking, and number of ATMs, according to U.S.

Speaker 28 News and World Report 2023. Chime checking account required.

Speaker 1 Let's go, birds!

Speaker 1 Today, explained. Kenny Torella, meetbeatvox.com.
Factory farms are in the spotlight because of expensive eggs and bird flu, and you've been reporting on them.

Speaker 12 Where do we begin? So let's start in Malcolm, Iowa.

Speaker 1 Malcolm?

Speaker 12 Yep.

Speaker 1 In the middle.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's actually in the middle of Iowa.

Speaker 12 I went there in September. It's this tiny, sleepy town about 75 miles east of Des Moines.
There's just a couple hundred people. There's a post office, a bar and grill, a lot of cornfields.

Speaker 12 And on the surface, it's a generally quiet and peaceful small town, except

Speaker 12 it has millions of chickens. Seven and a half million chickens, to be exact.

Speaker 1 How many people does it have?

Speaker 12 270 people.

Speaker 1 Oh, what?

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's like roughly what, off the top of my head, like 28,000 chickens per person?

Speaker 12 That's right. You must be some kind of math prodigy.
I didn't know that, Sean.

Speaker 1 I'm Asian.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and I talked to a few folks in Malcolm. One of them stood out.
Her name is Carolyn Bittner.

Speaker 30 It was probably a few days.

Speaker 30 after I moved in that I smelled anything.

Speaker 12 She moved to Malcolm in 2008 to become a pastor at two churches. She's now retired.

Speaker 12 And she told me that she really likes small-town rural life and that neighbors are kind to each other, except this one neighbor, Fremont Farms of Iowa.

Speaker 12 That's the farm that has seven and a half million egg-laying chickens.

Speaker 30 It's not close to my house,

Speaker 7 but

Speaker 30 when they move manure, the stench is

Speaker 30 sickening.

Speaker 30 And just last night,

Speaker 30 there was stench.

Speaker 12 And as soon as I got to Malcolm, I understood what Carolyn was saying.

Speaker 11 There's the smell.

Speaker 12 The stench of manure hung in the air, and the closer you got to Fremont Farms of Iowa, the stronger and stronger it smelled. It was overwhelming.

Speaker 30 I love to hang my clothes on the line to dry. And sometimes in the morning when I put them out the air is clean because the wind is going

Speaker 30 the other way.

Speaker 30 But if the wind shifts while they're out there and especially if it shifts while they're still damp, I bring them in, not smelling fresh and ozone-y, but smelling like chicken shit.

Speaker 12 Damn. Yeah, livestock farms generate nearly a trillion pounds of manure each year.

Speaker 12 And fumes from that manure creates terrible air pollution, which is linked to nine times more premature deaths than coal-fired power plants.

Speaker 1 This isn't like a happy story where like a trillion pounds of manure gets turned into a trillion pounds of fertilizer and recycles and closes the loop and all that.

Speaker 12 Well, there's just simply way too much manure for it to all serve as fertilizer.

Speaker 12 So often farmers will overapply manure, which, one, it smells really bad, but it also leaches into water, contaminates drinking water, and other issues.

Speaker 12 On top of that, you know, other research has found that living near a factory farm is positively associated with risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, and people who live near them also report higher rates of headaches, depression, anger, and respiratory symptoms, such as asthma.

Speaker 1 Okay, that sounds worse than awful, Kenny. Why would you want to live here in Malcolm, Iowa, next to the manure?

Speaker 12 Well, Carolyn moved moved to Malcolm for a job. She didn't know that there were also seven and a half million chickens in town.
Huh.

Speaker 12 And I've heard that from other people, that maybe they moved there and they didn't know, or maybe they've lived there for a lot of their lives and the factory farm started coming in in the 90s and the early 2000s and they had no choice but to just deal with it.

Speaker 12 You know, Carolyn has tried to speak up for years and tell the farm about how terrible it smells. She's also spoken up at permit hearings, too.

Speaker 1 What has she said? How has that gone?

Speaker 12 It hasn't gone that well. I mean, nothing has changed.
If anything, it's gotten worse because the chicken farm now has more animals than it did when she first moved in 2008.

Speaker 12 And a lot of this just comes down to public policy. You know, the problem is that the deck is stacked against Carolyn and people like her because

Speaker 12 Usually local, county, and state permitting regulations are really lax. They're really friendly to the meat, dairy, and egg industries.

Speaker 12 They allow these massive factory farms to come in, to be built really close to people's homes, to churches, and schools and businesses.

Speaker 12 And there's also usually pretty lax rules around how they handle that collective trillion pounds of manure.

Speaker 12 And she, you know, she told me that while Fremont Farms is doing fine, the town is kind of disappearing.

Speaker 30 The population

Speaker 30 here in Malcolm has been declining since I moved in. Partly, I'm sure, it's because of the smell.

Speaker 30 It's just not a very pleasant place to live anymore.

Speaker 1 So Malcolm cares more about this farm and the revenue it brings in than it does the people who might bounce.

Speaker 12 It seems so. And, you know, I've talked to a bunch of people in similar circumstances.
You know, there are thousands and thousands of these huge factory farms across the country.

Speaker 5 You know, there are wounds in this neighborhood that, that frankly will never heal.

Speaker 12 One person I talked to, her name is Sonia in Minnesota. She says that fights over big dairy operations and pig factory farms near her have torn her community apart.

Speaker 5 You know, deep, deep wounds in this neighborhood. And, you know,

Speaker 5 a wave of the hand is now met with, you know, a wave of the middle finger. That's how things operate.

Speaker 1 Dang.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and there's Edith in Worth County, Iowa, who told told me that a lot of her neighbors won't speak publicly against the factory farms near them.

Speaker 30 People are afraid to speak out. They'll lose friends.

Speaker 30 You know, they'll lose money opportunities. Small business people really have to watch it because even if they support

Speaker 30 being against factory farms, they'll lose business customers.

Speaker 1 Okay, so not only are we killing millions and millions of chickens and not even eating them because of bird flu, and not only are eggs more expensive across the entire country, but just living near these farms is a shit show.

Speaker 1 President Trump says he wants to do something about the price of eggs. He's got Elon Musk at his side.
I don't know what his diet is, but he's also got RFK at his other side.

Speaker 1 And that dude's always going on about factory farms and agriculture in the United States and how we need to fix it. I spent a lot of my career suing factory farms.

Speaker 1 And I probably sued Smithfield more than any other attorney, Tyson's Purdue. Is there an opportunity to hit reset right now?

Speaker 12 Yeah, RFK Jr. over the years has really criticized factory farming.

Speaker 12 In fact, for 20 years, he was the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is this group that does really great work to combat water pollution from these huge farms.

Speaker 12 But I have my doubts that he's going to really do much to shake up the agricultural status quo here.

Speaker 1 How come? Because he wasn't put in charge of agriculture?

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's right. He's in charge of HHS, which includes the U.S.

Speaker 12 Food and Drug Administration, but it's the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency who are really in charge of regulating farms and all of this pollution.

Speaker 1 It sounds like what you're saying, Kenny, is that the only way this would actually change and there'd be enough attention on factory farming to actually achieve political change would be if there were something as catastrophic as like a bird flu pandemic.

Speaker 1 Maybe.

Speaker 12 I mean, maybe if we get to a point where we're rationing eggs.

Speaker 1 Even then it's a maybe?

Speaker 12 I mean, you know, in 2009, over 10,000 Americans died from swine flu, which originated in pigs. And today, pig factory farming looks exactly like it did in 2009.

Speaker 12 So it's hard to say what, if anything, could push the country to

Speaker 12 really rethink how we raise animals for food. And I'm not even sure a major bird flu pandemic could do it.

Speaker 1 So that leaves us where it's on us, the consumers, to make different choices.

Speaker 12 That's true. We've become really accustomed to cheap eggs and other animal products.

Speaker 12 And I think visiting Iowa and hearing stories from people like Carolyn, you come to realize that there is a cost to these cheap eggs and other products. There is a cost to the environment.

Speaker 12 There's a cost to people who live in rural America near factory farms. There's a cost to the animals who are treated really terribly.
So yeah, there's always going to be this tension and trade-off.

Speaker 12 You know, we can opt to eat fewer eggs. We can eat egg alternative products like plant-based eggs.
Vegas.

Speaker 12 We can also use this as an opportunity to learn more about the factory farming system and maybe rethink how we produce food.

Speaker 12 I hope that's the one kind of silver lining of this terrible bird flu outbreak is that it gives us time to pause and think about how we might

Speaker 12 raise food in a more humane and sustainable way.

Speaker 1 Kenny TorellaVox.com. He also makes music.
In fact, all of the music you heard on today's show came from Kenny, who goes by Torello when he's dropping beats.

Speaker 1 Kenny's reporting was supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from the Builders Initiative. and Vox's Future Perfect Fellow, Sam Delgado, assisted with Kenny's recording.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Sam. Miles Bryan produced this episode, Amina Al Sadi edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, Andrea Christensder, and Patrick Boyd mixed.
I'm Sean Ramis Verme and it's today explained.

Speaker 11 Go Bart!

Speaker 11 Support for this show comes from OnePassword. If you're an IT or security pro, managing devices, identities, and applications can feel overwhelming and risky.

Speaker 11 Trellica by OnePassword helps conquer SaaS sprawl and shadow IT by discovering every app your team uses, managed or not. Take the first step to better security for your team.

Speaker 11 Learn more at onepassword.com/slash podcast offer. That's onepassword.com/slash podcast offer.
All lowercase.

Speaker 31 Oh, the car from Carvana's here.

Speaker 31 Well, will you look at that?

Speaker 32 It's exactly what I ordered. Like, precisely.

Speaker 31 It would be crazy if there were any catches, but there aren't, right? Right.

Speaker 12 Because that's how car buying should be.

Speaker 21 With Carvana, you get the car you want.

Speaker 31 Choose delivery or pickup and a week to love it or return it.

Speaker 32 Buy your car today with Carvana.

Speaker 31 Delivery or pickup fees may apply. Limitations and exclusions may apply.
See our seven-day return policy at carvana.com.