The insane price of eggs!

 

Sure, I buy eggs every once in awhile. Some weeks I'm kind of into eggs, you know, for eating. But more often I just need one or two eggs to make mayonnaise.

Of course I make mayonnaise! Doesn't everyone make mayonnaise?

But recently, as you probably know, all of America started going batshit insane about the price of eggs. I mean, I wasn't that interested, but I still knew all about it because it was simply everywhere. The soaring price of eggs was, dare I say, in the very batter of public life.

The funny thing was in the afternoon before going to the grocery store to investigate the price of eggs and, uh, shop for groceries, I had been listening to a favorite podcast, while shelving books at my library, called "War on Cars". In this show they were talking about "Moral Panics". Moral Panics are when a widespread fear, often irrational and overblown, rises up on bare fragments of evidence, that some evil thing is threatening the well-being and values of society in the gravest of ways. This is often perpetuated by a kind of mass media hysteria, and fed by politicians. Examples include the Salem Witch Trials, Reefer Madness, and the dangers of Rock, and Video Games, and Critical Race Theory. The show I was listening to was bringing in the idea of moral panic to describe what was happening in relation to Ebikes, scooters, and more people using bike lanes in various cities.

But something about this egg thing reminded me of what I was learning about moral panics.

I mean, the price of everything is going up. A lot of it is extremely suspicious to me, and I think has more to do with the Corporate Monopolization of markets than things like supply chain issues, but yes, both are deeply involved. Still, why the egg?

Probably like you, any trip I make to the grocery store these days can provide me with three or four random opportunities to be stunned at the newly high cost of something. I may never have seen cauliflower at five dollars a pound before, or I might suddenly notice that it has become normal for any good cheese to now be more than twenty dollars a pound. I looked at the eggs. They had a dozen on sale for an amount that evoked no particular reaction in me, and though I believe a singular organic free-range egg was 40 cents or so, and this was maybe higher than I was used to, it was not the sort of amount to make my jaw drop. And yet as I wheeled to the check out line the screaming banner headline of our main city newspaper that I passed was about the terrible high prices of eggs.

Weird.

I suppose it was because it was a symbol, a common food, easily understandable. It could express a broader outrage about rising prices. And maybe too it had something to do with it being neatly ascribable to bird flu.

If everything is crazy, and supply chains are broken, and bird flus are decimating products, and no one will work (for low wages), and we all feel like it's a craziness tearing apart the fabric of society and there's nothing we can do about it except suck it up, or use less eggs, or embrace the new luxury of omelets, then maybe we won't look...   too...    close?

If there is an underlying reason something is 15 percent more expensive, but you raise the price 25 percent, maybe you can shrug your shoulders and make ten percent more off of everything.

Naaaah. Just kidding. It's all fate and luck and beyond anyone's control. But I'm here to help!

Here's how to save money on eggs!

Buy a cheap chicken. It can even be a remaindered chicken.

Take it home.

Put it in your countertop time machine (use the kind with the viewing window).

Dial the machine back eight weeks, but keep your finger on the "stop" button.

You can do whatever until the chicken is getting kind of cute and fluffy. Then, when the chick becomes an egg wait a couple more seconds (this is important, otherwise, yuck). You want to catch your egg just before it disappears. 

If it disappears don't worry!

Dial your time machine forward a few hours and then hit the stop.

One very fresh egg!

Enjoy!