Take a moment to search the net for “Salmonella Egg Blame” and you’ll see a list of prime targets.  Among them:  ‘battery cages,’ ‘factory farming,’ ‘Wright County Egg,’ ‘industrial food production,’ ‘Hillandale Farms,’ ‘Jack DeCoster,’ ‘tainted chicken feed,’ ‘USDA,’ ‘FDA,’ the ‘US Senate’ and even ‘Barack Obama.’  The real culprit, however, is the US consumer.

Every decade for the past 150 years, the percentage of our income that we spend for food has decreased.  We now spend less than 10% of our income feeding ourselves compared to over 15% thirty years ago and over 50% before 1900.  To put this in more concrete terms, in 1875 it took 1,700 hours of work to purchase the annual food supply for a family.  Today it takes about 260 hours of work.  Oh, and in 1875 we spent 1% of our annual income on health care.  Today, we spend over 16%.  Not surprisingly, health care costs have tracked the food cost trend, but in the opposite direction.

Rose Acre Farms in Iowa; HSUS investigation Feb-Mar 2010 (Humane Society of the US)

We live in a food democracy.  Each day we vote with our wallets at grocery stores and markets throughout the US.  Over 90% of the eggs purchased by the US consumer are factory farmed, caged, non-organic, non pasture raised, non free range eggs selling for less than ten cents per egg.

To produce such an egg, producers must keep the hens in abysmal industrial farming conditions which the European Union and voters in the State of California have deemed inhumane and have outlawed.  Economics dictate that these hens are fed the lowest quality ingredients available, including at times meat and bone meal from – you guessed it – other dead chickens.  The total cost of this feed cannot exceed about two cents per hen, per day.  That’s like feeding humans for less than $1 per day.

In May of this year four college interns, sponsored by Whole Planet Foundation, took up residence in Pena Blanca, Guatemala with a mandate of living on $1 per day each.  This is what the poorest of poor live on worldwide.  The college students’ goal was to see if they could do the same – and experience the consequences.  They succeeded.  When I met up with them last month in their tiny dirt floor hut (think large battery cage), they had lost nearly 15 lbs each and had contracted a host of parasites and diseases including e. Coli poisoning, but they had survived on $1 per day each.  They are currently producing a documentary on their travails and those of Guatemala’s poor (more at www.onedollaraday.weebly.com).  They are also finishing up a regimen of heavy antibiotics, anti-parasites and anti-amoebas.  Sure, we can survive on $1 per day just as a hen can survive on two cents.  But, what’s the real cost?

Vital Farm eggs sell for around $5-$7 per dozen in stores and farmer’s markets.   Why so much?  Because it costs more to produce high quality food.  Our girls live outdoors, on healthy green pastures during daylight hours.  They eat native grasses and an organic feed ration that I’ve eaten by the handful (don’t try this with the feed given to hens laying ten cent eggs).  They run around, get exercise, take dust baths and generally get to act as the birds they are.  Thus, they produce an egg that has only 179 mg of cholesterol (vs. 200-280 for other eggs) and even contains vitamin C!

Hens being hens at Vital Farms.

We as consumers have no problem spending $1-$2 at home for our main entre (or a can of soda).  Why then do we have a problem buying $7/dozen eggs that will cost about $1.25 for a two-egg omelet?  Why do we believe that that omelet should cost $0.20 instead?

Michael Pollan, author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” defends his purchase of $8/dozen eggs in a recent Wall Street Journal article by stating that we should all “Pay more, eat less.”  If we buy ten cent eggs, we are to blame for the conditions that produce tainted foods.

Whole Foods recently sent a video team out to shoot the goings-on at our Austin farm.  You may know that we’re part of the Whole Foods Local Loan Program, that provides funding to local farmers to help them grow and get their products to market.  We really appreciate their work on the great little video they produced:

http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2010/03/vital-farms/

Girls On Film

Also – don’t miss our slightly more amateurish effort:  “Hens on Winter Pasture,” on YouTube.  Tell your friends!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6VXwKQZkA

While paper/cardboard is a renewable product, the paper mills that are responsible for their production are some of the worst polluters in the world.

Also, we found that the traditional cardboard egg carton did not protect their precious cargo very well, oftentimes leaving a broken or cracked egg. About 2 years ago, we began the search for the perfect vehicle to carry our hens’ eggs to our customers. We found one company in the world that made egg cartons from 100% recycled PET water bottles. Furthermore, the carton itself was 100% recyclable #1 PET. And, to top it off, due to the design which includes a comfortable air pocket on each end of the egg, these plastic egg cartons better protected our eggs.

According to ABC News, there is a vast area of the Pacific Ocean that has accumulated plastic trash on the surface.

Plastic bottles in a landfill

One such plastic garbage tsunami is said to be more than twice the size of the State of Texas. With a sea of plastic water bottles available, we decided that it would be better to support the market for recycled plastic by using 100% recycled water bottles for our packaging than it would be to support the cutting down and processing of more trees in paper mills in order to use the more politically correct cardboard. Maybe if enough demand for recycled PET plastic is created, someone will harvest the Pacific Ocean plastic for profit (attention young entrepreneurs!).

Since the world won’t be running short on plastic anytime soon, we think the 100% recycled containers we use are the most sustainable choice we can make.

Cheap and tasty, but at what cost?

We really liked Brian Walsh’s article from the August issue of Time magazine, Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food, and feel it’s very relevant to our methods at Vital Farms.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458-1,00.html

In detailing what is mostly pretty grim news, the author provides a litany of the ways in which American food consumers are on the losing end of a pretty sketchy transaction – by ingesting food products that are cheap, but also bring enormous health, environmental, and societal costs. Take the corn industry for example:

But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized — both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop — at least until corn ethanol skewed the market — artificially low. That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman.

This is especially relevant to the egg industry, as many farms feed their chickens this low-grade, genetically modified, hormone-filled version of corn to their chickens. The resulting eggs are not only uniform and flavorless, but also represent a nutritional compromise for egg eaters.

On our Better Egg page you can read about how pasture-raised hens transfer their natural diet into their eggs in a myriad of ways. We’re proud to say that every Vital Farms egg is produced without using processed or “enhanced” ingredients like GMO corn (or hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, or herbicides). While we’d love for our feed costs to be artificially lowered, that would mean we’d have to reduce the quality of the perfect little super-food our hens produce.