Imagine telling someone five years ago that a carton of eggs would cost more than a pound of salmon fillet or a whole rotisserie chicken. Somehow, today, it does. Prices have doubled in the past year, with a dozen eggs going for as much as $15 in certain urban markets. Restaurants and bodegas are tacking surcharges onto breakfast dishes. Cold cases in big-box stores are empty; grocers are limiting customers to a dozen or two a visit to make stocks last. Google searches for the phrase backyard chickens have tripled in the past two months.

Consumers are furious. Eggs are the second-most commonly consumed grocery item, beating out milk and cereal. The average American eats an egg every 1.3 days, or 277 a year. Eggs provide 4 percent of protein consumed in the country and are one of the least-expensive high-quality sources of the muscle-building macronutrient.

Or at least they were, until a highly pathogenic form of bird flu spread to American flocks in 2022. Today, the Department of Agriculture is tracking 36 separate outbreaks across nine states. The disease has led to the death or culling of 27 million laying hens—nearly 10 percent of the nation’s commercial flock—in the past eight weeks alone.

[Lora Kelley: The breaking point of eggs]

As a result, the egg supply is severely constrained. Businesses are struggling. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to bring down the cost of consumer goods “starting on day one,” while standing in front of a display of Cheerios, bacon, flour, and, yes, eggs. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts “little chance” for improved supplies “in the near term.” Americans paying more for their omelets and bacon-egg-and-cheeses are incensed.

It might not make cash-strapped consumers feel any better, but the fact that eggs were ever ubiquitous and cheap is remarkable. Americans’ egg addiction has been made possible only through billions of dollars of technological and infrastructural investment, as well as the immiseration of billions of animals. The industrial advances that made eggs cheap in the 20th century are, in part, responsible for their excruciating cost today.  

Contemporary laying hens are likely descended from dinosaurs. (When you eat a dino-shaped chicken nugget, you eat the present injection-molded into the shape of the past, the child in the shape of the grandparent.) Humans began domesticating the birds thousands of years ago, and Christopher Columbus brought them to this continent in 1493.

The 90 billion eggs that American laying hens now produce each year are a wonder. They are nutritional powerhouses: a complete protein, with all nine essential amino acids, abounding in vitamins B2, B12, A, D, E, and K; choline; selenium; phosphorus; and zinc. They are tasty; saturated-fat and cholesterol give them a tender and unctuous mouthfeel. Plus, they are a handy ingredient, binding compounds together and providing structure and moisture to baked goods.

Contrary to their reputation, eggs are strong too. Their shells are composed of calcium carbonate, known as “nature’s ceramic,” their pointed ovoid shape stellar at dispersing force; in architectural terms, they are palm-size marble cathedrals. In one demonstration at Harvard, a carefully cushioned single egg resisted the weight of 10 lead bricks, or 250 pounds. Try crushing a raw egg by wrapping your hand around it and squeezing: It’s tough if the egg is horizontal to your fingers, and impossible if it is vertical.

Although the egg is resistant to slow, evenly distributed pressure, it is vulnerable to sharp, concussive pressure. It has to be. Neonatal chicks weighing a tenth of a pound peck their way out. Just 5.5 pounds of force will crack an eggshell. A polite handshake applies more pressure, a bite on a bacon-egg-and-cheese perhaps 20 times as much.

This quality makes eggs difficult to transport from farm to market, more like grapes than like milk or rice. Perishability poses another challenge. At room temperature, farm-fresh eggs are safe to eat for weeks. But the government requires eggs to be washed; once washed, they begin to develop dangerous concentrations of bacteria in a few hours. Whole eggs cannot be frozen; the water content in the egg expands, cracking open the shell. Separated whites freeze and dethaw fine, but separated yolks do not. Ice crystallization changes their lipid and protein structure, transforming their mucosal texture into something akin to nut butter or chewed gum. Gelatinization makes it impossible to beat the yolks into dough or whisk them into dressing, unless the frozen egg yolks are preprocessed.

For centuries, none of this was a problem, because nobody was trying to transport these fragile, messy, spoilable ovals long distances. Many American families never bought eggs. Chickens were ubiquitous on farms and homesteads—easy to raise, quick to reproduce, and free to fatten, given that the omnivorous birds are adept foragers and happy consumers of table scraps. Ranchers and growers would sell their “farmwives’ surplus” from April to July, when laying peaked.

Around the turn of the 20th century, as the supply chain started to transform, so did the chicken and the egg. Selective breeding cleaved the broiler bird from the laying hen, the former specialized to grow fat thighs and breasts, the latter specialized to pump out eggs. Chicken farming became an industry of its own, and egg farming another.

Specialized farmers moved their flocks indoors, reducing mortality rates. They figured out that lighting their barns spurred the birds into laying more eggs, and into laying them year-round. One farmer who rigged up a 50-watt bulb noted that his hens were “cackling and behaving in liveliest fashion,” laying eggs at all hours, as recounted in Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History. Farmers started to lift hens off the floor on wire-mesh systems, making barns easier to muck out and tamping down infection.

[Read: Get used to expensive eggs]

A spate of agricultural innovations helped move the newfound bounty to market. Multiple inventors came up with the egg carton early in the 20th century, meaning farmers no longer had to use baskets and crates. Conveyor belts, incubators, sandblasters for cleaning, and egg-grading machines for measuring helped commoditize the product. The nascent industry piggybacked on innovations in the meatpacking industry. Companies transporting sides of beef in refrigerated trucks and warehouses began accepting eggs too.  

Even so, customers preferred fresh, local eggs to faraway, cold-stored ones well into the 20th century. Eggs were not routinely “candled” to check for spoilage, meaning a home cook never knew what cracking one open would bring, Freidberg writes. For a while, dehydrated powdered eggs became popular. The American military bought millions of pounds to feed soldiers during World War II. Bakeries started using frozen whites and processed frozen yolks. Analysts figured that consumers would opt for these stable products too. “The shell egg is fading in importance,” a member of the American Warehousemen’s Association concluded in 1941. It did not fade in importance. Advances in chicken-rearing, sanitation, shipping, and packaging, as well as advertising, brought consumers around. By the 1960s, many Americans were eating commodity eggs, rather than ones produced by local farmers or hens in backyard hutches.

Industrialization made eggs cheap. But it came with a cost, particularly for the animals that produced them.

Male chicks have no role in egg production, so they are gassed, threshed, or crushed after hatching. Female chicks have their beaks trimmed without anesthetic. Once grown, most are placed in battery cages, each bird allotted 67 to 86 square inches of space, smaller than a piece of printer paper. In these crowded conditions, laying hens cannot preen, move around, or spread their wings. The wire in the cages is slanted to let the eggs roll out, making it hard for the chickens to settle. Although 11 states have banned battery cages, three in five American commercial hens continue to reside in them.

Many birds on industrial farms show obvious signs of distress, afflicted by injury, osteoporosis, liver disease, and prolapse, as well as depression and social derangement. When their egg production drops, generally when the birds are a year or two old, they are gassed and turned into poultry meal, a main component of dog food.

The egg-production system imposes its own costs on consumers. In the 1970s, the country had thousands of small-scale egg farms, vying to win over customers with competitive prices and fresh quality. Today, 150 firms produce 95 percent of the country’s eggs, and a single one, Cal-Maine Foods, accounts for 20 percent of the market. The industry has consolidated vertically as well as horizontally. Two companies supply 90 percent of chicks. A single firm sets benchmark egg prices, hampering price discovery in the market. Consumer advocates and the courts have found evidence of price-fixing, price gouging, and “antitrust conspiracy”—made invisible on grocery-store shelves thanks to creative packaging and brand differentiation.

Of late, the centralization and industrialization of the industry have intensified the bird-flu crisis. The largest commercial egg producers own millions of birds. A single laying house holds as many as 350,000, serried into wire crates and stacked on top of one another. The virus spreads rapidly in such environments. USDA rules obligate farms to cull an entire flock if a single bird is infected; the government then compensates the farm for its losses. The culling policy helps stop the spread of the lethal virus, but the compensation policy reduces farms’ incentive to invest in smaller-scale, more humane, and safer animal-rearing practices that would limit the need for workers to kill so many birds in the first place.  

Some egg producers have managed to eke out higher earnings despite the spread of bird flu, perhaps thanks to cartelization. From 2022 to 2023, retail egg prices tripled, noted Angela Huffman of Farm Action, a nonprofit advocating for small farms. She pointed to data indicating that prices would have gone up only 12 to 24 percent in a competitive market.

The price of a dozen eggs has been a potent political issue for the past half century or so. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon tussled over eggs in the 1960 presidential contest; a decade later, Nixon took up the issue again as inflation spiked. “Eggs have to be transported, processed, cooked, and served, but 30 cents a dozen to the farmer and $30 a dozen to whoever buys those eggs in a restaurant, that is just too much,” he told reporters in 1972, stressing that he would tackle the middleman for the common man.

During his 1996 campaign for the Republican nomination, a reporter asked Lamar Alexander how much a dozen eggs cost. He did not respond, and was later caught asking an aide to get him the number: “I need to know right now.” The Bob Dole campaign was thrilled. “Lamar may be an outsider when it comes to grocery stores, but he’s an insider when it comes to politics,” it crowed in a press release. “Next time he’s walking across New Hampshire, he might want to stop at a supermarket.”

On the trail last year, Trump lambasted Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for failing to bring food prices down. In office, his administration has blamed egg prices directly on their policies. Biden “directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply,” Trump’s press secretary told reporters last month.  

[Read: The chickens that are surrogates for rare breeds]

This week, the Trump administration laid out a five-point plan to get egg prices down: financing on-farm biosecurity upgrades, providing additional funds to farmers who have to cull their flocks, investing in bird-flu vaccines and therapeutics, eliminating regulations, and increasing foreign imports. Administration officials have critiqued the USDA culling policy, suggesting that vaccination and biosecurity measures should render it unnecessary. “Why does it make any sense to have a big perimeter of dead chickens, when it’s the ducks and the geese that are spreading it?” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said on Face the Nation earlier this month.

But pharmaceutical firms have not invested much in bird-flu vaccines. There are no USDA-approved options, and there is no farm-by-farm vaccine infrastructure. “As ugly as it is, just like with the wildfires in California, sometimes you have to cut all the trees down and dig a fire line,” explained Matt Koci of North Carolina State University. “We can’t do anything to save that poultry house, but maybe we can dig enough of a line around it to save neighboring farms.”

Of the proposed policy measures, increasing imports would likely be the most effective. But Trump is waging a global trade war at the moment, and as the coronavirus pandemic demonstrated, companies need time and money to adjust their supply chains. “The system for egg production is both complex and time sensitive,” Emily Metz, the president of the American Egg Board, wrote in a statement. “It’s going to take a sustained period” for supply to catch up with demand.

Consumers aren’t happy, but the chickens are the ones really suffering. At least for protein-loving breakfast eaters, there are always beans.