190,000,000 Omelets
I don’t believe in the three-egg omelet. Two-egg omelets are vastly superior. But we can save that argument for another day.
But perhaps you heard, 380 million eggs were just recalled in a salmonella outbreak. If you brought all the recalled eggs to Washington D.C. you could hurl 875,563 at each member of Congress for their ridiculous lack of oversight in a much too consolidated industry.
Did I mention that all of these eggs came from a single producer? Let’s give credit where it’s due. The producer in question is Wright County Egg of Galt, Iowa.
Never heard of them? Well, they produce eggs for:
Albertson’s, Bayview, Dutch Farms, Farm Fresh, Glenview Farms, Hillandale, Kemps, Lucerne, Lund, Mountain Dairy, Nulaid, Ralph’s, Shoreland, Sunshine, Sun Valley, and Trafficanda.
The full list and lot dates are available here.
But here is the good news:
Eggs affected by the expanded recall were distributed to food wholesalers, distribution centers and foodservice companies in California, Arizona, Missouri, Minnesota, Texas, Georgia, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Illinois, Utah, Nebraska, Arkansas, Wisconsin and Oklahoma. These companies distribute nationwide.
Well, maybe not so good.
When people talk about the hidden costs of cheap eggs, this is certainly one of them. There are economies of scale for large producers. Which is why your local farmer will never be able to offer $1 per carton eggs. But when production is consolidated, and things go wrong, they go very wrong, very fast.
The solution, by the way, isn’t to hard cook all your eggs. The solution is to buy clean eggs. Just because they are local doesn’t make them clean. Just because they are mass-produced doesn’t make them dirty. Salmonella can happen anywhere. But when it happens with a small local farm, the danger is limited to one community, instead of the whole freaking country.
So far only four states have reported statistics, and over 300 people have been sickened. Come on! What will it take to get some serious food policy discussions moving?
FUSSYlittleBLOG 
Even though they cost me more, I’ve switched to buying Giroux Farms eggs. They’re cage free and a NY state company. I can afford to pay a little more to support a local farm.
I think it would be environmentally unsound to waste those eggs by hurling them at members of Congress. They should be served raw in the Congressional Cafe.
I say we get some catapults or trebuchets. We can set it up near the reflecting pool and do our hurling like that. It would be far more entertaining than having them served at the Cafe. And our tax dollars would support the clean up. Now there’s a good use of resources….