Like many of you, I am shocked by the recent recall of over half a billion eggs. However, what is so stunning to me is not the sheer magnitude of the recall. Rather, I’m shocked that this is the first offense perpetrated by the egg industry large enough to trigger America’s outrage regarding food safety. Our egg industry is an emblem of industrialized animal agribusiness – a system that jeopardizes the health of American consumers each and every day, institutionally abuses animals, and pollutes our seas and waterways.

The Food and Drug Administration estimates that each year, 142,000 Americans are sickened by egg-borne Salmonella. Tragically, Salmonella is the top cause of food-poisoning related deaths in the United States. The conditions that created this widespread contamination are hardly an aberration – they are typical of an industry in dire need of reform. The facilities where the eggs originated are both factories (I won’t call them farms) that confine millions of hens in cages smaller than a sheet of paper. Every one of the recalled eggs comes from a caged hen. Nearly 280 million hens are confined in cages across the country. I have seen industrialized egg factories firsthand as part of my work with the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. These operations are literally nauseating: Airborne fecal dust chokes the air, facilitating the spread of Salmonella among birds packed beak-to-beak. Massive stacks of tiny cages line the dim walls, and thousands of thin white birds shudder in the darkness. They strain to turn around and spread unused wings in impossibly small cages, scratching haplessly at the thin wires under their feet.

Whether or not you care about a chicken’s right to stretch its wings or scratch in the dirt, the science is clear: eggs from confined chickens are hotbeds for Salmonella. Of the eight studies conducted in the last five years, every one found that battery cage facilities possessed greater Salmonella rates than cage-free operations. According to a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, by switching to cage-free production, the egg industry may as much as halve Salmonella risk. With so many people becoming sick, animal agribusiness has a clear moral imperative to rip out the cages and move to cage-free systems, and soon. Indeed, that’s just what the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Protection recommended at the conclusion of our two-and-a-half-year study: phase out the most intensive and inhumane production practices, such as cages to confine laying hens, to reduce risks to public health and improve animal well-being.

National food safety organizations are joining the call for such reform. The Center for Food Safety and Center for Science in the Public Interest endorsed a successful 2008 California ballot measure that mandates egg producers to become cage-free by 2015. Michigan passed a similar phaseout through its legislature, and recently California Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill requiring all whole eggs sold in the state, regardless of where produced, be cage-free by 2015.