On a particularly cold night after hours of studying at a cafe, me and my friends are standing in the empty parking lot trying to plan dinner. We see a Tofu House nearby, and decide that a warm bowl of tofu soup is just what we needed. Each of us took off, beating the cold air to rush into the Tofu restaurant. As we sit down, we familiarize ourselves with the restaurant and the menu, eager for some warm soup and watching that raw egg cook in the Korean earthenware bowl they would serve the tofu soup in.
There were small conversations from other customers in the restaurant, but I distinctly remember hearing one of my friends call out, “they’re not serving any eggs here.” I mean, how could you serve tofu soup without eggs? I instantly felt the disappointment creeping in, but as I looked up and saw the sign that my friends were pointing at. It read, “Bird Flu, No Eggs.”
Bird flu? No eggs? Is it some kind of salmonella? Eggs can’t be that expensive. I quickly wiped out my phone and searched for bird flu in Georgia. The news reports didn’t look too bad, so certainly this would pass in a few weeks, right? I don’t think a lot of people know about this right now either. Plus, I can tolerate no eggs now, and I’ll just go get some at the store later. That was what I had thought. But the following week, I would end up realizing that it had affected eggs prices too. I knew then that this bird flu could not be taken lightly.
So where did this bird flu come from? This bird flu is a type of avian influenza A virus, also H5N1, that causes a highly infectious and severe respiratory disease in birds (Mahase, 2023). First detected in chickens in Scotland in 1959, and then discovered in geese in Southern China and Hong Kong in 1996 (Mahase, 2023). And then in 2003, HPAI A/H5N1 had been identified in poultry and wild birds across Asia, Africa, and some parts of Europe (Sellwood et al., 2007). An outbreak of the bird flu on a poultry farm in the east of England led to the culling of over 150,000 birds in 2007 (Sellwood et al., 2007). And finally, the first report of the virus in the US wasn’t until January 2022. The bird flu strand, H5N1 2.3.4.4b, affected 58 million commercial poultry and backyard flocks (Mahase, 2023). Of course this raises one question: with this history of bird flu, should there be any concern?
One thing about this bird flu is that this virus seems better adapted to infecting wild birds, and that there are potential antiviral drugs that have been approved to treat seasonal flu if you get infected (Mahase, 2023). And according to Ian Brown, the head of virology at UK’s Animal and Plant Health Agency, actions traditionally means detecting and killing infected folks, leading to a limited supply of eggs. With the demand for eggs rising, prices have been rising. The average price for a dozen grade A large eggs have reached a high of $6.23 as of March 2025. It has been reported that there are hopes of cheap eggs by Easter and egg prices have indeed been slowly decreasing. For the meantime though, I will just appreciate my tofu soup in its natural form and get my protein from the tofu and beef.
Sources Cited
Sellwood, C., Asgari-Jirhandeh, N., Salimee, S. (2007). Bird flu: if or when? Planning for the next pandemic, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 445-450. https://doi.org/10.1136/pgmj.2007.059253
Mahase, E. (2023). H5N1: Do we need to worry about the latest bird flu outbreaks? BMJ : British Medical Journal (Online), 380 doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p401
