Illuminate The Way

like, the noncompete thing where the eggs can’t even be given away is bullshit. but the thing where the eggs have to be destroyed isn’t as horrible as it seems, at first. because: eggs with irregular shells aren’t going to travel the same as regular eggs. eggs that break in transit spill white and yolk all over the cartons, gluing down the neighboring eggs, making them more likely to fracture. minute cracks in an eggshell let in bacteria. yolk and white splashed all over attracts bugs and bacteria. a whole carton or a whole pallet might have to be thrown out because of one or two broken eggs in transit– and if it’s not, there’s no way for some trucker or grocery store handler to know if they’re putting eggs in the freezer that are now past the safe threshold for consumption.

if you eat local food, you can get it fresher, and be sure that irregular food is still safe to eat. if you go to the grocery store and your egg traveled forty hours to get there, you need that egg to be regular, to have traveled a smooth and predictable path, to have held up in transit the way all the other eggs did. mass food production relies on a lot of calculations: the size of the food, how it’s packaged, how it’s protected and with what padding, what temperature it needs to stay at, how fast the trucks go, how much jostling it can take, how big of a stack it can rest in.

you know ‘a few bad apples spoil the barrel’, right? if you let rotten food ship with good food, the rot spreads fast. it all rots.

outliers that throw that math off have to be discarded, not because capitalists don’t care about food waste–every discarded egg is an egg they don’t get to sell! of course they want to sell the eggs!– but because when it comes to shipping food across an entire country, you risk everything when you play fast and loose with food that spoils in transit.

At present local produce is often prohibitly expensive. It shouldn’t be. It should logically be cheaper. But big suppliers can squeeze farmers with massive contracts, get weird tax breaks ans subsidies, and do tons of other shit to create a world in which their wasteful mass produced shit is cheaper. Local farmers end up catering to the high income ‘ethical consumer’ yuppie market because that’s how they can survive. As a result, I often can’t afford their products