I just sent this e-mail to the Denver Post editors in response to their August 28th article “Egg recall prompts eat-local scramble in Colorado” by Rita Wold. I encourage you to write a similar letter. By showing the papers that we care about this issue, we encourage them to keep investigating the egg industry and show everybody why they probably should not be eating eggs.

You can email the article’s author Rita Wold at rwold@denverpost.com and the editors at openforum@denverpost.com. Keep it under 150 words. I had to trim mine a bit.

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I appreciated the Post’s follow-up on how Coloradoans are responding to the recent egg recall. I hope you will continue to look at the salmonella outbreak and help keep food safety in the news. It is important to me and to all American families, and we appreciate these glimpses into the food system that puts products on our local grocery shelves.

I was a bit disappointed that the article didn’t address another likely response to a salmonella scare: the decision to stop eating eggs altogether. Certainly this is the most effective way to eliminate the risk of salmonella exposure. It may seem like an extreme reaction to an outbreak, but it is a reasonable one. Any egg enthusiast will think twice about their next purchase if they research the conditions required to give us a dozen eggs for 99 cents. This is what happened to me 3 years ago when I decided to go vegan.

Perhaps you did not encounter anybody who made this decision in preparing your report, but I believe it is worth looking into. Eggs are often referred to as a “perfect food,” but when it comes to health, animal welfare, and environmental impact, that generous description could not be further from the truth. Cut out eggs and animal products and you cut out cholesterol, reduce the risks of heart disease and many cancers (and salmonella ingestion), and you cut off funding to an industry that profits from the intensive confinement of complex social animals.

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Have you ever written a letter to the editor? Did it get published?