The battle to persuade the University to start purchasing cage-free eggs for food in the residence hall and in catering services has met so far with the University’s caution to make a move that could cost students tens of thousands of dollars.
But that reluctance has frustrated Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a local group that has pushed for months for the University to join others in the nation that have elected to stop using eggs farmed from hens raised in battery-cages.
The controversy is part of a national campaign spearheaded by the Humane Society of the United States, trying to get universities to buy only cage-free eggs. According to HSUS, more than 80 universities have shied away from purchasing battery-cage eggs – eggs from hens that are crammed so tightly together so they can’t spread their wings and their excrement covers and eats the feathers off of each other. Those universities, which include Dartmouth College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in just the past two weeks, have opted for cage-free eggs, which come from hens that are allowed to roam around barns and nest as they please.
SETA has pushed the University in recent months to switch to cage-free eggs, a move that the University is exploring cautiously because, it says, it could cost students tens of thousands of dollars. The eggs the University uses in the dining halls and the University Catering and Conferences service are farmed from battery-cages, Tom Driscoll, the director of food service for University Housing, has told the Emerald.
Driscoll said the University currently spends around $58,000 on liquid eggs each year. Using the latest figures from Hidden Villa Ranch, the California-based cage-free egg producer Driscoll has been speaking with, the switch could cost students as much as $33,640 each year.
In an e-mail, Cyd Szymanski, CEO of Nest Fresh Eggs, a Colorado-based cage-free distributor, said that her company could supply the University for $29,000 each year.
“I don’t like the argument that just because it costs a lot we shouldn’t pay for it,” SETA member Carrie Packwood Freeman said.
Freeman said that while the lump sum appears large, it averages out to virtually nothing for each student.
“Our University is paying $50,000 a year to keep chickens crammed in the darkness,” Freeman said.
Freeman said that communication has broken down between the group and Driscoll and Allen Gidley, the director of business affairs for housing. After she sent him an e-mail, Driscoll wrote that “We are currently evaluating product quality, price and availability. I don’t think another meeting at this time is necessary.”
SETA has not begun a protest campaign, but, Freeman said, the group has not ruled out the possibility of public demonstrations.
“We’re trying to work with them, not against them,” Freeman said, “but battery farming is “another kind of slavery.”
Driscoll has told the Emerald that the decision will take time and any changes would be implemented during summer term, at the earliest.
Multiple Emerald attempts to reach Driscoll were unsuccessful.
Both University President Dave Frohnmayer and Gidley have been silent on the issue, declining multiple requests for interviews and statements on the issue.
Todd Mann, president of the Residence Hall Association and a current candidate for ASUO president, did not make a definitive statement on whether the switch would be good for students.
Calling the proposed switch expensive, Mann said “I’d have to look more into it.”
ASUO presidential candidate Jared Axelrod echoed this sentiment, saying that the rising cost of tuition needs to be controlled, and that he needed to research the issue with more depth.
Some universities that have made the switch have been able to do so at a minimal increase in cost.
Dick Williams, director of Dining Services at Grinnell College in Iowa, said the college made the switch without increasing the cost at all by buying from local farmers.
According to an article in The Daily Iowan, the student newspaper for the University of Iowa, that university’s switch will only cost students an additional $3,000 per year total.

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