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America’s meat shortage is more serious than your missing hamburgers:
chamerionwrites:
This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the meatpacking industry hard, as some of the worst virus outbreaks in the United States have occurred in the tight, chilly confines of meat processing plants. Standing elbow-to-elbow, workers there — many of them immigrants, in already dangerous roles and making minimum wage — are facing some of the highest infection rates in the nation.
Sick workers mean meatpacking plants are shutting down, and these closures are contributing to a deeply disruptive breakdown in the meat supply chain. The vast majority of meat processing takes place in a small number of plants controlled by a handful of large corporations, namely Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings Inc., and Cargill Inc. More than a dozen of these companies’ beef, chicken, and pork plants closed in April, and despite an order by President Trump to reopen the plants, managers fear that doing so will put lives at risk so facilities continue to close. There have been nearly 5,000 reported cases of workers with Covid-19 at some 115 meat processing facilities nationwide. At least 20 meatpacking workers have died.
And that’s just what’s already happened. As the pandemic’s effects stretch into the summer, outbreaks in meatpacking plants are creating ripple effects. Slower lines in the plants mean less meat makes it to market, while farmers are slaughtering millions of animals that can’t get processed due to the slowdown of the lines. It’s a paradox that could disrupt America’s food supply for years to come.
This context should put your missing hamburger into perspective. The plight of these workers is just the starting point in a chain of crises the coronavirus is creating in America’s food supply. The shuttered meatpacking plants have created a bottleneck in the system through which most meat in the United States must flow in order to get ground beef to Wendy’s, chicken breasts to your local grocery stores, bacon to the nearby diner now trying to run a takeout business, and so on.
Things get really tricky on the other side of that bottleneck, where thousands of farmers have planned the lives of their animals around a schedule that terminates at those meatpacking facilities. If those plants aren’t operating, it’s not like they can just keep the cows, chickens, or pigs in a nearby field.
“If you hold them, they gain weight and you have to feed them, and that’s expensive,” Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri, told Recode. “And if they gain too much weight, then they’re going to be too big to be processed in these very standardized meat plants, like Smithfield.”
“So you might try to hold them up” and keep the animals waiting in a feedlot, Hendrickson added. “Or you’re going to kill them, euthanize them.”
Now imagine this at scale. According to Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, the meat processing capacity in the United States is down by about 40 percent. In the pork industry alone, that amounts to 200,000 pigs that won’t get sent to slaughter, because the meatpacking plants that would process them are closed or otherwise unavailable. If nothing else changes, those 200,000 excess pigs a day become a million pigs a week with nowhere to go but a mass grave…
Understanding how we got to a point in the United States where two months of disruption caused the whole system to break down requires some historical perspective.
If all this has you thinking about The Jungle, you’re on the right track. Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel turned the American meat industry upside down just over a century ago, exposing inhuman working conditions for immigrants in processing plants in Chicago. But the public seemed less interested in the human interest aspect of the book, instead fixating on details of the dangerously unsanitary meatpacking plants. A few months after The Jungle was published in 1906, the US government passed the Meat Inspection Act and established the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Sinclair famously said of the legislation, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
What Sinclair said then still rings true. While the FDA did address public concern over more sanitary conditions in the plants, the workers continued to struggle, doing back-breaking labor for low wages. Meanwhile, the whole meat industry was tightly controlled by a handful of powerful corporations. This is all still true today.
It was technology that laid the groundwork for America’s hyper-consolidated meat supply. The innovation of the refrigerated rail car in the late 19th century meant that meat could be shipped across the United States more easily than animals. Chicago meat magnate Gustavus Swift’s company perfected the design for the first “ice boxes on wheels,” enabling the shipment of meat across the United States and the world. Another Chicago firm, Armour and Company, became an early adopter of refrigerated boxcars, and consolidation of the industry followed. By the turn of the century, the “Big Five” packers controlled the vast majority of the meat industry, including the infrastructure that connected farms to processing plants to the dinner table, where Americans were suddenly enjoying more kinds of meat for lower prices.
This centralized model for meat production, especially for beef, hasn’t changed much in the last hundred or so years. The system built by the original Big Five became a paradigm for the modern industrial agriculture business in the United States, and some of those companies still have a tight grip on America’s food supply. Swift and Company is now part of JBS USA. Armour and Company got bought by ConAgra, and the Amour brand was later sold to Smithfield Foods. Meatpacking remains consolidated to a few dozen Midwestern processing plants, many of which are owned by a handful of huge corporations, like JBS and Smithfield. That’s why when a few of these processors get shut down, due to a pandemic or something else, the country’s entire meat supply suffers.
“The meat supply system relies on a very efficient, well-managed set of logistics,” said Maureen Ogle, historian and author of In Meat We Trust. “But the problem right now is that the coronavirus has disrupted at least one critical link in the meat supply chain in a way that has never been disrupted before, and that one disruption is rippling through the whole system, causing bottlenecks and all kinds of other issues.”
You could argue Upton Sinclair tried to warn us. Consolidation of the meatpacking industry had begun years before The Jungle grossed out the world, but while the legislation that followed in the early 20th century improved certain aspects of how processing works, Americans were already hooked on cheap, readily available meat and seemed unwilling to part with the luxury, regardless of how despicable the industry was. So the industry didn’t change. Many people looked right past the plight of the immigrants working Chicago’s meatpacking plants, and the big meat corporations continued to exploit the cheap labor. A hundred years later, workers in meatpacking plants are getting sick and dying right now, but most Americans are instead focusing their attention on Wendy’s being out of burgers…
One would think that the closure of so many large meatpacking plants would mean that small and midsize processors could handle some of the backlog. That certainly sounds better than killing millions of cows, pigs, and chickens and then burying them in mass graves. But because of the way the meat industry is structured, this just isn’t possible.
“The top four beef processors process over 80 percent of the heifer slaughter, and that is the beef that generally gets sold through the grocery stores,” explained Hendrickson, the rural sociologist. “Over 60 percent of poultry and pork are processed by the largest firms.” She added that poultry is so vertically integrated that corporations like Tyson actually own the chickens themselves, and everybody involved in getting that chicken to the store is just a contractor for Tyson.
The smaller processors don’t have the capacity to deal with all these cows, chickens, and pigs. The coronavirus pandemic does not have an expiration date, so we don’t know how long these plants might struggle with outbreaks among workers that will further delay processing or shut down more plants. Even with some version of social distancing in place, it’s apparent that these facilities, like nursing homes and prisons, are especially prone to Covid-19 outbreaks…
“We Americans want what we want,” said Ogle, the historian. “We have a deep sense of entitlement when it comes to food.”
There’s probably not going to be a meat shortage anytime soon. You probably will continue to enjoy meat, although it might not be as cheap or readily available as it used to be. Over time, there is evidence that the American food supply will be more chaotic and unpredictable, too. Along the way, more poorly paid workers in meatpacking plants will probably die. More animals will die, perhaps millions more. Some farmers might lose their land.
So it’s not really about the burgers. There’s a version of America and its food consumption habits that existed three months ago that might never exist again. Some might feel entitled to getting that back. Others will find something new to want.
America’s meat shortage is more serious than your missing hamburgers:
chamerionwrites:
This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the meatpacking industry hard, as some of the worst virus outbreaks in the United States have occurred in the tight, chilly confines of meat processing plants. Standing elbow-to-elbow, workers there — many of them immigrants, in already dangerous roles and making minimum wage — are facing some of the highest infection rates in the nation.
Sick workers mean meatpacking plants are shutting down, and these closures are contributing to a deeply disruptive breakdown in the meat supply chain. The vast majority of meat processing takes place in a small number of plants controlled by a handful of large corporations, namely Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings Inc., and Cargill Inc. More than a dozen of these companies’ beef, chicken, and pork plants closed in April, and despite an order by President Trump to reopen the plants, managers fear that doing so will put lives at risk so facilities continue to close. There have been nearly 5,000 reported cases of workers with Covid-19 at some 115 meat processing facilities nationwide. At least 20 meatpacking workers have died.
And that’s just what’s already happened. As the pandemic’s effects stretch into the summer, outbreaks in meatpacking plants are creating ripple effects. Slower lines in the plants mean less meat makes it to market, while farmers are slaughtering millions of animals that can’t get processed due to the slowdown of the lines. It’s a paradox that could disrupt America’s food supply for years to come.
This context should put your missing hamburger into perspective. The plight of these workers is just the starting point in a chain of crises the coronavirus is creating in America’s food supply. The shuttered meatpacking plants have created a bottleneck in the system through which most meat in the United States must flow in order to get ground beef to Wendy’s, chicken breasts to your local grocery stores, bacon to the nearby diner now trying to run a takeout business, and so on.
Things get really tricky on the other side of that bottleneck, where thousands of farmers have planned the lives of their animals around a schedule that terminates at those meatpacking facilities. If those plants aren’t operating, it’s not like they can just keep the cows, chickens, or pigs in a nearby field.
“If you hold them, they gain weight and you have to feed them, and that’s expensive,” Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri, told Recode. “And if they gain too much weight, then they’re going to be too big to be processed in these very standardized meat plants, like Smithfield.”
“So you might try to hold them up” and keep the animals waiting in a feedlot, Hendrickson added. “Or you’re going to kill them, euthanize them.”
Now imagine this at scale. According to Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, the meat processing capacity in the United States is down by about 40 percent. In the pork industry alone, that amounts to 200,000 pigs that won’t get sent to slaughter, because the meatpacking plants that would process them are closed or otherwise unavailable. If nothing else changes, those 200,000 excess pigs a day become a million pigs a week with nowhere to go but a mass grave…
Understanding how we got to a point in the United States where two months of disruption caused the whole system to break down requires some historical perspective.
If all this has you thinking about The Jungle, you’re on the right track. Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel turned the American meat industry upside down just over a century ago, exposing inhuman working conditions for immigrants in processing plants in Chicago. But the public seemed less interested in the human interest aspect of the book, instead fixating on details of the dangerously unsanitary meatpacking plants. A few months after The Jungle was published in 1906, the US government passed the Meat Inspection Act and established the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Sinclair famously said of the legislation, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
What Sinclair said then still rings true. While the FDA did address public concern over more sanitary conditions in the plants, the workers continued to struggle, doing back-breaking labor for low wages. Meanwhile, the whole meat industry was tightly controlled by a handful of powerful corporations. This is all still true today.
It was technology that laid the groundwork for America’s hyper-consolidated meat supply. The innovation of the refrigerated rail car in the late 19th century meant that meat could be shipped across the United States more easily than animals. Chicago meat magnate Gustavus Swift’s company perfected the design for the first “ice boxes on wheels,” enabling the shipment of meat across the United States and the world. Another Chicago firm, Armour and Company, became an early adopter of refrigerated boxcars, and consolidation of the industry followed. By the turn of the century, the “Big Five” packers controlled the vast majority of the meat industry, including the infrastructure that connected farms to processing plants to the dinner table, where Americans were suddenly enjoying more kinds of meat for lower prices.
This centralized model for meat production, especially for beef, hasn’t changed much in the last hundred or so years. The system built by the original Big Five became a paradigm for the modern industrial agriculture business in the United States, and some of those companies still have a tight grip on America’s food supply. Swift and Company is now part of JBS USA. Armour and Company got bought by ConAgra, and the Amour brand was later sold to Smithfield Foods. Meatpacking remains consolidated to a few dozen Midwestern processing plants, many of which are owned by a handful of huge corporations, like JBS and Smithfield. That’s why when a few of these processors get shut down, due to a pandemic or something else, the country’s entire meat supply suffers.
“The meat supply system relies on a very efficient, well-managed set of logistics,” said Maureen Ogle, historian and author of In Meat We Trust. “But the problem right now is that the coronavirus has disrupted at least one critical link in the meat supply chain in a way that has never been disrupted before, and that one disruption is rippling through the whole system, causing bottlenecks and all kinds of other issues.”
You could argue Upton Sinclair tried to warn us. Consolidation of the meatpacking industry had begun years before The Jungle grossed out the world, but while the legislation that followed in the early 20th century improved certain aspects of how processing works, Americans were already hooked on cheap, readily available meat and seemed unwilling to part with the luxury, regardless of how despicable the industry was. So the industry didn’t change. Many people looked right past the plight of the immigrants working Chicago’s meatpacking plants, and the big meat corporations continued to exploit the cheap labor. A hundred years later, workers in meatpacking plants are getting sick and dying right now, but most Americans are instead focusing their attention on Wendy’s being out of burgers…
One would think that the closure of so many large meatpacking plants would mean that small and midsize processors could handle some of the backlog. That certainly sounds better than killing millions of cows, pigs, and chickens and then burying them in mass graves. But because of the way the meat industry is structured, this just isn’t possible.
“The top four beef processors process over 80 percent of the heifer slaughter, and that is the beef that generally gets sold through the grocery stores,” explained Hendrickson, the rural sociologist. “Over 60 percent of poultry and pork are processed by the largest firms.” She added that poultry is so vertically integrated that corporations like Tyson actually own the chickens themselves, and everybody involved in getting that chicken to the store is just a contractor for Tyson.
The smaller processors don’t have the capacity to deal with all these cows, chickens, and pigs. The coronavirus pandemic does not have an expiration date, so we don’t know how long these plants might struggle with outbreaks among workers that will further delay processing or shut down more plants. Even with some version of social distancing in place, it’s apparent that these facilities, like nursing homes and prisons, are especially prone to Covid-19 outbreaks…
“We Americans want what we want,” said Ogle, the historian. “We have a deep sense of entitlement when it comes to food.”
There’s probably not going to be a meat shortage anytime soon. You probably will continue to enjoy meat, although it might not be as cheap or readily available as it used to be. Over time, there is evidence that the American food supply will be more chaotic and unpredictable, too. Along the way, more poorly paid workers in meatpacking plants will probably die. More animals will die, perhaps millions more. Some farmers might lose their land.
So it’s not really about the burgers. There’s a version of America and its food consumption habits that existed three months ago that might never exist again. Some might feel entitled to getting that back. Others will find something new to want.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-22 08:52 pm (UTC)I've got vivid childhood memories of riding in the cab of the truck filled with cattle to the local slaughterhouse with dad. he wouldn't let us out, but we could see the animals moving out of the truck through chutes into the building, and hear the "bang" when they were killed. that facility has been closed for decades, but I guess I hadn't put together just what had happened to the industry on a national basis