Bok bok bok

Down the road from where my best friend, Crash, lives, is a family who raises their own chickens and sells the eggs for $2.50 a dozen.

Recently, I'd switched to buying "cage free" eggs at the grocery store - for $2.70 a dozen. If they're of the organic variety, they're $3.40 a dozen.

Though I realize that the chickens who provide the "cage free" eggs aren't TRULY cage free, it's worth it to me to pay the extra money. The eggs taste SO much better than the store-brand 69-cent-per-dozen eggs, and although I'm the last person to sympathize with PETA, I prefer my eggs to come from chickens who aren't crammed on top of each other. At least the store "cage free" chickens get more room. Because, I'm sorry... there's no way this is, in any stretch of the imagination, humane...



Living in Suburbia, I'm not ENTIRELY sure if we can have chickens, although after having eggs from A's neighbor's mini-farm, I'm going to be forced to call Animal Control and see if they can tell me if I can have them.

I mentioned the farm eggs to my mother, who launched into an interrogation about if I had to refrigerate them and if how they have to be cooked... in case farm eggs are totally different than any other...

...and then she asked how much I paid for them.

My mother then launched into a gentle berratement of how ridiculous it was to pay that much for eggs, and that the 69 eggs at the grocery store were fine.



The Architect and I later talked about how depressing it is that most of the people in this country are SO. OBSESSED. with cheap - quality be damned.

That how it's the good-ol'-boys who beat their chests, sing "God Bless the USA," scream "Amurrka! Love it or leave it! Keep our jobs here in the US! Stop sendin' our jobs to China and India!" and then run to Wal Mart (the single largest importer of foreign products in the US...)

Sixty-nine cents for a dozen eggs. Less than six CENTS per egg.

If people were actually forced to pay the true price for their food, we might be able to do away with over crowded chicken barns and feed lots.

Cheap food via subsidies.

Less subsidies, less obesity, lower the population, cure cancer, global warming (which doesn't exist anyway, but none of those yayhoos ever propose that people stop breeding...), etc, etc. In a perfect world, anyway...





(images courtesy http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/)