EGGS ARE IN the hot seat right now, with an oversized role in last year’s presidential election and a continued media barrage currently focused on how higher prices might affect this year’s Easter egg hunt.  

Some of the reporting looks at causes: general post-COVID inflation since 2022 and, more recently, the avian flu.  

Less probing coverage tends toward outrage (search for “eggstortion” and you’ll get a taste) and demands for accountability. No matter who you’re reading or talking to, it’s hard to escape the sense that we’re in a crisis and that the best outcome would be for egg prices to drop back to normal as soon as possible. But what if “normal” is actually part of a bigger problem? 

At a talk I gave last summer about the challenge of making deep change in the modern food system, a woman in the audience said she really wanted to support her local food co-op but wished they had some cheaper options for detergent.  

“The brand I want is three dollars more than the supermarket,” she said. 

When I asked how big a difference three dollars made to her, she admitted, “That’s what my husband says. It won’t break us, and it means I don’t have to spend time driving around to save a couple of bucks.” 

Then she added, “So I guess I’ll buy it at the co-op for three dollars more. But not five dollars. For five I would definitely go somewhere else.” 

That comment reflected the unwritten deal that middle-class Americans have made over the past century with the ever more powerful and distant entities that provide our groceries. There’s an invisible but unbreakable price ceiling, beyond which we will change our shopping choices and—if it gets bad enough—our votes.  

It happened in the early 1970s and again at the end of that decade, combining with high oil prices to send voters toward Ronald Reagan’s promise of a new day. 

It happened again last year. 

We haven’t actually seen double-digit food price increases since the 70s. That may be one reason why 2022’s inflationary spike hit so hard. But there’s day-to-day sticker shock, too, whenever we see a price that’s higher than expected. It violates that unwritten agreement that groceries in America should stay relatively cheap. 

“Relative” means relative to the kinds of jobs and incomes that enabled socioeconomic mobility throughout much of the last century. Affordable meat and eggs and a shot at college education for your kids are two sides of the same coin.  

The cheapness of American food is also relative to the rest of the world, where people fork over more of their money—often much more—for groceries, as Americans did before our food system became so fully industrialized. 

Now, after decades of widening wealth inequalities, shredded social safety nets, and continued ecological devastation, that deal is looking shaky. And a lot of people are circling the wagons around relatively cheap groceries and voting for whoever promises to bring prices down without asking us to take a hard look at what kept them low in the first place. 

A harder look would show us that three-dollar-a-dozen eggs were only ever possible because of huge economies of scale, with millions of chickens under one roof in inherently terrible conditions for the birds, human workers, and the ecosystems around them.  

Such “efficiencies” create new vulnerabilities like the spread of avian flu.  

Historically, governments have tackled the problems inherent in very large-scale food production in very different ways. Some countries have put caps on how much can be produced, usually to help out farmers who suffer when over-abundant supply drives prices down below what it cost them to grow or raise the food in the first place.  

That’s been the case with egg production in Canada. Because of supply caps, eggs were more expensive there before the current flu outbreak. But the price hasn’t risen as it has in the US. It’s easier to curtail the spread of the disease in a landscape of smaller-scale farms with tens of thousands of birds rather than millions. 

There hasn’t been much appetite for that kind of supply management in the US since the “get big or get out” approach of the late twentieth century. Instead, we inventive Americans have favored technological fixes, with ever-larger machinery and ever-more-sophisticated chemicals and pharmaceuticals.  

But those fixes tend to be very capital intensive. Very often, they make economic sense only at a very large scale. And that drives the cycle on and on—larger-scale farms and slaughterhouses and processing plants, more and more corporate consolidation at every level. 

The unsustainable conditions that give us cheap food are becoming clearer in the present moment. Corporate actors and their political allies are eliminating already-fragile safety nets, including those that get food to the too-many people who can’t afford it without help. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to make food healthier does nothing to make it more accessible to those without means. Nor will it do anything to dislodge giant companies who will happily sell us any kind of food as long as they’re able to make money doing it.  

If we’re not willing to confront the way that markets and industrialization have fundamentally shaped how we eat and what we think it should cost, we’re stuck with a food system that resists change at its deepest levels, one where maintaining “everyday low prices” means that only the very biggest companies can survive.  

If the trend toward consolidation continues, we may well be heading toward a day when we all depend on either Walmart or Amazon for our groceries. 

What would it look like instead to parlay this moment into some kind of true social solidarity around food? It happened during the early months of the Covid pandemic, when more Americans started to recognize the links among health risks, poverty, racial disparities, and diet.  

At the same time, it was harder to ignore the dangers and downsides of our industrial food system, including its reliance on so many underpaid and insecure workers toiling in farm fields and slaughterhouses and delivery trucks. During the lockdowns and the social and racial reckoning of 2020, voices from across the socioeconomic spectrum were calling for more equitable and conscientious ways of growing and sharing food. 

The difficulty, of course, is that those underpaid workers are among those who benefit from the relatively cheap prices and absurd overabundance of the industrialized food system. It’s one of the things that makes the status quo so resistant to change. No one in their right mind wants to make it harder for people in need to get enough to eat. 

But the current all-out attack on all forms of federal assistance changes the equation. The pathway toward prosperity that relatively cheap food helped to open for many Americans is now blocked in many directions. And the price of eggs has become a proxy for everything that was cemented in price by that unwritten deal, contributing to the political backlash that has put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.   

It’s a hard moment to argue that cheap food is a problem. But it’s also exactly the right moment, because getting those cheap eggs back means continuing to prop up a system that can’t and shouldn’t be sustained in the long run.  

With the cracks in its foundation ever more apparent, it’s a good time for more of us to start asking some better questions about food that go well beyond the price on the sticker. 

Cathy Stanton is a senior lecturer in anthropology and environmental studies at Tufts University.