BY STEVEN KASZAB
The price of food continues to increase, putting pressure on our pocketbooks, and making us reconsider what we will have for dinner, lunch, and breakfast each day. Breakfast was a traditionally easy thing to do: bacon, or sausages, toast and eggs.
Now, we have to reconsider how we will begin our day. Eggs have increased in price 43% over the last two years and the price differences seem outrageous. $3.89 – $7.75+ for a dozen eggs. Unbelievable! Ask an producer of eggs in Toronto how their products could increase so much. The answer was canned of course. Costs have escalated throughout the marketplace from: costs of feed, growth hormones, chemical additives to transportation, staff payroll increases, etc.
Ok! I cannot prove the bit about growth hormones, but come on, these little critters cannot produce eggs so quickly, so there must be something in their chicken chow!
What has changed? Our eggs are harvested from grow operations locally situated, so transport cannot be a huge factor in price increases. The payroll of most operations has remained relatively the same, so no undue raises for labourers paid minimum wage. Hydro-energy heating costs have gone up a bit. Perhaps the pandemic has had a major effect upon these producers and their charges, the millions of chickens laying their delicious eggs.
Perhaps the chickens made some demands over the pandemic period the producers have not told us about.
How else can we be charged the current prices for eggs? A conspiracy of silence has set itself upon the retail grocery and livestock/poultry sector. The conspiracy is set in price gouging with strong elements of overall sector price fixing. Some would say that the Westins of Canada showed the grocery sector that fixing the price on bread can work with little consequences felt, so why not profit from all the other foods they produce and sell?
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