Anyone who’s gone to the supermarket recently knows that egg prices have soared just as fast and as high as a bird taking flight. Indeed, egg prices year-to-year rose by around 60 percent last December according to Consumer Price Index data. This is particularly distressing because eggs have always been a good, affordable source of protein for lower income families.
While the American consumer struggles with “egg-flation,” some vegan activists have pondered why egg prices are not higher.
In a recent Vox.com article titled “Eggs Are Expensive For All the Wrong Reasons,” Marina Bolotnikova, a vegan Harvard grad, insists that consumers should stop assuming eggs must be cheap in the first place.
In her view, consumers take for granted that egg-laying hens are abundant in supply and therefore affordable. She argues that we would respect hens more if we considered them rare and luxurious. In other words, expensive eggs should be the norm, not the exception.
While Bolotnikova bashes shoppers for being whiny, she also claims the American consumer must be “absolved” of the sin of “participating in an indefensibly cruel system” (which is an activist’s way of saying buying food like a normal person and eating a normal diet). If a dozen eggs need to cost $50 for consumers to repent and start loving animals more, then so be it.
It’s easy for someone like Bolotnikova to pontificate about these issues when she doesn’t even consume eggs. She is, after all, a vegan activist who spent a career in Ivy League academia and now just writes about farming. Out of touch, much?
So while you the consumer feel the tight squeeze in your wallet, some vegan activists want to shame you for simply complaining about costs.
