The Current - U.S. eggs are so expensive it feels like ‘eating gold’

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Egg prices are now so high in the U.S. that Ohio diner owner Denise McCarrick says it feels like her customers are eating gold. We look at how avian flu is helping to drive up those prices, plus what it means for business — and for breakfast — when omelettes become a luxury item. 

Here's a question for you. What's your email address saying about your business? First impressions matter and your email says a lot. It's your customer's first look at your brand. A custom.ca email shows your credible, professional and local. It's your business identity. Own it. Show you mean business from the get-go. Get your custom.ca email now at yourcustomemail.ca and let your email do the talking.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, it's Matt here. Thanks for listening to The Current, wherever you're getting this podcast. Before we get to today's show, wonder if I might ask a favor of you if you could hit the follow button on whatever app you're using.

There is a lot of news that's out there these days. We're trying to help you make sense of it all and give you a bit of a break from some of that news too. So if you already follow the program, thank you. And if you have done that, maybe you could leave us a rating or review as well. The whole point of this is to let more listeners find our show and perhaps find some of that information that's so important in these really tricky times. So thanks for all of that. Appreciate it and on to today's show. How do you like your eggs? Over easy, hard-boiled, sunny-side-up, poached. I

love a poached egg, you know. Eggs are a staple for many families. Lately though in the United States it has been a scramble, see what I did there, to find them at a reasonable cost. Don't buy eggs because they're too expensive And we do buy eggs, but that price is just It's crazy, right? It seems like every time I come to the store. They've gone up in price again I haven't bought eggs for around three weeks now Yeah, they went up in price no doubt about it egg prices in the United States have reached a record high That is if you can find those eggs people are going to the store, they can't find eggs. I see

this Commander-in-Chief doing all of these press conferences about every revenge and tactic and different type of endeavor for the federal government. What are we doing about the costs? Michigan representative Haley Stevens posted that video to social media with the caption, Where is the executive order on helping Americans afford basic goods like eggs and milk? President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to bring down prices and made specific reference during the campaign to the cost of eggs. So even though the main culprit for the egg shortage right now is a severe outbreak of

the avian flu, many Americans feel let down and frustrated. Denise McCarrick is the owner of Nancy's Diner in Grafton, Ohio. Denise, good morning. Good morning. Is this a rush hour for you? Yeah, usually, yeah. And how busy would the diner be now

and how many eggs would you be serving? So right now, because we open at 7.30 in the morning, right now we'd be at least through 15 dozen, give or take. We close at 3 PM. Yeah. What's the hot item with eggs on the menu? Always omelets. Always omelets.

How much do you pay for eggs right now? So for a case of 15 dozen eggs, it's about $135. And how would that compare to, I don't know, a few months ago? A few months ago, we were hovering right about $80. And this time last year? About 60. So that's a big increase. Oh yeah. And is that a wholesale price for the restaurant or are you going to the grocery store, Costco,

what have you, just buying? That's a wholesale price for us. That's a wholesale price. So what do you do? I mean, running a restaurant, people often say is a bit like a canary in the coal mine for the health of the overall economy because you're not making bags and bags of money. What do you do with the higher cost? You really have to improvise. You try to offer other alternatives that wouldn't include eggs, but we're in a small town and compared to a lot of places around us, we're fairly inexpensive.

We're not trying to make enough money. So most of our customers are regular. So they do understand that we do have to do price increases at this time. People aren't really giving up eggs, luckily because it's more convenient to get it from us and to get a whole meal. It's cheaper than getting all the ingredients at the store and less effort to do it yourself.

So, maybe they're just not getting extra eggs other than their two regular eggs for a standard breakfast or four for their omelet. But you got to raise prices. Some things you can eat the cost of prices, but when they increase as significantly as they have been, and they're increasing almost every week, there is a bit of an understanding with how things are going here that you're going to have to make some changes. Were eggs one of those? Because normally, as you said, they would be a lot cheaper.

Were they one of those things on a restaurant menu where you could make a little bit of money because people would order an omelet and the input cost, if I can put it that way, typically would be lower, right? Oh, yes. So you always had for eggs, like a big price gap between what you paid and what you could charge so that you did make profit off of that.

And now, you know, that space is really getting very, very, very tight because you almost can't. You don't want to price people, you know, out of choosing your establishment to get things such as eggs. And since we're predominantly a breakfast place, that's what they're coming for. So before, eggs used to be, let's see, I would say pre-COVID, because you were hovering around, you know, you're just getting out of the holidays. You were at about $40 for a 15 dozen case of eggs.

And now you're paying $135. Yeah. Yeah. And eggs are one of the only things that we've, you know, over the years that the prices, you know, steadily you do have, you know, a little bit of a raise and everything, but they would go back down. They were one of those items that during the holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, when people are doing a lot of baked goods and stuff like that, that the prices would

hike a little bit. But after the holidays, they would always come down. And now we're looking at steadily, since COVID, but not really the fault of COVID in the last couple years, just the consistent hikes. They're really not coming back down the way that they were. I wonder whether those omelets are going to become a luxury item. It feels like people are eating gold now.

So the president said he would bring down consumer prices on day one of his administration. I don't want you to end with politics, but I mean, are you hopeful that that promise will happen soon? I mean, regardless of where you sit politically, you know, you always hope for the best, but it's not really something that I'm planning

on. He does like to speak in a lot of hyperbole, but unless you're able to tell every single big company that they have to cut their prices for consumers, it's not going to happen. Big companies, they're going to keep the prices as they are because people are going to pay them. Denise, it's good to talk to you. I wish you the best of luck and hopefully a busy day at the diner this morning. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Denise McCarrick is the owner of Nancy's Diner in Grafton, Ohio. Here's a question for you. What's your email address saying about your business? First impressions matter and your email says a lot. It's your customer's first look at your brand. A custom.ca email shows your credible, professional and local. It's your business identity. Own it. Show you mean business from the get-go. Get your custom.ca email now at yourcustomemail.ca and let your email do the talking. I'm Dena Temple-Raston, the host of the Click Here podcast from Record of Future News. Twice

a week, we tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And these days, our digital world is being overrun by hackers. I was just targeted by a nation state. And they range from reflective. It's a crime, bro. And I live with that every day. To ruthless. Do you feel guilty about it?

No, not really. Click here for a record of future news. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. As much as political promises come up in this discussion, avian influenza is at the crux of this issue when it comes to the cost of eggs and the egg shortage being felt in the United States. That virus is spreading in chickens and other animals, humans as well. Helen Branswell covers infectious diseases as a senior writer at the health news website STAT. She's in Boston. Helen, good morning. Hi, Matt. Avian Flu has been around for a few years. You and I have spoken about it before. What's going on now that would lead in the United States in particular to this egg shortage?

Well, you know, this version of the virus, because we're talking about H5N1, a virus that kills chickens and is also not great for humans. It's been circulating in the United States since about February 2022. In that time, there have been intermittent outbreaks in poultry operations, you know, migratory birds, the movement of migratory birds seems to ignite some of that. And sometimes there are more outbreaks, sometimes there are less outbreaks, but there are always a lot. I was looking on the US Department of Agriculture's website last night trying to get some stats for this conversation. And I saw that since February 2020, 150 million poultry have died in the United States as

a consequence of this outbreak. And in the last 30 days alone, there have been 23 million. Some of those birds would have died. Some of them would have been culled to try to stop the outbreaks. And then, I mean, as you posted on social media, because there isn't enough happening, Arizona, among other states, has found H5N1 in milk, right? Yeah.

So as your listeners might remember, about a year, well, in late March of 2024, the USDA announced that it had discovered that cows in certain parts of the United States were infected with bird flu. Up until then, it hadn't been known that this virus would infect cows. And in the interval, it's moved around from through at least 17 states. At last count, almost 1,000 herds have been infected. I mean, some of those herds will have recovered, but over the course of that year. And there's been sort of pressure on the agriculture department to try to get a better handle on what's going on because in some cases farmers won't test their cows. They don't want to know. And so late last year in December, USDA announced that it was rolling out this program to test bulk milk. All states in the contiguous United States will be involved at some point,

but at this point, 42 of them are in it. And I think they're testing about once a month. And if they find virus in bulk milk, then they go and find found milk from Arizona that was infected with H5N1 and Arizona to that point had not declared any infected herds. An interesting part about the Arizona situation was that it was a slightly different version of the virus than has been spreading in most of the outbreaks in the cows. This is one that is of the genotype D1.1, which is the same version of the virus that infected the teenager in British Columbia that your listeners will have heard about, the teenager who was very seriously ill in November and December?

The concern, as you say, is that there will be different mutations, different variations of this virus. And this is all happening at the same time as the Trump administration is slashing funding and agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the US Department of Agriculture. On the weekend, they fired key people in the USDA who were managing avian flu, but they're not saying it was a mistake

and they wanna hire them back because they shouldn't have been fired. You said in some ways that, well, I mean, how do you see this? What does that do when it comes to monitoring and preparing for what may unfold when it comes to this virus? Well, right now, you know,

U.S. government departments are in chaos because of, you know, the cuts that are coming, the unorganized way the cuts are coming. You said that some of these cuts are unthinkable. Well, it's just, yeah, I think that's true. And it's both things you wouldn't have thought you would have had to worry about and just the way it's being handled. I mean, at the CDC last week, a whole bunch of people were told on Friday that they were probably going to be laid off because they were on probation, but that they would find out by four o'clock that day. And most of them didn't get the notice at four o'clock that day.

So I think some of them might have felt that they were safe, but the notices came at eight o'clock or eight o'clock on Saturday. I mean, the way this is being handled is not well organized and the agencies are really trying both to do the work that they are tasked with and also interpret what's happening and what's coming at them from DC. We just have a minute or so left. What's at stake do you think in this moment? We just, we've gone through COVID and that pandemic, and there are a lot of lessons learned or not learned.

Um, what's, what's at stake when you're, when you're taking a look at the situation now? So the thing with H5N1 is you just don't know what's going to happen with it. It is unknowable and And that's extremely frustrating, but that is the truth. What is also true is that if it triggers a pandemic, that won't be great.

The fatality rate with this virus in humans, in detected human cases, has been quite scary. It's likely that there have been lots of, or a number of cases that were never detected so that the fatality rate is artificially high. But regardless, in the United States, in the last year, there have been 69 confirmed cases and one of them has died. If you were to extrapolate that number across populations,

that would be a terrible event. You know, first of all, the globe doesn't need another pandemic at this point. No. But we don't have a choice. At some point in time, there will be other pandemics. Hopefully not this one, but you know, if you're going to have to deal with a pandemic,

you'd want all your soldiers ready to go into battle for you. And it's not clear that that's the situation. It's also not clear that the vestiges of COVID, there's a COVID hangover that is really affecting the way people deal with these issues and it's not helping. I hate to leave it there, but I know we'll talk again about this. It's bracing. Helen, thank you very much. Thanks for your time. Helen Branswell covers infectious diseases and global health for the health news website STAT.