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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

With the obsession over egg prices you’d think everyone is eating two dozen per day or something.

Yea seriously. The price increase is inconvenient, but hardly relevant in terms of calories/$.

I eat 5-6 eggs each morning with some potatoes (my blood work is great btw, so take it easy armchair dietitians). Dietary cholesterol isn't what most people think. I digress.

But that means my at-home breakfast went from:

(5 eggs * $0.2) + (1 red potato * $0.20) = $1.20

(5 eggs * $0.5) + (1 red potato * $0.20 = $2.70

I'll survive.

Your strange breakfast has increased in price by 150%. If this were happening across meals, that would mean that a family who formerly spent $400 a month on groceries is now spending $1000 a month on groceries.

edit: assuming a total 20% tax rate and a $15 minimum wage, that $600 represents 50 additional hours of work a month.

> If this were happening across meals,

Yeah, it would be different if the situation was different.

I was replying to a comment about a 6-egg breakfast. You're welcome to reduce my 600 hour/year calculation to a 200 hour/year calculation (assuming a three-meal day of an entirely normal family of runners), because I explained exactly what I was doing in a way that you completely understood.

> I was replying to a comment about a 6-egg breakfast.

And that person is already in the upper extreme of most affected.

For you to make a scenario where that is multiplied even further goes beyond anything realistic.

It was clear what you were doing, but that doesn't make it reasonable.

Your other comment says "I'm disagreeing that the doubling or tripling of the prices of basic foodstuffs such as eggs, flour, milk etc. is a silly thing to get hung up on." but you're really going about arguing that in a bad way.

If 5% of your diet triples in price, that's a notable setback, but building up the 5% into a much bigger percent for the sake of argument doesn't make a very convincing one.

There is a huge difference between one foodstuff going up at a time versus all of them, especially if it's temporary. I'm much more worried about the price of every food that isn't eggs. If you gave me a choice between cutting eggs 3x or cutting everything else 10%, I think I'd do the latter.

It's a very normal breakfast for athletes. But your example isn't our current reality so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

To borrow a saying from the investment world - It's easy to double a small number.

I'm not defending the price hike. I'm just pointing out that it's a silly thing to get hung up on and most are not considering that eggs have been, and still are, a caloric and protein dense staple of healthy diets. We take that for granted.

Eggs aren't the only grocery item that has risen in price. The reason I used your breakfast as an example is because you used it as an example. I assume that you were using it as an example of an extremely egg-heavy breakfast, and pointing out that the price difference is insignificant to you.

I responded by pointing out that if (ideal, fantasy) minimum-wage families ate like you, they would have to work 50 more hours a month in order to deal with the price increase. My implication is that 50 hours of work a month is significant. Salary calculations are usually made with an assumption of 2000 hours a year, and that increase in egg prices of families who had your diet would represent 600 of those hours.

I'm disagreeing that the doubling or tripling of the prices of basic foodstuffs such as eggs, flour, milk etc. is a silly thing to get hung up on. Your argument seems to be that eggs are so good, they'd be a bargain at any price?

How do you cook the potato ? Always interested in alternative (for me) breakfasts !

Dice ~1lb of red potatoes (for potassium)

Coat in olive oil. Season with salt, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika.

Spread on oven pan. Bake at 420F for 20-22min until edges brown (I'm at >5000' elevation btw)

Place in container and store in fridge.

In the morning in sautee to heat them before adding scrambled egg. You can top with cheese and scallions but I don't.

Amount of potatoes is determined by past 24hrs and next 24hrs of energy expenditure. Rest days are ~50g, training days between 100-150g

cheers ! I make this spice mixture for fries and eggs, it might interest you:

  2 parts salt
  1 part sweet paprika
  1 part garlic powder
  dash of pepper or mustard powder
  dash of citric acid powder for the extra kick

That sounds good, I'll try it out. Thanks!

You’re spending $500/year more on breakfast. That’s nothing to sneeze at, especially for people on tight budgets

Potato prices have gone up substantially as well. Grocery stores are advertising $1 a pound as a sale price

Are you not? When I was a lad I ate four dozen eggs every morning to help me get large. And now that I'm grown I eat five dozen eggs (so I'm roughly the size of a barn).

A barn? Should be a barge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

If you have a family then there's a good chance you go through them really fast. Imagine making 2-egg omelets for a family of 4. That's 8 eggs right there. Then you bake something with the kids in the afternoon and that's 8 eggs. Then you decide to make pasta for a change and that's 8 more eggs. It's not that difficult to go through a lot of eggs and why places like Costco sell eggs in 2-dozen quantities as well.

It's not difficult to go through 4 dozen a week and at $5 more per dozen that's $20/week and $80/month more for eggs. That starts to hit a lot of people's budgets.

I've literally just not purchased a single egg since this started. I'll live. Turns out one can go a substantially long time without eating a very specific single food item.

Companies that bulk buy eggs to put into their own products don't seem to be getting as gouged as the normal consumer, so it hasn't affected my grocery shopping much.

In fact I've benefited quite a bit from this. Chicken is pretty cheap right now.

As a protein they are a unique combination of nutritious, consistent, versatile, easy to cook, and a long refrigerated shelf life.

The fact that you replaced them in your diet doesn't make them easy to replace in all diets.

I also have stopped buying eggs, but everything you said is correct. Maybe they are still underpriced? I wonder how high the price will go before the average American will buy fewer of them.

I go through ~18 eggs/week. I already bought better eggs though, so the price increases have not been as noticeable.

Something I will notice is when my local grocery stops selling chicken breasts for $1.99/pound. I'm surprised they haven't upped the price every time I'm in there.

I assume the price is low because they are culling herds

It's been $1.99 for years. It's my bellweather for price increases.

You cannot sell culled chickens as food.

Lots of things have eggs as an ingredient, from breakfasts, to breads, pastries, ramens and pastas.

I doubt this is the main explanation, because liquid egg product prices don't necessarily track whole egg prices. I don't know where to look up the current prices for "breaker eggs", but the supply chains are remarkably bifurcated, and even if e.g. the same bird flu outbreak affected both, the effects might evolve differently across time and location.

30 pound pail of eggs is $82. https://www.webstaurantstore.com/frozen-whole-liquid-eggs-30...

But no idea what they used to be - maybe somewhere someone has printed catalogs.

According to the Wayback Machine[0] in 2022-10-09, the price was $126.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221009125424/https://www.webst...

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