Economics for Chickens

About two weeks ago I happened to breakfast at the local Coco’s restaurant.  I opted for the raspberry cheese blintz pancakes combo, with bacon, eggs over easy.  It was very good, thanks for asking; it is hard to beat raspberries.

As I was waiting to pay my bill at the front counter, I noticed a rather disturbing hand-crafted sign announcing no meringue pies would be available do to the egg shortage.  I perused the refrigerated cabinet on the wall behind the counter and confirmed by brief visual inspection that indeed there were no meringue pies to be counted among the inventory.  I looked again at the hand-written sign to see if I had missed any explanatory information that might shed light on the root cause of this epicurean catastrophe.  By the time I had exhausted that resource, the cashier arrived.  In poring over her vacuous facial expression, I determined there was no information available in that quarter to shed light on this most troubling crisis.

So I pursued the course of any ambitious pseudo-intellectual and duly forgot all about it.   But a kernel of curiosity stayed with me and finally today, desperately searching the news headlines for some subject with which to entertain you as is my wont, I stumbled upon an article reporting a shortage of pumpkin pie filling for this year’s Thanksgiving season. (As I learned from my fictional mentor, Ford Prefect… “DON’T PANIC”, but more about the pumpkin worriment later.)  This revivified my wonderment over the aforementioned egg shortage.  So, lacking any ambition, as is also my wont, I Googled “egg shortage”.

It seems that since sometime earlier this year, we have been experiencing a dire egg shortage.  This was caused not by lack of effort on our hens’ part, but rather an outbreak of avian flu that has affected some forty-eight million birds including chickens, geese and TURKEYS.  I am not sure if I have stumbled onto some nefarious Islamo-fueled, anti-Pilgrim plot to deprive us of our God-given right to overeat on the third Thursday of November, but something reeks of marine odiferousness (smells fishy for you ESLs out there).

Somewhat to my relief, as I continued into the factual, non-inflammatory depths of the article, I learned that the shortage to date has really only affected the liquid egg supply.  (I am going to ask you to take a leap of faith here and assume as I did that the phrase “liquid eggs” refers to egg product that has been extracted from its ovoid protector and shipped sans shell for the intended use as an ingredient in commercial food applications.)  Any noticed price increase in the retail egg market is due to pressure from liquid egg product providers seeking an alternative supply source.  There are still plenty of eggs available to the non-commercial consumer.  We are assured by those who know (or at least speak as if they do) the condition will have corrected itself by 2016.  I’m not sure how the retail turkey market is poised to deal with their seasonal concerns.

But more importantly, we must prepare ourselves for the prognostication that there will be a shortage of pumpkin pie filling.  This potential calamity is the result of record rainfall levels in Illinois.  It seems, ninety percent of all pie filling pumpkins are raised within ninety miles of Peoria.  Kinda sounds like a monopoly to me (that’s the economic term for close control of a commodity or product, not a Parker Bros. game), and that’s wrong.

At any rate, Libby’s, the most prodigious pumpkin pie filling producer, recommends you buy your canned pumpkin pie filling early and often, as the supply may run short.  Go figure!