McDonald’s restaurants are determined to offer cage-free eggs and real butter to its customers. Should be good news but the locomotive may have left the station before the cars were hooked up. The massive quantities of those products required by the global fast food chain cannot be met by agricultural systems of the world unless we rethink and recalibrate how food moves forward. Industrial agribusiness does not yet know how to raise cage-free laying hens in large quantities, and the dairy industry is all about volume not butterfat. Their aren’t enough Jersey, Guernsey, and Ayrshire milk cows to supply that amount of butter. Small farmers can do it and quickly but they need to be set free and encouraged. Plus there needs to be a return to small, localized egg and milk handling facilities with whole new approaches to storage and delivery. Fantastic opportunity with messy risks. The best outcomes are exciting to imagine but they could lead to nasty manifestations of greed as the unscrupulous rise to the occasion and bend rules to supply the demand. Whose to say whether the time calls for more or less regulation? LRM