By Katy Budge

Let’s be clear. This “meat shortage” that the CEOs of meat packing companies are sniveling about has nothing to do with supply. It’s about how vast numbers of animals are processed for our plates. There are serious systemic problems with the Big Meat industry, but we — the consumers — are partially to blame.

The past several decades have witnessed significant changes in this industry, most of which have brought us to our current crisis. Meat used to be a status symbol because it was relatively expensive to produce. Now, thanks to modern processing, it has become affordable, and has elbowed its way into being not only a staple of our Western diets, but the star.

But the industry didn’t stage a coup. During our watch, and largely with our consent, they gave consumers exactly what we were asking for. They gave us cheap meat. Those lower price points are possible because the meat industry got more efficient. There are several ways to do that, including consolidation, standardization, and just plain ol’ ramping up processing.

Consolidation

Before the 1980s, ranchers and poultry farms typically sent their animals to regional slaughterhouses, mainly in the Midwest. Carcasses would then go out to smaller, independent meat packing plants throughout the country staffed by highly skilled butchers. Their paychecks reflected their knowledge and rightly so – it’s no easy task to go from whole animal to the cuts of meat that consumers want.

Trouble is, consumers increasingly didn’t want all the cuts that a whole animal produces, let alone the by-products. Though it’s exalted in local food circles, tip-to-tail eating isn’t a part of the conversation for the average consumer. We want the steaks, the chops, the wings.

Those large slaughterhouses started to figure out that they could do that cherry picking much cheaper than smaller facilities, who would not only have to retool their operations, but also deal with the lesser-in-demand cuts. Facilities that were once slaughter-only became large processing plants as well, sending out packages of meat versus carcasses. Those local meat packers couldn’t compete, and now they are very few and far between.

COVID-19 has pulled the curtain back on those large scale plants, and there’s a reason you keep hearing the same names over and over again: JBS USA (owned by JBS in Brazil), Smithfield (owned by WH Group in China), Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef Packing Company. It’s because collectively they process approximately 80% of the nation’s beef, 60% of the pork, and 50% of the poultry. In a recent EATER article, Cassandra Fish, an industry analyst and former Tyson risk management executive, estimated that only about 50 meat processing plants are responsible for as much as 98 percent of all U.S. meat slaughter and processing.

Standardization

Big Meat has become an assembly line. As such, it runs best when the product fits the machinery and when the line can run as uninterrupted as possible. That’s been brought into sharp focus as farmers and ranchers are being forced to euthanize hundreds of thousands of animals that can’t get processed. But don’t blame those farmers and ranchers.

With an assembly line, time is money, so industrial cattle, swine, and poultry have been bred to convert what they eat as quickly as possible into protein for us to eat. Cattle for Big Meat are fed growth hormones to fatten them up faster, and industrial cattle, swine, and poultry are regularly fed antibiotics to keep them healthy in their crowded living conditions.

These animals are bred and fed to accommodate a timeline, certainly not flavor. Given the level at which consumers are buying industrial meat, it would seem we don’t care much about the quality of flavor anymore, let alone animal welfare.

That pipeline breeding approach has an especially significant effect on swine and poultry. A pig usually hits its market weight of 250 pounds at about six months. If it gets much bigger, the standardized machinery of the packing plants physically can’t handle it. And, because of the way they are bred and fed, most pigs will die of obesity if there’s much delay in processing.

With the commercial chicken industry, the timeline is even more accelerated. Another recent EATER article quoted this from industry expert Matthew Wadiak — “… a modern chicken is processed at 38 days, and they grow so quickly, at close to 50 days … they start dying of heart attacks and organ failure and they just get so big they can’t walk and move …”

Faster Processing

Gone are the days when most of domestic meat processing was done by skilled butchers. Rendering an animal into protein for your plate has become an entry level, assembly line position. And, the processing jobs are fast, repetitive, and dangerous. They’re also very low paying, so most of the workers are people of color and illegal immigrants. Already on the margins of the workforce, they’re unlikely to speak up about working conditions for fear of losing their jobs.

This aspect of the meat industry has certainly been dragged into the spotlight by the COVID-19 crisis. As has been well documented, there’s no way to social distance when you’re working elbow-to-elbow in a crowded facility. These plants are designed for efficiency, for providing consumers cheap meat.

Consider the very scale at which these facilities operate. Modern beef plants can process about 800,000 pounds of beef a day; and if you purchase a single four-ounce patty from that facility, it may have meat from as many as 50 different animals. Currently, the speed limit on pork processing lines is 1106 hogs an hour, about 18 a minute, but the USDA is considering eliminating even those hazardous caps.

What’s Next — A Return to Resiliency?

Certainly the price of food is an issue for many people. A single working mother probably isn’t going to be able – or willing – to buy organic, grass-fed hamburger for her three teenage boys. But, there are a lot of people who can afford sustainably raised and harvested meat, especially if they choose to eat less of it – even sometimes. Indeed, if this pandemic makes us really understand the ins and outs of how Big Meat operates, Meatless Mondays might also morph into Meatless Wednesdays, and maybe even Fridays and Saturdays as well.

As noted at the beginning of this piece, the meat industry has given us exactly what we’ve been asking for — cheap meat. Problem is, that model of efficiency has proven to be very, very fragile in times of crisis. And not just this current pandemic. Think of all the meat scares in recent decades; if one diseased animal finds its way into that huge meat packing pipeline, an E. coli contamination will shut down a plant and trigger massive recalls.

Yes, Big Meat is efficient at cranking out immense quantities of low cost product, but it is also a fragile system. It’s not the resilient, regional supply chain we used to have that could weather a mid-size plant here or there going offline. That change happened because consumers asked for something, and got it. Now we need to start asking for something else, demanding it with our dollars. Think about what kind of system you’re supporting if you keep choosing cheap meat. We’ve gotten to the point where the lowest amount we fork over at the cash register is our criteria, and we are indeed paying the price for that.