The Egg War
I bet you didn’t know that government health agencies consider eggs a “dangerous” product. Well, they do. And it’s probably right that they do. Because the American factory farming industry (“big ag”) has spent the past several decades adopting practices that we all should be ashamed of, we have succeeded in breeding dangerous, ugly bacteria, and spreading those bacteria throughout the industry. Because of that, most chickens are born harboring potentially dangerous varieties of salmonella bacteria inside themselves. Through processes both natural (egg production and laying) and man-made (unsanitary conditions and poor handling practices), those bacteria can contaminate the eggs. If those contaminated eggs are eaten without being cooked fully, they may make you very ill. However, the odds of this happening to you are very slim. It is estimated that internal salmonella contamination occurs in somewhere between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 20,000 eggs. Salmonella on the outside of the eggs is much more common, which is why you should be careful when cracking them not to let exterior shell come in contact with the insides as much as possible. In any case, hand washing and proper cooking should eliminate any danger.
Because of the danger of contaminated eggs, the various departments of health require that eggs be stored and handled properly prior to you purchasing them, and that they be labeled properly to insure you are aware of what you are getting and where it came from. All this is well and good. I personally think some of their requirements are overkill, but that is to be expected when the agency is used to dealing with big ag, where the laying hens are treated abysmally, disease abounds, and the conditions the eggs are laid in necessitate extreme precautions. Nevertheless, because we value you and your health we comply with all the requirements, cleaning our eggs, keeping them refrigerated, and bringing them to market in iced coolers.
The state health department sets the requirements for how we handle our eggs, but leaves enforcement to the county departments. After leaving the farmer’s markets alone for as long as we know, and without any outbreaks of egg-borne illness that we are aware of, the Williamson County Department of Health decided that:
- All sellers of eggs at farmer’s markets in the county should possess a permit that they had not previously been required to possess
Since we didn’t complete all the paperwork and pay our $75 fee in time, we were unable to sell our eggs at the Georgetown Farmer's Market last week. Our primary complaint with how the county health department handled this is that it seems rather arbitrary to create essentially a new requirement (the requirement to hold the permit may have already existed, but no one had been informed about it for as long as the market has been in existence) and shut everyone down immediately with no grace period for vendors to come into compliance. Additionally (and this is where it begins to really affect you), we felt the $75 permit fee to be egregious. Such a fee for a restaurant may amount to no more than a fraction of a percent of its yearly profit. For a small farmer’s market vendor like us, that’s a significant fee, more than you probably imagine. Eggs are a modest portion of our farmer’s market income, but producing humane, high quality eggs in small volume doesn’t pay very well. That $75 fee amounts to more than 10% of our yearly profits from the eggs we sell at the Georgetown farmer’s market, leaving us no choice but to pass that cost on to you. But I guess that’s what the government’s good for.
Anyway, the good news is that (sometimes) the government does listen! Many customers at the farmer's markete (not to mention the farmers themselves) complained to the county health department. They had a meeting and decided to lower the permit fee to $35 for the egg vendors, and they will meet in July to consider creating a separate permitting process specifically for egg vendors, with lower fees and more egg-specific wording.
In our eyes, that's a real victory! We politely and respectfully complained, they listened, and they made some concessions. Our kids got to see first hand that people can make a difference!
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