The other day, I had the privilege of speaking about the national egg recall on NPR. In case you haven’t heard, more than half a BILLION eggs were recalled for salmonella after 1300 people got sick. Last I heard, federal officials think it was the chickens’ feed that made them sick.

I’ve posted quite a bit about this recall on my own blog. For one thing, the man at the heart of the recall is an utter criminal with a record spanning longer than I’ve been alive. And the egg industry itself has faced intense pressure to consolidate and to have larger and larger egg farms over the years. And, for their success at making eggs cheaper and cheaper, egg farmers have been rewarded with roughly NOTHING. Egg prices to the farmers have stayed flat. But egg prices to the consumer have gone up over time. Who’s taking the extra money? The retailer.

So this isn’t a simple case of "you get what you pay for." If you adjusted for inflation, you’ve probably been paying about the same price for eggs over the years, but the farmer has been getting less and less, and at the same time, the farmer’s made the costs of production go down to stay in business. But meanwhile, the retailer is taking a larger chunk of the money. Fair? I say no.

Well, a vegan called into the radio show I was on to provide the solution to this whole mess. Don’t eat eggs. There. Solved. No more salmonella in eggs, so long as we don’t eat any eggs. Got that everyone?

There’s only one problem with that. This isn’t just about eggs. This is about FOOD. And we all eat food – even vegans. Those of us who are lucky can buy our food locally from people we know and trust, or even grow our food ourselves. But what about everyone else? Surely the majority of the country doesn’t deserve to get food poisoning because they haven’t – or cannot – discovered farmers’ markets and gardening yet.  . . .

And that brings me to something else that happened this week. It didn’t get much attention because we’ve all been focusing on eggs instead of food in general. The Obama administration has been holding a series of hearings around the country on the consolidation in agriculture, and arguably the biggest one – the one on livestock – took place this Friday in Colorado.

The same problem affects us no matter which food gets recalled – peanuts, spinach, eggs, beef, etc. Our food system is in the hands of a few, very powerful producers. Nearly every food is produced or processed by a small number of companies, and then it makes its way through a somewhat convoluted but also consolidated supply chain to greet us at the store. You can buy this brand of eggs or that, and it might come from the same farm. How the hell is any consumer supposed to be an informed shopper, purchasing safe food when we have no real way to measure quality based on the information at the store, nor do we have any real choices?

The egg industry is actually much less consolidated that most animal agriculture. You want beef? You’ve got about three or four companies who will sell it to you, and it only comes from a few large slaughterhouses. Chicken? Same deal, although there are more slaughterhouses.

If we think this egg recall is about eggs, we’re missing the point. Eggs are just one of a long string of foods that have had food safety outbreaks in the past decade or so. Which one will be next, and how many more people will get sick and/or die from tainted food before we fix our problems? And will the Obama administration follow up after these hearings on consolidation by actually addressing the problem?