How can California mandate the sale of only cage free eggs?

How can California mandate the sale of only cage free eggs?

It took an act of congress to repeal the California mandate banning the sale of gas powered vehicles in the state. Given that it took congress to undo the mandate, I presume that it was another act of congress that gave California the power in the first place. Let’s consider what has happened. California’s mandate said that in 2035 and thereafter, no gas vehicles could be sold in the state. I guess that this would mean that California residents who would then go out of state to buy a car could no longer get them registered in California. I also presume that the sale of used cars would have be permitted. This is ironic because if the move to ban the sale of new gas cars is predicated on the environment, perpetuating the sale of older gas cars would mean keeping vehicles that pollute more on the streets. I also presume that Californians would be prohibited from buying used cars and registering them in the state. If not, this would lead to a common practice in China, now being addressed by their government, in which a new car is registered and sold as used. That way, Californians would be able to buy a new “used” car and register it in the state.

Was California given an exemption to legislate that only cage free eggs can be sold in the state? Since the California market is so large, out of state egg producers who wanted to sell in the state were forced to comply with the California regulation. This was one of the reasons why egg prices were so high especially in California where customers can not purchase the cheaper non cage free eggs. There is something called the Egg Products Inspection Act (no kidding), which bars states from requiring “the use of standards of quality, condition, weight, quantity, or grade which are in addition to or different from the official Federal standards.” Huh? Doesn’t that mean that California violated the Egg Act by imposing conditions that are “different from the official federal standards” if it wasn’t granted a waiver? That is egg-actly what it seems to me. So Trump’s Department of Justice has just filed a suit to roll back California’s cage free egg mandate. This will give Californians a choice like the rest of us. Did you know that Turkey exports about 70 million eggs to the US each year but when the avian flu hit, they sent 420 million? Are these eggs cage free? Are they allowed in California?  Is Trump putting a tariff on Turkish eggs? Obviously they constitute a threat to national security.

I had never seen cage free eggs in the stores before the California mandate. Now they are in every store along side eggs produced by hens in bondage. There is now a market for cage free eggs. Some folks will buy them because they cite animal cruelty reasons. Others contend that cage free eggs taste better. A certain brand of brown eggs used to be my favorite before the avian flu caused those eggs to disappear from the shelves. They are back but I am now buying a brand’s extra large white cage free eggs – instead of their brown ones because they are cheaper and I cannot taste any difference. They are egg-cellent.

So I wonder why the Californians can’t be like the rest of us. My state did not try to ban gas vehicles but left it up to us what type of vehicle we choose to buy. It did not ban the sale of caged chicken eggs either. Yet cage free eggs are on the grocer’s shelves offering us a choice. Banning the sale in the state of those products would be akin of Tennessee saying that no whiskey other than Tennessee whiskeys can be sold in the state. Georgia would ban out of state peaches and Florida could ban out of the state tomatoes (or get Donald Trump to do it for them). Clearly these acts would be in violation of Federal law. So why is California allowed the banning of eggs that are not cage free? Isn’t it time for California’s chickens to come home to roost?

I am personally appalled that some chickens are stacked inside a cage for their egg laying life. But cage free does not mean free range. If the hens are kept in barns where one square foot is available per hen, it qualifies as cage free. Still not an ideal situation if you sympathize with the hens. However, “free range” is no panacea either. Free range simply means that the hens have access to an outdoor space. But there is no rule dictating what constitutes an outdoor space like its minimum dimensions. Some observers say that even if an outdoor space is available that it is so unappealing that the range free chickens don’t venture outside making them no different from those that are cage free. I guess that the most humane conditions would apply to pasture-raised chickens – but watch out for the coyotes. 

I am also appalled at the living conditions for chickens raised for the table. When I see the trucks stacked with chickens piled on top of each other going to slaughter, I have images of my people stacked inside a slave ship shackled together living in filth. At least we were not being sent to become food. But I do eat chickens that are not organic, free range or cage free. 

When I was growing up, my grandparents raised chickens at their Georgia farm. They were certainly free range. They wandered all over the place but stayed mostly close to the house. They would be pecking all over the place. My grandfather gave them open access to the bottom of the outhouse where they engaged in solid waste disposal. I don’t remember how the eggs or the chickens themselves tasted. But my sainted mother to her dying day bemoaned the taste of modern eggs and chickens.

Maybe one day I will stop eating chickens and their eggs like I have done with red meat. I have not eaten any red meat other than what I kill myself since 1971. When I was at the farm growing up, I loved to follow my grandfather around when he was hunting. He hunted small game there being previous few deer and no turkey in Georgia in those days. I loved his dogs which were kept outside in a pen and existed only for hunting rabbits. I stopped hunting when I went to college and only started hunting again after my grandfather died in 1971. I vowed that going forward that I would only eat the meat that I had killed myself. I only eat venison and wild game that I harvest. I do eat the fish that I decide to keep although most times I catch and release. I did not start eating chicken again for almost 20 years and started back because of not wanting to impose my diet on my other half when we  started dating. But I am seriously thinking about stopping again. Maybe if one day I move back to the farm I will get some chickens. I can raise my own meat and produce my own eggs. Then I will stop buying processed chickens and mass produced eggs – cage free or not.