About those eggs

If you’ve been to the grocery store lately you know what our egg situation is like. Avian flu has struck the major egg producers and a whole lot of chickens have been culled. That’s the problem with industrial scale farming -when thing go wrong they go wrong on a large scale. 

In my local stores the egg section is pretty empty. We also have the weird situation where organic and free range eggs can actually be cheaper than regular eggs. That’s because the specialty eggs are smaller operations and less prone to the disease. 

Of course you could always raise your own chickens. That’s great if you are into that sort of thing. As much as I love eating eggs raising chickens really doesn’t fit my lifestyle. My lovely wife and I like to travel too much. We don’t have anyone who’d be willing to take over when we are gone. 

What we’ve been doing is buying a lot of local eggs. They were never cheap, but now their prices aren’t any worse than the poorer quality eggs. Even with today’s high prices, eggs are a fairly cheap source of protein. I’m not going to drop them out of my diet if I don’t have to.

Eggs are not one of those things I want to stock up on. I’ve tried different powered and freeze dried eggs. They aren’t that good. I’ve found the powered eggs are suitable as a cooking ingredient but not very good for things like omelets. The freeze dried eggs taste bad and the mouth feel is like eating sponges. I don’t recommend it. 

Worse come to worse I’d rather do without eggs than eat bad ones.

-Sixbears

Lousy Farmer

I would have made a lousy farmer. Thank goodness my ancestors gave up potato farming in the cold rocky soil of Quebec. That’s not a life for me.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad there are farmers. I’m doubly glad I’m not one of them. For me running a farm is a type of slavery, or at the very least serfdom. Serfs were bound to the land. Farmers are too. Don’t think so? A farmer that spends too much time away from his farm soon goes out of business. Lord help him if he’s raising animals as they require constant care.

I believe it was Henry David Thoreau who said something about how much of a misfortune it is to inherit a fully functioning farm. Then again, I guess we can call Thoreau’s cabin experiment at Walden Pond the great grandfather of the simplicity movement. He pared down life to the basics and seemed to truly enjoy himself.

Thoreau, while not a farmer, was a gardener. There’s a huge difference between the two, and not just of scale. A farmer grows food with the intent of surplus. That surplus allows him to participate in the money economy. A gardener grows just enough for his own needs. That allows him to have freedom from the money economy.

Farmers deal with the greater economy of banks, markets, suppliers, dealers, regulators -a whole host of masters. A gardener avoids all that. They can even afford to participate less in the money economy because part of their needs are being satisfied without it. No need to earn taxable money to buy the food that you can grow.

As you can imagine, governments love farmers and hate gardeners. The first farmers provided the surplus that supported bureaucracy, priesthoods and armies. Sure, we got civilization out of the process, but at a high cost to personal freedom, liberty and health.

-Sixbears

King Corn abdicates

It’s looking bad for the this year’s corn crop. Heat and drought in the nation’s heartland are taking a toll. What corn that is produced may cost a lot more to ship. Low water on the Mississippi is shutting down barge operations causing shippers to resort to more expensive trains and trucks.

Food is going to get pricey. Not much corn is actually eaten as plain corn, but it has been the cheapest sugar on the market so it’s used in just about everything. Corn also has a major role as an animal feed. Expect the price of meat to go up.

Then there is energy. Ethanol derived from corn is a significant portion of our liquid fuels.

What will happen? Nations that depend on cheap American corn for food are going to experience unrest. A major component in the Arab Awakening is rising food prices. It’s going to get uglier. Cheap US corn destroyed Mexico’s local corn producers -and now the price is going up.

Will fuel get more expensive at the pump? By rights it should, but collapsing world economies may keep the price down for a while. Of course, if it’s your personal economy that’s collapsed you won’t be buying much fuel either.

I’m not a big fan of corn. It’s a heavily genetically altered plant that relies on chemical inputs and is grown on a massive factory scale. High fructose corn syrup is something I’ve cut out of my diet -and feel better for it. Ethanol fuel has ethical issues. Is is better to feed American cars or poor people? It’s not even a very efficient way to produce fuel, just barely producing a bit more energy than it consumes.

Even though I don’t eat any corn and prefer grass raised meat, I’ll suffer along with everyone else. When a major grain like corn is in trouble, all food is going to go up in price. Stock up on food now while you still can.

One problem will most likely go away. Boaters have been worried that the government would approve E15 gasoline. That’s 15% ethanol as opposed to the 10% currently allowed. The current formula has been very bad in the marine environment so the 15% was expected to be much worse. My guess is that there won’t be even 10% ethanol in that E10 gasoline.

Being so hugely dependent on one major food crop has always been a recipe for disaster. It was bad new for the Mayans. Reliance on potatoes was bad for the Irish. Of course, corn production has been terrible efficient and therefore cheap. The problem is efficient systems are often fragile.

-Sixbears