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    We Can Have More Humane Chicken Eggs

    Every spring, I’d eagerly await my special package — a box that arrived peeping. Inside were just-hatched chicks, still egg-shaped and covered in down.I would raise the chicks in my home office. During our first month together, there was always a chick or two in my sweater, on my shoulder or perching atop my head. They considered me their mother.Later, when they moved outside to a coop, they ranged freely over the eight acres my husband and I own in rural New Hampshire. Whenever they caught sight of me, they would greet me as if I were a member of the Beatles, racing toward me with wings outstretched. When they began to lay eggs, I was elated. I had gotten the hens to keep me company, but nothing tastes better than an egg from a free-range chicken you know personally. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1980, so I felt great about accepting this gift from my sweet little flock, which I called the Ladies.I had no idea that while the Ladies enjoyed shelter and sunshine, fresh bugs and freedom, their newborn brothers faced a gruesome fate shared by 6.5 billion male chicks around the world each year. These male birds can’t lay eggs but also aren’t raised for meat. Because they come from egg-laying breeds, they don’t grow big or fast enough to be used for food. So they are ground up alive or gassed to death.The practice is especially egregious because unlike many baby mammals and songbirds, which are born blind, naked and helpless, newborn chicks are capable little creatures. Within hours of hatching, they are standing, running and successfully finding food. When they are thrown into the grinder or gasser at 1-day old, these male chicks are alert and aware.Unwittingly, I was complicit in this monstrosity.The good news is that a new technology can help end it. Called in ovo sexing, it determines the sex of the chick embryo long before it hatches, allowing the producers to get rid of the male eggs and hatch only the females. Eggs from in ovo sexed hens have been available in some European countries since 2018 and now make up about 20 percent of Europe’s market, driven in large part by bans on chick culling in several countries, including Germany and France. Come summer, the first such eggs are due to become available in U.S. supermarkets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Egg Prices Continued to Rise in March

    Egg prices have reached record highs as bird flu outbreaks have hit poultry farms and forced producers to cull tens of millions of hens.For weeks, President Trump has repeatedly boasted that his administration had managed to bring egg prices down. But new data on Thursday showed that egg prices at the grocery store continued to climb in March.Egg prices rose 5.9 percent over the month, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They climbed at a slower rate, though, after rising 10.4 percent in February and 15.2 percent in January.Compared with a year earlier, egg prices are up 60.4 percent.Egg prices have reached record highs in recent months as bird flu outbreaks have hit poultry farms and forced producers to cull tens of millions of hens. But Mr. Trump, who had vowed to bring down grocery prices while on the campaign trail, has continued to claim victory on egg prices. This month, Mr. Trump said that egg prices had dropped 59 percent, and on Monday, he said that egg prices were down 79 percent.Consumers might not be feeling relief because the president is not referring to retail egg prices. He is instead pointing to the wholesale price of eggs, which has fallen by roughly half since the beginning of his second term.Wholesale egg prices dropped from a national average of $6.55 a dozen on Jan. 24 to $3.26 on April 4, according to data from the Agriculture Department. Wholesale egg prices are also down from a peak of more than $8 a dozen at the end of February.But the average retail price for a dozen large eggs reached $6.23 in March, up from $5.90 the month before, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Fact-Checking Trump’s Justice Dept. Speech on Crime, Immigration and His Cases

    President Trump repeated a number of well-trodden falsehoods on Friday in a grievance-fueled speech at the Justice Department, veering from prepared remarks to single out lawyers and prosecutors and assail the criminal investigations into him.His remarks, billed as a policy address, were wide-ranging, touching on immigration, crime and the price of eggs.Here’s a fact-check.Mr. Trump’s misleading claims touched on:His legal troublesThe 2020 electionBiden and classified documentsThe Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the CapitolParents, anti-abortion activists and CatholicsImmigration and crimeEgg pricesHis legal troublesWhat Was Said“They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”“They spied on my campaign, launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another, broke the law on a colossal scale, persecuted my family, staff and supporters, raided my home Mar-a-Lago and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States.”This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump’s claims refer to a wide array of investigations and criminal cases that occurred before, during and after his first term as president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Thing That Could Be Trump’s Undoing

    If there are Martian scholars examining the United States right now, they might be puzzling over the great Trump paradox.It’s that President Trump is doing immense long-term damage to the United States by undermining democratic norms, vandalizing the federal government and siding with alleged war criminals in the Kremlin, yet if support for him falls, I doubt it will have anything to do with all this. Rather, it may be … egg prices.American voters have been, to my mind, surprisingly comfortable with a felon who pardons other, violent felons and engages in reckless attacks on our rule of law and the global system that we created in 1945 and that has hugely enriched and empowered us. Trump doubled down on his, er, “cultural revolution” in his speech to Congress a few days ago, and about three-quarters of those who watched the speech approved of it to some degree (largely because those who watched were disproportionately Republican).Attacks by Democrats on Trump as undemocratic never got much traction among working-class voters; they cared less about issues at 30,000 feet and more about economic and cultural concerns at three feet. So in a strange way, what may impede Trump and preserve American democracy is not popular revulsion at the historic damage that he is doing to America but rather alarm at the myriad banal impacts on our daily lives because of Trumpian mismanagement.Trump’s tariffs, even if partly delayed, presumably will raise consumer prices and hurt the financial markets and thus our retirement savings; they will create a mess of supply chains for manufacturing goods. One gauge of what to expect: The latest estimate from the Atlanta Federal Reserve is an astonishing 2.4 percent decline in American G.D.P. in the first quarter of 2025.Americans may put up with a president calling journalists enemies of the people, may even accept a president pardoning felons who club police officers while trying to overturn an election. But historically, they’ve not been very forgiving of presidents who preside over recessions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Salmonella Outbreak Prompts Egg Recall by Wisconsin Farm

    Officials said 65 people in nine states have been infected in the outbreak, which has been traced to an egg farm. No deaths have been reported.A salmonella outbreak that has sickened dozens of people in nine states prompted a recall of certain brands of eggs on Friday after officials said they traced the source of the infections to a farm in Wisconsin.State health officials said that 42 of the 65 people infected were in Wisconsin. Many people reported eating eggs at restaurants in the state before they got sick.Officials were able to trace the source of the eggs to Milo’s Poultry Farms of Bonduel, Wis., where they identified the outbreak strain in a packing facility and a hens egg-laying house, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.All carton sizes and egg types produced at the farm, which either bear the label “Milo’s Poultry Farms” or “Tony’s Fresh Market,” were recalled by the farm, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said.The eggs were distributed to retail stores and food service suppliers in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, the F.D.A. said. The recall includes all expiration dates. The exact number of eggs recalled was not immediately available.No deaths have been reported in the outbreak, but 24 people were hospitalized. The first case was reported in late May, but most infections were reported in July and August, according to the C.D.C.The reported number of people infected is likely an undercount because it usually takes weeks to determine if an infection is part of an outbreak and because some people may recover without testing for the bacteria, the C.D.C. said.Aside from Wisconsin, infections were reported in California, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Utah and Virginia. Illinois reported the second-highest number of infections with 11, followed by Minnesota, which reported three.The symptoms of the bacterial infection include diarrhea, fever and abdominal pain and usually begin within three days of ingesting the contaminated food, the F.D.A. said.Symptoms usually clear up within a week, but people with weakened immune systems, including young children and older adults, are more susceptible to severe, and sometimes fatal, infections, the F.D.A. said.The egg recall came after a deadly summer outbreak of listeria that prompted the recall of seven million pounds of Boar’s Head deli meat products.That outbreak has resulted in nine deaths and dozens of hospitalizations and the temporary shutdown of a Boar’s Head plant in Virginia, where inspectors had found black mold, water dripping over meat and dead flies. More