One of the UK’s poultry producers’ associations reported last autumn that between bird flu and persistently low margins, up to a third of its members either reduced production or closed down altogether. One former egg farm near me now rents storage units; another has been on the market for months, unable to find a buyer. As a result, there aren’t enough eggs to stock the shelves — and supermarkets are importing them from Italy. “So what?” you might ask. This is the market at work. But around this time three years ago, egg politics looked for a moment as though they might be on a different course.

Covid lockdowns scrambled many of the food supply chains we’d grown accustomed to — and as the country reeled, it seemed briefly as though more local networks might begin to re-emerge. (This was the point we first got our birds, albeit less with profit in mind than our own kitchen.) On my street, neighbours with back-garden poultry did a roaring trade.

Early 2020 brought a wider sense, too, that Covid might signal the end for free-trade absolutism more generally, and prompt a return to more bounded and local networks. But three years on, although my street still has several poultry-keepers, most have reverted to buying eggs from the shops. The turn away from free trade, if the Italian egg suppliers are anything to go by, has yet to occur.

Why, then, do we seem unable to imagine any other way of doing things? This seemingly inexorable drift back to the impersonal market epitomises Britain’s approach to food. This system, which we embraced in earnest nearly two centuries ago, maps a belief in the impersonal logic of “the market” onto a terrain whose most important attributes are simply not visible to market logic. And egg politics shows, in microcosm, just how poorly this ideology meshes with food production — to the extent that it now threatens our capacity to produce food at all.

Our trajectory toward the current situation was set out by Karl Polanyi, in the influential 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Humans, Polanyi argues, have always bought, sold, and exchanged things. But for the most part, across time and cultures, the market has been ordered to the needs of social institutions, and regulated accordingly. What’s unique about the modern world, he suggests, is that it works the other way round: our social institutions are ordered to the market.

For Polanyi, it was the enclosure of the commons that set England on this trajectory, by displacing England’s subsistence peasants, and creating the industrial proletariat, who were obliged to work for a wage. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin for that older, landowning order was the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws: tariffs that aimed to protect domestic grain prices from the influence of cheaper foreign imports, and were vigorously opposed by the mercantile class and industrial proletariat.

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It was, in effect, a contest between Britain’s food producers and an emerging population of food consumers. And in 1846, the food producers lost their protection from competition. The change accelerated Britain’s shift from a farming-first to an industrial economy, and set agriculture — once the largest employer in England — on the trajectory it’s followed ever since: dwindling opportunities for youth, relentless demands for efficiency, and with these a bitter tension between land stewardship, and market-driven pressure to lower standards. The historian Robert Ensor writes that after repeal, “the only chance for any young or enterprising person on the countryside was to get out of it”. Many smaller farmers gave up, and emigrated to America.

As populations urbanised, this also pushed Britons to abandon domestic poultry-keeping — or rather, to centralise it. Today, most egg farming (where it survives at all) is highly industrialised, with 48% of British birds in battery cages. Despite more recent regulations banning the cruellest intensive farming practices, bird welfare often suffers. And their waste, though an excellent nutrient for our domestic veg beds, is a major source of river pollution at scale.

Perhaps the gains in efficiency warrant the loss of chicken-keeping culture. But chicken centralisation also illustrates how, when market pressures collide with food production, it’s not so much that costs are driven down. Rather, they’re externalised into areas that don’t appear on the balance sheet, such as animal cruelty, river pollution, distressed producers — or, more subtly, disappearing cultures.

We’re middle-class chicken hobbyists, not farmers, but even amateur poultry-keeping has left me wondering what else is lost in cultural terms when chickens are centralised, from realism about animal behaviour, to poultry-based metaphors — or seasonal rituals. Absent modern, artificial housing conditions, many hens stop laying over the winter. If your birds are free-range, when they start again in the spring, you have to figure out where they’re hiding their eggs. When I learned this, it left me wondering whether this insight survives for most modern families only in the other egg glut we’re eating our way through: the chocolate one. Modern chocolate was, after all, invented the year after the Corn Laws were repealed. So Britain’s urbanisation began in earnest just as chocolate became a mass-market treat. Did a trace of the older form of “spring egg hunt” —  for real eggs — urbanise, too, in chocolate form, among now-henless households?

The nineteenth-century Tories were ambivalent about such losses: the Corn Law debate split the Tory Party down the middle, and eventually forced Robert Peel’s resignation as Prime Minister. But despite their residual association in the public mind with the interests of landowners, today’s Tory Party seems closer in spirit to the old Whigs: mercantilist to the core, and deeply reluctant to look too closely at how well “markets” manage the complex mesh of social, environmental and economic issues bound up in domestic food production.

When, for example, Johnson struck a “free trade deal” with Australia around two years ago, it was hailed as a benefit of Brexit. At the time, the National Farmers’ Union warned that the proposed deal would be disastrous for British farmers; Johnson shrugged it off with a merrily Whiggish nod to market ideology, declaring: “This is a country that grew successful and prosperous on free trade, on exporting around the world.”

Last year, British farmers warned again that, applied to farming, these free-market policies are “sleepwalking” Britain into a food crisis. In January, shop shelves across the country stood empty. The government shrugged, this time blaming supermarkets for “market failure”. More recently, food tsar Henry Dimbleby quit his post, condemning ministers’s “ultra-free-market ideology” as a threat to Britain’s food security.

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But the ideology seems as tenacious as ever, and our leaders as convinced at ever that where the dictates of the market require that something be dissolved — even if that turns out to be Britain’s capacity to produce eggs at all — then it will be dissolved. We don’t need poultry producers in Britain. The market will provide: we’ll just import eggs.

But this is premised on a belief that nothing can stand in the way of international trade, now or in the future. And even leaving aside energy prices, just based on news headlines over the last 20 years, this strikes me as — to put it mildly — a risky bet. What if we grind domestic food security to nothing in the name of the “free market”, only for the wheels to come off global trade again?

And yet nor am I sure that this is just a matter of ideology-blinded mercantilist leaders. For all proposed solutions to food security — whether free-market ones from the Right, or regulatory or veganism-based ones from the Left — share the same implicit certainty that whatever the solution is, it will still involve centralisation. And yet we could surely make a dent in the nested (sorry) poultry problems of food security, pricing, pollution, welfare, and carbon-intensive supply chains — not to mention improve domestic food waste management — by going the opposite way, toward chicken decentralisation.

Yes, some people live in apartments. But 87% of British homes have a back garden. And regulations on intensive poultry farming permit an insane density of birds — 17 hens per square metre — meaning even a tiny back garden could easily keep a few hens in many times this space, while enabling the recycling of kitchen scraps and supplying the garden with high-quality fertiliser.

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So why aren’t we doing this? I don’t think it’s just that Tories are wicked mercantilists, or that the farmers are almost gone already. The only explanation I can see is simple, and dispiriting: that however excited some got in 2020 about re-localising and de-marketising food production, the vast majority of people just don’t want to.

The fault, in truth, lies with all of us: for market “efficiency” and “convenience” isn’t just about price and choice. It’s also about lack of obligation. As I’ve learned when buying (and, occasionally, selling) eggs among neighbours, the moment you make trade more local — which is to say, more personal — you swiftly become caught in additional layers of obligation, whether to the birds that depend on you for food and safety, or to the neighbours whose subsistence is now (in however tiny a way) more bound up in yours.

And while communitarians often idealise such networks, we’ve grown accustomed to being able to buy eggs without this layer of complexity. No one who views taking the neighbour’s bin round as a huge favour will be keen on re-creating this complexity unless they absolutely have to. Most are still more than happy to look away from the uncounted welfare, ecological and food-security costs of this freedom from obligation. And I suspect it’s this, more than anything, that explains our Titanic-like drift toward the iceberg of food supply disaster.

Changing course would not just mean kicking out the Tories, or fiddling with regulations, embracing synthetic foods, or even re-building forgotten practices in domestic food production. It would mean re-evaluating every basic assumption about how we relate to one another, and why. The food crisis will have to get a great deal more severe — and fresh eggs a great deal more expensive than mass-produced chocolate ones — before many are willing to do that.

They’d be less confident if they’d watched a clutch of chicks grow up, as we did over lockdown last year. Our little flock of backyard chickens now includes four hens and one rooster. He’s insufferable. I’ve watched his obnoxious personality blossom, in stark contrast to the docile hens, and I can only describe him as an absolute cock — both literally and figuratively. He is aggressive, domineering, territorial, horny, and very, very loud.

It would be difficult to find a creature who more completely epitomises all the traits we’re encouraged to condemn these days, under the catch-all term “toxic masculinity” But as well as being amused by his problematic machismo (and ridiculous hat), I’ve developed a grudging respect for his attitude. He takes his duties as chicken patriarch seriously, and is insufferable mostly because he pursues these duties with bird-brained single-mindedness.

He’s protective of the hens, stands guard while they eat and will fight anything he considers a threat to them – including us. Full-blown military assault by him is a mixture of comical and genuinely unnerving, as now he’s an adult he has spurs. He wields these sharp protrusions from the backs of his legs like a pair of sabres, fluffing up his neck feathers and flying at you spurs first, whereupon you have to win or he’ll attack you every time you go near him.

In humans, this kind of belligerence is the male-coded trait quickest to be filed under “toxic masculinity”. Regardless of how things are for chickens, though, we’re told that aggression in human males has nothing to do with biology. Instead, the explanations for phenomena such as males’ measurably greater propensity to commit violent crime are explained by theories such as bad role models, economic stress or gender role identification.

Having watched the rooster and the hens develop so differently, I find this less than convincing. It seems far-fetched that humans should be the only sexually dimorphic species on the planet in which sex has absolutely zero impact on attitude or behaviour.

“So what?” you might say. We may have some evolved instincts, but unlike chickens, humans can modulate these according to different social and cultural norms. Certainly, in many historic contexts, social pressure has leaned toward punishing not aggressive males but those who weren’t aggressive enough. This was the case until very recently: 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers in World War 1 were shot for cowardice.

And further back in time, some societies took these traits to extremes. The 13th-century Old Norse Saga of the Jomsvikings recounts exploits of such cheerfully macho ultra-violence they make my rooster look chicken. In one such episode, Svein Buason, a Jomsviking due to be executed, asks his enemies to hold his hair away from his neck so it won’t be bloodied as the blade falls. He then jerks his head, causing the blade to fall and cut off his enemy’s hands. It doesn’t get much more macho than using your own inevitable death to troll the enemy.

Contemporary culture, though, has swung the other way, and would rather deprecate than celebrate anything with a whiff of old-school masculinity. This is perhaps understandable: we live in a peaceful and high-tech society, and once-adaptive male-coded traits such as violence and physical risk-taking just aren’t useful like they were to the Jomsvikings. Indeed, in a society where employers prioritise soft skills, collaborative working and low levels of overt conflict, such traits are actively undesirable.

This is all fine, provided you believe human nature to be completely malleable. We just need to train boys out of being cock-ish. But the signs are not especially promising. In 2017-18, there were 7,905 permanent exclusions from schools (mostly for violence), of which only 1,787 (23%) were girls.

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Some argue that the cure for this is working harder at teaching boys to eschew toxic masculinity. But what if a baseline of aggression is baked into human males, as it is in cockerels? Even if such tendencies are somewhat responsive to cultural cues, they may not be absolutely so. And if this is the case, efforts to eradicate “toxic masculinity” may be futile or even counter-productive.

Certainly, many of the young men on the receiving end of such social-constructionist efforts are responding by rejecting not stoicism, aggression and competition but the mainstream preference for cooperation, empathy, and non-violent negotiation. You can find some of these men in internet subcultures that revere traditionally cock-ish traits and cultures such as the Vikings and Spartans, while chafing at what Bronze Age Pervert, one of the more prominent voices in these realms, calls “matriarchy”.

In such groups, Jomsviking-style machismo, or even the World War 1 sort, is far from nearing extinction through social engineering. On the contrary: it’s increasingly self-aware and mutinous, and views the war on “toxic masculinity” as a conspiracy to subordinate the natural vigour of males. And men who have adopted a version of this worldview are increasingly opting out of the moral mainstream in more concrete ways too.

It was relatively easy to pretend the 20,000-odd Western fighters who joined Isis were motivated mainly by religious fervour. But this is less persuasive in the case of the hundreds of right-wingers who flocked to the recent conflict in the Ukraine, choosing their “side” seemingly at random and on occasions even shooting at each other.

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What do they want, though? Consider the Viking raiders so idolised by such subcultures. These, reports the 17^th-century historian William Camden, were drawn by lot from communities with too many spare males, and encouraged to go raiding in no small part because they were a nuisance at home. And they didn’t just want gold and women; they wanted glory. It’s not inconceivable that people such as  Craig Lang, wanted for murder in the USA but feted as a hero in Ukraine for his role in the conflict there, went in search of something similar.

This is not to condone such actions, but to wonder: what are the alternatives? In On Combat, Lt Col David Grossman compares peaceful, productive, empathic citizens (sheep), sociopathic aggressors (wolves) and those with “a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens” which he calls “sheepdogs”: those who fight to protect their own.

For Grossman, there’s honour in being a “sheepdog”. But well-meaning blank-slatist efforts to re-code all combative traits as “toxic masculinity” are now having the side-effect of rendering the “sheepdog” type suspect as well. Today, male-coded belligerence and stoicism are under fire even in quintessential “sheepdog” institutions such as the military and police.

But if, as I suspect, a measure of cockerel-like attitude is ineradicable in at least some human males, this may well backfire. If such men are now unwelcome even in the mainstream military and pseudo-military institutions that previously valued their personalities, we may find ourselves not in a safer and gentler world after all. We might just discover we have more Craig Langs on the loose.

Lang is relatively unusual in seeking out combat. But the underbelly of the internet is full of men violently hostile to the norms of a “feminist” mainstream that deplores the things they value, and who daydream increasingly vividly about the search for glory. Perhaps they will confine this to the realm of fantasy forever. But perhaps they won’t.

None of this is to offer an unqualified endorsement of these traits, which have many downsides. But wouldn’t we be better-advised to seek constructive roles for the men who possess them, rather than trying to “educate” (in other words shame) “toxic masculinity” out of existence. Especially if the alternative is a growing subculture of men who have gone beyond daydreaming online about “Vikings”, to actively seeking to recreate their violent, restless and hypermasculine world in the 21^st century.

Our rooster has a job to do, and we value him for it – even though he is a cock. But for men whose personalities tend toward aggression, protectiveness, competition and stoicism, what honourable roles are left? We’d be foolish to shrug our shoulders as such men lose hope of being valued as protectors, and start looking for glory as wolves.