In 2012 fewer than 10% of the egg-laying hens in the US were cage-free. Instead the vast majority were raised in enclosures that longtime animal welfare campaigner Josh Balk describes as “the size of a home microwave.” By then, Balk had been pushing his cage-free agenda for the better part of a decade, starting as a recent graduate of George Washington University working with students on their successful petition to remove eggs from caged birds from a campus market in 2005. Less than two years later, more than 100 college and university dining systems had joined the cage-free movement, despite a then-40% price premium over regular eggs...But the real turning point came in 2015. That year packaged-food companies including General Mills and Nestlé, as well as restaurant giants Cheesecake Factory, Starbucks, Subway and others, announced their own plans to achieve 100% cage-free egg status... The Golden Arches then beat its own timeline, announcing in February 2024 that it was sourcing all its eggs from hens that could spread their wings and walk around outside the confines of teeny-tiny metal cages...California passed Proposition 2 in 2008 in a landslide—with 63.5% of voters choosing to require that all egg-laying hens in the state, as well as pregnant pigs and veal calves, be housed in quarters that let them stand up, fully stretch limbs, lie down and turn around. Nine other states, including Arizona, Massachusetts and Michigan, have since passed similar measures. The year after Prop 2 passed, the California legislature mandated that as of 2015 all eggs sold in the state—the most populous in the country—would meet the Prop 2 standards...“There is a lot of talk about cage-free, but are people actually buying them?” he asked. Data from NielsenIQ offers a clear answer: yes. At US retailers, unit sales of eggs labeled “cage-free” were up about 16% for the 52 weeks ended on June 28. Pasture-raised eggs, a category that goes even further than cage-free, were up even more, at 25%. Unit sales of eggs overall were up a mere 1.6% in the same period...Now the Department of Justice is stepping in with a lawsuit against the state of California that it says will protect residents from the “real harm” caused by its “rogue” cage-free egg commitments and the ensuing higher prices, as USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins put it in a press release. “Thankfully, President Trump is standing up against this overreach,” she said... Although the suit blames cage-free laws for higher prices in the state, there’s widespread agreement within the industry that price spikes have been a direct result of bird flu, not cage-free eggs...
More information at the archived article from Bloomberg.
With respect, it's not preventing people from choosing free range eggs. It is instead ensuring that there is an alternative available. I may prefer free rangers, but the cost is likely significantly more.
ReplyDeleteI quite understand. We have both types in our home.
DeleteWith little respect, it is allowing farmers to enclose the chickens in small inhumane cages, which makes it easier, and hence cheaper, to collect the eggs, etc.
DeleteHairdressers could do a cheaper haircut if they had your head locked in a vice while they worked ... but how much cruelty do you accept to save a few cents per egg or head ?
And that head is in the vice 24 hours a day, for it's entire life.
Might be a good idea to disallow others to look at the United States as a Third World country.
Of course, that may need a drive by a certain book depository.
Quite ballsy to say residents get harmed by something this explicitly voted for by a wide margin.
ReplyDeleteWords loose meaning when the media copy these words without pushback.
Anyway, the way people treat animals is very revealing about themselves.
Finally, I note that at Costco, the 24-packs of cage free organic eggs tend to cost as much as regular eggs (per egg) in the regular supermarket (if you can get them these days - hello bird flu). This is true for most organic meat, dairy, vegetables and fruit. There is no need for organic products to be significantly more expensive than regular products. This is a fallacy local farmer's markets and WholePayCheck sold us. If we demand more properly grown fresh food the price will normalize.
Finally, and I am digressing, the reason why the rest of the world does not like to buy US beef is that it's food standards are just higher. For instance, EU regulations for "normal" beef are pretty much what "organic" beef is in the US. And US farmers (and consumers) do not want to meet those standards, and hence miss out on sales.
In terms of the livestock mentioned, the differences between confinement approaches are not insignificant, but no one should be led to believe we are not inflicting great suffering across all such practices, from better to worse, in all confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Is all this suffering necessary? (Not to mention the associated environmental damage?) I can't imagine Donald Trump taking such a question seriously. But this question is not taken seriously by more than a very small fraction of Americans. So, in this sense, if we stop splitting hairs, we are uncomfortably close to Trump in our dominant normative culture. Said differently, start talking animal suffering, animal exploitation, animal rights, or even to the least threatening question of animal welfare within the food system, and 90% of Democrats, liberals and progressives will change the subject. They'll vote for a law giving a sow room to turn around, at least here in California, but to wonder if a sow has a particle of moral standing is a bridge too far. The ethics of diet? Esoteric. Overall, Trump is our shadow in the Jungian sense.
ReplyDeleteThe Netherlands has an Animal Rights Party.
Deletehttps://www.partyfortheanimals.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_the_Animals
They're basically PETA as a political party.
3/150 seats in the Dutch house
1/75 seat in the Dutch senate
26/572 provincial seats in the 12 Dutch provinces
63 council seats in Dutch cities
1/31/720 seat in EU parliament (one of the 31 Dutch seats out of 720 total seats)
And before you say that's not enough, they do get things done:
https://www.partijvoordedieren.nl/successen
(good luck with google translate)
Their simple existence has forced other parties to have opinions on animal welfare and rights, and forced them to recognize uncomfortable truths. Oh the benefits of multiparty political system.
They're trying to get started in other EU countries, but electoral thresholds make that hard. In a lot of countries you need a few % of the vote to get in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_threshold#Europe
(Technically, the Netherlands has a threshold as well, but it is 1 seat, which kinda is a moot point)
They end every speech in parliament with the Cato-esk phrase: "And furthermore, we believe that the bioindustry should be ended."
Returning to the US: The DNC is working to get rid of Iowa as the first primary. That would help the silly focus on corn subsidies and other rural affairs that prevails in US politics.
The point of my little screed is that we keep focusing, lazer-like, on Trump, as if he's all that different from the rest of us Americans. Whether the first primary is in Iowa or Idaho, if the DNC ever invites someone from PETA to speak at a national convention I'll eat my shorts.
DeleteThis is kind of interesting. The Dutch come in at 1.8% vegan, about like the US:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/veganism-by-country
There's always a lot of debate on whether you have to be vegan to be a member of the Animal Rights Party. They are fairly open about the fact that they don't really understand how you can not be a vegan and support them, but they'll take all the support they can get. They also acknowledge that going full vegan from a "normal" diet is a process that can take time, and fully support anyone eating less meat and acknowledge that many people may go through a long flexitarian phase before they're fully vegan.
DeletePersonally, I think they get a lot of support of people who are fine with eating meat, but do want higher standards of animal welfare.
I note that there is a much larger push in the Netherlands, from the government but with support of supermarkets to point people towards a vegetarian diet.
https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/nl/duurzaam-eten/waarom-is-minder-vlees-eten-beter-voor-gezondheid-en-milieu.aspx
https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/Assets/Uploads/voedingscentrum/Documents/FS%20Duurzaam%20eten%20-%20Engels%202022.pdf
(second link in annoying pdf but English)
Which is a thing because the Netherlands is a HUMONGOUS meat producer (considering its puny size).
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Animal-density-in-the-European-Union-in-number-of-livestock-units-500-kg-LW-per-hectare_fig1_228882429
And this is one of the main political problems right now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_crisis_in_the_Netherlands
The other two are immigration and housing. But they're all intertwined.
I agree with you that moral progress is a journey and not a destination. But in order to take that journey, we need to make understanding the true size of our "misery footprint" the primary focus. This is true across human, animal and environmental domains. Whether we buy "cage free" eggs is less important than whether we really hear the voice of suffering and let it lead us. If we do, then I think that voice will sort out questions of action and activism at a deep level. This is not to be confused with an argument for keeping hens in spaces the size of a piece of copy paper. Rather, the question is how deep and comprehensive are the roots of what motivates us. Otherwise we're like bees moving from flower to flower, from recycling to eco-friendly resorts to heritage pig meat to bigger tanks for orcas to bigger and bigger batteries to charity that can never really serve justice to... As if the voice in our heads can guide us while the voice of suffering is systematically muted. While the voice of 85 billion CAFO animals is very certainly muted. We're not trained to do this kind of moral work. To really hear and to really object. And I don't see myself as any example of success. A much better example of failure. So we humans march on. Morally disengaged. And it's no accident that Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the world.
DeleteWhether we buy "cage free" eggs is less important than whether we really hear the voice of suffering and let it lead us.
DeleteBut it is important. Because you're using *an* available tool to show what you want, other than your vote. Driving up demand for better products helps.
However, we should recognize that individual actions are not enough to get to meaningful progress. The fallacy of "letting your spending speak" is that your spending is insignificant, because while consumer spending is important, it is dwarfed by industry spending.
Whatever you do to buy decent products in the supermarket does not stop those supermarkets from wrapping those products in too much plastic and driving them to your supermarkets in the most polluting trucks possible. Individual choices can not change force supermarkets to change.
But government regulation can. And that's why collective action is needed.
The big fallacy at the moment is that people think the government should be run like a business. The government is however not a business, and should not be run as one. The government is a service and should be run as such.
Bingo !
ReplyDelete> We have both types in our home.
ReplyDeleteDon't put all your eggs in one basket! :-)
The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.
ReplyDeleteProverbs 12:10
DeleteSpeaking of animal confinement, in the 1980's the EU passed laws about the sizes of cages for different animals. When the Russian circus came to Brussels, they had to enlarge the cages for the performing bears to meet the requirements. The Russians were furious when the bears refused to perform because they preferred to remain in the new cages,
ReplyDeleteWA state went all cage-free eggs in Jan 2024. Personally I don't mind paying a little more to not be so cruel.
ReplyDelete