No Need for Tinfoil, the Conspiracies Are Correct
In January of last year PBS NewsHour ran a segment that got me so worked up. The topic was the rising price of eggs, but that’s old news; what made me mad was the angle that NewsHour took. Because it was wrong, you see. And seemed to be spoon-fed by the egg industry. Here’s the email I wrote:
I was surprised by your recent segment on rising egg prices, as it didn't deviate from the publicist/lobbyist talking points.
The largest commercial egg producer in the US is taking in record profits and has not experienced any avian flu outbreaks at its facilities. Unsurprisingly, they are being questioned about price gouging.
The biggest egg supplier in the U.S. is Cal-Maine, a company profiting hundreds of millions of dollars per QUARTER. The avian flu outbreak of 2022 did happen (APPARENTLY), but as CNN reported, “There have been no positive tests of the avian flu at any Cal-Maine Foods’ facilities.”
Since then, Kraft, General Mills, Nestle, and Kellogg have won a settlement against Cal-Maine and the second largest egg producer in the U.S., Rose Acre Farms, as well as some trade groups. The food conglomerates successfully argued that the egg farms had colluded to fix prices in the mid-2000s. You gotta figure they’ve been doing it for longer than 20 years.
(The egg groups’ animal-welfare-based response is so savvy it almost made me believe them.)
An advocacy group called Farm Action has accused Cal-Maine and the rest of fixing prices in this decade, too.
It doesn’t stop with the farms. A British think tank found that “the impact of companies maintaining margins by passing on higher prices to consumers should not be overlooked as a contributing factor to inflation … food firms have an outsized influence on the wider economy.”
The Federal Trade Commission found that the scam train kept rolling: grocery stores raised their prices during the pandemic just because they could.
Now the Department of Justice is suing an information exchange called Agri Stats, as it has evidence the company actually uses its data to facilitate price fixing for chicken, turkey, and pork.
High prices for food would be reasonable if employees were paid well and animals were humanely treated. But we all know that’s not what’s going on. Where does fixing this country start?
More Food Media:
Behind-the-scenes on influencers, affiliate links, etc. Casey’s audience is larger than mine, but since I cover food, I get a lot of the same pitches.
Soul rolls and other culinary smash ups; should legacy publications stay in their lane; activists who are not empaths. With K.J. Kearney.
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This newsletter is edited by Katherine Spiers, host of the podcast Smart Mouth.
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