Insisting on Cheaper Eggs Is a Huge Mistake
“Much human suffering resulting from zoonotic diseases,” Benatar stated bluntly, “could probably have been avoided had humans treated animals better.”
For decades, public health experts have feared that the next big pandemic would originate in poultry. In an eerily prescient 2007 articlein the American Journal of Public Health titled “The Chickens Come Home to Roost,” published during a global avian flu outbreak, David Benatar wrote that the next global influenza pandemic would likely start with an avian influenza. “Much human suffering resulting from zoonotic diseases,” Benatar stated bluntly, “could probably have been avoided had humans treated animals better.” Reducing the risk of zoonotic outbreaks in the food system, mostly by reducing land-clearing for crops and moving away from the factory-farming of animals, are lessons we should have learned from previous avian flu outbreaks and from the 2009 swine flu outbreak. And these should have been driven home by the scope and scale of human and economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Instead, meat, dairy, and egg consumption increased. People may claim to care about animal welfare and avoiding future pandemics, and many people surely do, but in the aggregate shoppers vote against these interests with their dollars by, for instance, buying cheap eggs. Economists call this revealed preference: look at what people actually buy and you’ll understand what they actually value. And consumers, understandably, value price, taste, and habit. Markets respond by trying to give consumers what they want, and in this case that means funneling money to factory farms.
What consumers buy, in turn, determines both how inflation is measured and how it’s experienced. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a tool for measuring inflation. It compiles the costs of a wide range of good most Americans buy and compares the cost of this basket over time. But this tool evaluates not just what consumers buy but how much, so if consumers eat a lot of eggs, the price of eggs will be weighted heavily in calculating the CPI. As the Brookings Institute put it in an article written before the current outbreak of H5N1, “Americans spend more on chicken than tofu, so changes in the price of chicken have a greater impact on the CPI.” In the face of a supply shock like H5N1, egg prices rise much faster than other goods, which not only drives up CPI, but makes the difference in prices very obviously visible to shoppers, even though most of them don’t connect the price hikes to a disease ravaging farms thousands of miles away from their supermarket. Put differently, H5N1 is an invisible inflationary disease.