It isn’t entirely about lowering one’s food miles to cut down on the amount of oil used and greenhouse gases produced in bringing your food to you. It’s also about knowing where your food comes from so you can have greater confidence in its safety.
By now most of us have heard of the egg recall due to salmonella, which has now grown to a recall of half a billion eggs and is expected to generate more recalls. Currently about 1,000 people have contracted salmonella from these eggs.
It’s a small amount of eggs compared to the whole amount produced in the United States, but if you read the article I linked, you can see the common factor in the recalls is Quality Egg, which provides farmers with feed and young chickens, and which also has had numerous safety violations (among other problems) over the years. The conditions in which the chickens must live and the workers must work sound pretty horrible, but it’s not atypical of a factory farm situation.
Humane issues aside, happy chickens who have room to move are healthier chickens. That we as a country produce so many eggs in inhumane, unsanitary conditions means we take many risks with those eggs. This is why we buy our eggs from Swingbelly’s at the Forest Park Farmers Market. He has good prices, will tell you exactly how he cares for his chickens – some of whom you can meet – and the eggs are really good.
The problem, ultimately, is that buying eggs in this way is always more expensive than buying a dozen white eggs from the supermarket for $2. Prices for mass-produced food in the United States don’t reflect the actual cost of production, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post. If you eat eggs, don’t keep chickens yourself, and can spend the extra couple bucks at the farmers market, I encourage you to give those eggs a try.
