This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in Images for East Bernard Express, January 26, 2023.
I wasn’t surprised when my wife came back from the grocery store the other day and reported that the pasture-raised eggs we usually buy were selling for $7 per dozen. I had been seeing posts on Facebook satirizing the high price of eggs, — one post showed an egg in a fancy jewelry box. “More precious than gold,” sarcastically proclaimed another post featuring a carton of eggs.
These online posts reminded me of that famous Aesop Fable, “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.” The owner of the goose isn’t satisfied with just one golden egg per day, so he kills the goose to get the eggs inside her. There were no eggs inside, and his source of golden eggs was dead.
But don’t blame the egg farmers today for the high cost. Bird flu has wiped out numerous flocks of chickens, and the cost of chicken feed has doubled. No golden egg for farmers!
My Wendish grandparents were farmers, and one way they earned money was to sell eggs. In 1939, eggs sold for 32 cents a dozen (the equivalent today of $2.99). When World War II got underway, eggs were scarce and doubled in price (64 cents a dozen, about $4.48 by today’s economy). While my grandparents made a profit off their eggs, these oval edibles were not exactly “golden,” even when they became scarce.
While I am neither a politician nor an economist, I suspect there are many other causes for this high cost of eggs crisis, including general inflation.
Since my parents also raised chickens and had plenty eggs, we didn’t feel the pinch during the World War II egg shortage. My parents gave eggs, or sold them for a few cents, to folks who had no chickens. It was not uncommon during the War for homemakers to make cakes without eggs.
No doubt, a solution to today’s problem would be for each one of us to build a chicken house, buy some chickens, and have our own eggs.
I hear people say they’re going to do that, but things would have to get a lot worse before that becomes my plan of action.
Helping my parents take care of our chickens in Dime Box is one of my memories not consistent with the image of the “good old days.”
Feeding chickens and hunting eggs daily soon becomes monotony. Periodically cleaning out the chicken house with a shovel was unpleasant to say the least, but not nearly as unpleasant as painting creosote on the inside walls. Finding chicken snakes in the nests when hunting eggs was terrifying for a kid afraid of snakes. No fun either putting medicine in the chickens’ water when they got sick and clipping their wings when they flew over the fence to eat up the crop of vegetables in our garden.
No, I’ll do without eggs before I return to egg farming! And cake made without eggs tastes good enough!
-o-
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired Wharton County Junior College teacher, a retired Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.