Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Wrong.
It was the lobbyist.
The price of eggs has skyrocketed in Michigan, and it’ll probably never go down in an appreciable way. And it’s all due to a chummy deal cut between Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, animal-rights activists, and corporate egg producers. Then there is the lobbyist who put the whole thing together.
The background:
In 2009, the Humane Society of the United States convinced Gov. Jennifer Granholm to sign a law requiring Michigan egg producers to use bigger cages so that confined hens could spread their wings and live more “humanely.”
The egg producers were given 11 years to make the change.
The lobbyist for the Humane Society at the time was a lawyer named Peter Ruddell.
In 2018, Ruddell, who was still working for the Humane Society, was back at the Capitol with a new idea, one imported straight from California.
Instead of larger cages, how about doing away with cages altogether by 2025?
Gov. Rick Snyder didn’t like the idea and vetoed it.
But the very next year, Snyder was out, and Whitmer was in. And Ruddell? He had a new job.
Ruddell was now the lobbyist for the egg farmers.
“They (animal activists) had a gun to our head,” Ruddell told me. “We’re sitting in 2019, and the poultry industry has not made the conversion. Gretchen Whitmer is now governor, and there’s really not the feeling that she is going to be as favorable to the agriculture industry as she is to the animal rights community, because the progressives really funded her primary campaign in 2018.”
“So we felt like we had our back against the wall in the poultry industry to make sure we got the five years we needed desperately to match up with the new marketplace commitments.”
So basically, it was Ruddell’s own gun from his time with the Humane Society that the animal rights activists were now pointing at Ruddell’s new clients, the egg farmers.
“Yeah,” Ruddell giggled. “Quite bizarre, isn’t it?”
As it happens, the egg farmers liked the cage-free idea.
Why? That answer is buried deep in Michigan Compiled Law—Section 287.746 Subsection (4):
“…a business owner shall not knowingly engage in the sale of any shell egg in this state that the business owner knows or should know is the product of an egg-laying hen that was confined…”
That means that nearly 70% of the nation’s eggs—the ones laid by caged hens—are now illegal to sell in Michigan, effective January 1.
The market gets cornered, the competition gets crushed, and prices explode.
Add to that a bird flu pandemic that has decimated Michigan’s chicken flocks. Now the price of a dozen eggs costs more than the chicken itself.
Are the more expensive “cage-free” eggs, laid by thousands of birds crammed in darkened barns, any more ethical or healthy than traditional eggs？
Studies show higher rates of bacteria, parasitic infection, and cannibalism among cage-free poultry.
Further, about 60% of all bird flu deaths in 2024 occurred in cage-free settings, even though cage-free poultry make up only a third of the U.S. market.
No matter. The Humane Society gets its donations. The governor gets her contributions. Corporate Agriculture gets its profit. And the lobbyist gets paid.
Meanwhile, grandma gets thin.
Caged eggs are still legal in Ohio. Last week, the price for a dozen in Toledo was $3.97.
In Royal Oak, where caged-eggs are now considered contraband, the price was $6.29. In San Francisco, it was $8.99.
“I don’t pay daily attention to the price of eggs,” said Ruddell, the switch-hitting lobbyist. “But, I’ll take your word for it.”
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools.
