So what came first, the chicken or the egg? In the case of an Iowa "farm" faced with 228 million eggs tainted with salmonella, that question is being addressed on a national scale. Does factory farming create dangerous disease outbreaks, or help contain them? We won't wrestle with that issue here, though to many the answer is pretty obvious. Instead, we will consider the implications of having so many eggs in one basket, so to speak. 228 million is a large number. Normal day to day considerations for most of us are measured in the hundreds or thousands, or, in the case of eggs, dozens. Small-town folk don't often get to throw around such large figures. 228 million eggs, starting at the Mohonk tower and laid end to end would stretch across the globe and take you well into Australia. That's a lot of eggs.

So far, there is nothing to be alarmed about locally. The reported illnesses have come from California, Minnesota, and other western states, even though the eggs have been distributed nationally. Packaged under such pleasingly nostalgic names like Dutch Farms, Mountain Dairy, and Ralph's Eggs, there is nothing Dutch, Mountainous or Ralph-like about these oval death-bombs. They are produced in industrial facilities by factory workers for corporate shareholders, not by Ma and Pa working the back 40. At Wright County Eggs in Iowa, there is no little girl in pigtails collecting the morning's eggs with a wicker basket. But that's OK, since most consumers don't seem much to care.

But they do care about something. Eggs in a carton from Plant #1230092 don't sell very well. It's too….accurate. So where the reality-based production department of factory food falls short, the marketing division steps right in. Our fantasies about what we eat need to be fed just as much as our stomachs. Hence the allusions to an agrarian utopia of stalwart men and women working the soil owned by a family – the same, intact, still-speaking-to-one-another family– for generations. Too bad these families don't exist anymore. They've all been bought out and conglomerated, to become a behemoth where 228 million only constitutes a "partial" recall.

The powerful imagery of the family farm is not just exploited by marketers. Politicians use it too, to pass "farm" bills that only benefit multinational corporations, or give tax relief to the wealthy to preserve their suspiciously estate-like "farms." "Preserve the family farm!" they bellow, and we swallow it, hook, line and sinker. Why? Because they know. They know that we long for something that no longer exists.

Yet there are chickens in our midst. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of chickens call the Wallkill and Rondout Valleys their home, considering the ongoing red-hot fad of growing your own backyard brood. And there are even commercial flocks, laying eggs on local farms for local appetites, where the name on the carton — if it isn't recycled supermarket packaging — might actually reflect who and where the eggs are laid. But by and large, we don't buy these eggs. They cost more, sometimes a lot more, and most places we buy eggs from don't carry them.

To the egg factory, eggs and their profits come first. Before the chickens, before the health of consumers, even before the reality of what those eggs actually are. And for us, after a week or two of vomiting and at worst some intravenous fluids, we'll be back to frying up that Ralph's three-egg omelet, secure that Ralph has our best interests in mind.