Earlier this year, I decided to move back to Nepal with the particular smugness of someone who thinks he no longer has to pay for exorbitant groceries. I’d left New York, where a dozen eggs had become more than a small financial event — screaming headlines in national publications about how eggs became a luxury or how to make an omelet without breaking the bank. I’d gone from paying $4.35 for a baconeggandcheese to $8.17 at the same bodega on downtown Wall Street in a matter of months. In moving to Nepal, I’d assumed I didn’t quite have to think twice about paying for eggs. It’s a different hemisphere, a different chicken.

A month since I landed back in Kathmandu, the local supermarket has raised its egg price each time I’ve visited it. I hadn’t done the math myself until I read a newspaper report last night: Egg prices increase for the fourth time in a month, hovering at around Rs575 for a crate. The eggs in Kathmandu, for what it’s worth, are good.

New York’s egg crisis had a villain everyone could name: H5N1. The avian flu strain, which had been grinding through American laying flocks since 2022, took its worst swing yet in early 2025. The average dozen hit $4.95 in January, a record, then kept climbing — wholesale prices in New York touched $7.24 a dozen at one point. The ones I preferred, eggs with a bright orange yolk that came from “pasture-raised” hens, reached $11. Restaurants started adding surcharges. And then the government intervened, because in America, you don’t mess with breakfast. In June 2026, the Justice Department sued three of the country’s largest egg producers, accusing them of coordinating supply and pricing between 2022 and 2025. The producers deny it.

Nepal is having the same emergency, but here, no one wants to ask questions. Remember when the banana prices were going bananas a few months ago?

The Nepal Layers Poultry Farmers’ Association raised its support price for eggs four separate times within a single month. The association’s president points to the obvious culprit: bird flu has killed close to a million birds since February, and the country’s laying hens can no longer keep pace with demand — roughly 4.1 million eggs are devoured in a day against 3 million that are laid.

But the part I keep returning to is that in New York, there is a mechanism — an antitrust law, a paper trail, subpoenas — built for exactly the question of whether a shortage is real or performed. A consumer rights advocate said the quiet part plainly to Kantipur: there is no law and no standard that governs how egg prices get set. Traders and associations point to demand and scarcity, and raise prices at their own discretion, he said, because nothing stops them from doing so. A supply department official confirmed the shape of it from the other side: his office checks whether eggs are sold at the price the producers’ association announces. It does not have the authority to ask why that price is what it is.

The two egg crises I’ve had to live through back-to-back appear to rhyme, but something tells me they don’t quite resolve the same way. New York’s bird flu led to a shortage and, eventually, a lawsuit that asked whether the shortage was entirely honest. Kathmandu’s bird flu has produced a shortage and, so far, an association meeting that sets a new number every week or two, with nobody positioned to ask it anything at all. Even the farmers say they’re not seeing the money.

I did not move eight thousand miles to have opinions about eggs. I moved for the family, for the mountains, for reasons that had nothing to do with poultry markets on two continents behaving rudely and interrupting my breakfast. But I’ll admit the coincidence has worn down some of my smugness. I thought I could leave inflation behind on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy Airport. Turns out it doesn’t need your address to find you, just your appetite.