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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

> but chickens don't have to be farmed like that

They probably have to if you want to keep the same, low and subsided price that people, who don't want or can pay more, got used to.

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I think I pay $8 a dozen for Vital Farms eggs. My assumption is that a lot of that price is for whatever overhead is required to run things a bit more humanely than the average.

Unfortunately in the case of animal wellfare or Bio as the call it in Europe your extra money mostly goes to supermarkets as profit, to the low volume producers and less than 5% actually go towards a better product or animal wellfare. For things like eggs I would be very surprised if more than 1 cent extra per egg is actually spend towards improving the conditions of chickens.

This seems to undercut the "doing it ethically would significantly increase prices" argument for why it doesn't happen. Does this mean we could legislate the worst kinds of egg production out of existence and, once things settled down, only pay single-digit-percentages more for a dozen eggs, because most of the difference now is just middlemen gouging price-insensitive buyers? $5 more per dozen is a shock and would have people up in arms (probably literally), $0.20 more per dozen seems... not so bad.

The argument is that keeping the price low requires inhumane practices, but providing human practices doesn't command a price that would offset the overhead of being more human? That doesn't make sense.

I also pay more for pasture raised chicken eggs as well, but the regular eggs by me are almost always on sale for $1.50 for dozen if you're willing to jump between a few brands. That's a pretty massive difference, especially for someone with a family who probably goes through a couple dozen eggs per week.

I'm aware that making a software-engineer salary I can easily afford more humanely raised eggs, but I'd never judge my friends who are, say, schoolteachers, for not being able to justify eggs that are 6x more expensive.

inb4 the inevitable comment of "pasture raised doesn't mean anything, the chickens can still...." Yes I researched the specific farm my eggs come from to make sure it's humane.

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