When I first moved to London, I rarely cooked the same lunch or dinner on repeat. But at breakfast, my love of the familiar has asserted itself for as long as I have had any control over the matter. In the greasy spoon café at college; in a narrow kitchen in Rome; in every London rental flat I ever shared, I have always had a strong preference for starting my day with eggs on toast. Before I go home to stay with my parents, they often tell me either “we’ll make sure we’ve got enough eggs,” or even better, “good, Sue and Phil just dropped some eggs off.” Phil and Sue live near my parents, and especially in the summer, their hens lay eggs with the richest, tastiest yolks I have ever tasted.
I gave up denying that I am a creature of habit years ago, so I have let routine creep into my lunches and dinners too. I seldom cook meat, so I often use my knack with eggs, honed over many years, to turn vegetable sides into a full meal. Eggs are still complicated — ethically, environmentally, and in the kitchen — but producing eggs omits less carbon than most other animal products, which is the main reason I started buying less meat.
Last week, I stayed with my parents in Monmouthshire, where a short walk in almost any direction will now eventually take you past a poultry farm. It is not the presence of these farms that is new, but their scale, and the sheer number of them. The same is true along much of the Wye Valley, including in Powys, and in Herefordshire, where I grew up. Supply has grown to meet an increase in demand: between 2001 and 2021, the number of eggs packed in the UK increased by over 30%.
The number of eggs we eat has changed, but the way they are produced has really changed. Over the same twenty-year period, the amount of free-range eggs produced in the UK has increased by over 240%: a staggering shift. In 2001, 23% of eggs packed in the UK were free range. In 2021, that figure was 59%. Having all these hens roaming about — even if in reality, free range hens often have less room for roaming than we might like to believe — means they are bound to take up a bit of extra space.
Is this not good news? After all, the cruelty of intensive battery farming is well-documented, and increasingly so — this is likely to have been a big factor in the fall in the number of barn eggs produced for sale in the UK. We do not like to imagine that our eggs are laid by suffering hens. In most UK supermarkets, you will find egg boxes with all sorts of cosy, bucolic names; the “Happy Egg Co” is a big player on the Wye Valley farming scene.
But the more I learn about food production, the less clear these waters become. Our demand for eggs — which includes free range eggs — is killing the Wye. As George Monbiot writes, the surplus nutrients from chicken manure — especially phosphate — drain into the river, with disastrous effects on water quality. I took a morning walk along the Wye in Hereford, and could spot the algae that is a visible sign of its threatened ecosystem.
We should care for the river’s sake: algae sucks out the river’s oxygen, which kills fish, which starves otters, kingfishers and others besides. But if this does not strike enough of a chord, we should care for the sakes of those who call the valley home. And not even just for them. “If you have never navigated the Wye, you have seen nothing,” wrote the artist William Gilpin in the late eighteenth century. Should future generations not be able to visit the bookshops of Hay-on-Wye in high summer, or the magnificent Tintern Abbey, without having to bear the stench of a dead river?
“It seemed like Omnipotence! God, methought,
Had built him there a temple; the whole world
Seemed imaged in its vast circumference.
No wish profaned my overwhelmed heart
Blest hour! It was a luxury — to be.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the Wye Valley
It is true that the industrial scale of egg production is exacerbating this damage, but free range poultry farming can be industrial, too. The two are not mutually exclusive. Some free range farms are vast, and they have to be if they are going to meet our insatiable demand. There is even evidence that free range farms are especially polluting for the Wye: they allow hens to deposit manure directly on fields, which can then run straight into the river. If the hens are happy — debatable — then the river certainly is not.
I no longer live near Phil and Sue, so a decent chunk of my weekly food budget goes on organic eggs from the closest thing to a small-scale farm I can afford. I am privileged to be in the position to do this. I suppose I could eat them less often, and eat more beans instead. I probably should. But anything that looks like an easy solution — even quitting eggs altogether — will not save the Wye on its own.
The idea of the personal carbon footprint is fundamentally limited: it puts all the onus on individual consumer guilt, and lets massive polluters off scot-free. There’s a reason that BP spent a small fortune on advertising in order to popularise the term. Similarly, the Wye is a victim of a political failure — capitalism — that is bigger than any one person. It is convenient for the shareholders of companies that profit from pollution, which include supermarkets and industrial farms, to turn this into a debate about personal consumption.
That does not mean there is nothing we can do. Monbiot compares the Wye to a coral reef. Though the river is smaller, we must make its poisoning just as well known, and just as scandalous. Allowing industries free rein to profit at the expense of the places we live should be politically toxic. Chicken manure, planning permission and soil chemistry are not especially sexy topics, but we must not let that stop us from making a noise about them.
This week I have enjoyed:
Orienteering, by Rebecca May Johnson — which features a river too, and river life (swans!).
The Yellow Kitchen, by Margaux Vialleron — a wonderful debut novel about food, community, London, and much more besides.
On Beans, by Alicia Kennedy, which made me consider trying to become somebody who eats daal for breakfast (or ful medames, or something else entirely).