Know Where Your #$)@#% Food Comes From

In mid-May, Congress released a 61 page report entitled, “Now to Get Rid of those Pesky Health Departments!” How the Trump Administration Helped the Meatpacking Industry Block Pandemic Worker Protections. The report details the lobbying involved to ensure meatpacking workers were deemed essential workers in the spring of 2020. These essential workers were forced to “continue working in dangerous conditions” and were deprived of benefits “if they chose to stay home or quit” - and people died.

A billboard stood across from the JBS meatpacking plant near Greeley, Colorado, on 12 October 2020. Photograph: David Zalubowski/AP

The crowded factories became superspreader locales for their surrounding communities. “At least 59,000 workers at five of the largest meatpacking companies – Tyson Foods, JBS USA Holdings, Smithfield Foods, Cargill and National Beef Packing Company which are the subject of the congressional inquiry – contracted Covid in the first year of the pandemic, of whom at least 269 died,” summarized The Guardian.*

The part that boggles my mind is that not once, NOT ONCE, does the report mention the animal carnage that would have resulted if the workers stayed safe at home. The industry chose the death of plant workers over wasting thousands of animals destined for slaughter. I am not saying it would have been a good idea to waste those animals - but I do think not even mentioning the role of the animals in the corporate decision making process is disrespectful to both the animals and to those of us who might choose to eat animals raised under those conditions.

The report paints only half the picture. This omission is clearly, to my mind, because no one understands where their food comes from.

For those of you confused about this rant. Let me back up.

We will take chickens as our example.**

The poultry industry functions as a vertically integrated monopoly. That means the company owns the chicks, the recipe for the feed, the feed itself, the processing plants (slaughterhouses), and hires the workers to process the animals (the butchers). Tyson Foods’ website highlights the “Independent Farmers” who raise Tyson’s chickens. “Independent Farmers” are told the cost for the chicks, told the price for the feed, and 8 weeks later are told the price for the finished birds that will be taken to slaughter. Or, as Tyson’s website states, Tyson supplies “the birds and feed, and provide[s] technical advice, while the poultry farmer provides the labor, housing and utilities.”

So, I am a Tyson executive sitting at my desk in front of a spreadsheet. For the sake of this exercise I manage 8 “independent” farms (Farm A through Farm H). Each farm has three barns with 100,000 chickens total (small farms).*** To ensure a consistent supply of meat the timing of the harvest is staggered. Every week 1 farm needs to have chickens taken to slaughter, two days (this is my guess) are given to the farmer to clean out the barns, and then new chicks arrive to start the 8 weeks of growing. Rinse repeat, rinse repeat.

Week one - Farm A has 100,000 8 week old chickens taken to slaughter, 1, Farm B has 7 week old chickens still growing, Farm C has 6 week old chickens growing away, Farm D has 5 week old chickens… all the way to Farm H with their baby birds.

Week two - The farms move up in the rotation. Farm B has their 100,000 8 week old birds taken for processing, Farm A has a barn full of babies. Rinse repeat.

If the birds are not slaughtered at week 8 havoc ensues. The birds are bred for meat production not health. Unexercised bones cannot support the weight of a fully grown meat bird. Animals have heart attacks and bones begin to break. The meat is becoming less and less tender. There are incubating eggs ready to hatch that need a barn.

Is Tyson going to ask the “Independent Farmer” to build another barn for the aging birds and create a market for tougher meat? I don’t think so. The chicken train is speeding along well oiled tracks and without the humans to butcher the birds the whole train is off the tracks.

Chickens, pigs, beef, turkeys. Animals with life cycles. Animals who take care and feeding and nurturing (ideally) to become our dinner.

What would have been the right thing to do in this instance? Derail the train?

I think so.

Such a waste of animal life would have been a strong signal our industrial food system is not serving the animals nor the eaters. It would have been a shock to the American psyche to not have cheap animal protein available (eventually, we would have eaten through the stored meat first). It would have forced us to look at our food choices and examine our priorities as a society.

The report vilifies the industry leaders for stoking fears about a “meat shortage” and the “breaking of our food supply” if the workers were not deemed essential - but those phrases only work if you know where your food is coming from. The author of the report, nor the reporters covering the story, understood the nuance of those phrases and instead attacked the industry for creating fear about a paucity of meat when, in fact, there was enough surplus to export. As if the exports illustrate the industry was lying. Exports don’t disprove the statement “breaking of our food supply,” they are a red herring.****

This obfuscation is clearly part of the modus operandi of the meat packing industry. Opaqueness works well to hide all sorts of ills and it continued to work as demonstrated by the report and it’s media coverage.

The meatpacking industry decided a human life was more expendable than the life of an animal. Yes, these animals were already in the system to be killed and consumed by humans. Yet the morality of saying humans can die so animals will not be wasted in an industry that clearly does not care for animal welfare doesn’t work either.

Asking someone in the industrial meatpacking world to behave more transparently and ethically feels like intentionally banging my head against a wall while hitting myself with a hammer. But it would have been nice if someone - perhaps even our government who felt righteous (and frankly sophomoric) enough to entitle the report, “Now to get rid of those pesky Health Departments” How the Trump Administration helped the Meatpacking Industry Block Pandemic Worker Protections - if someone would have treated the tragedy of what happened as a tragedy for adults. Not children who are to be kept in ignorance about essentials of their daily existence - like where their food comes from.

Maybe if the report had been entitled, Culling Millions of Meat Animals during the Pandemic saved Human Lives and Derailed the Meatpacking Industry. What Happens Now?

That sounds more like a government report not penned for click-bait. That sounds like a more complex and nuanced take on the tragedy of what happened during the pandemic and the choices we made as a society about our meat consumption and the treatment of the animals. That, obviously, sounds like fiction - because it is.

Maybe we can learn for next time.

Sigh.

*The best article I found detailing this report was the Des Moines Register, shoutout to Tyler Jett for a very interesting article and not copying and pasting the phrases of others.

** When I visited a chicken farm in PA I don’t recall whether it was 1 or 2 days the farmer told me for the turnaround. I remember it being a short time.

***Think I am being dramatic with these butchering numbers? Check again, according to the USDA, nearly 9 billion chickens are slaughtered a year. That is 24,000,000 a day.

**** For those of you reading this who feel not having access to cheap meat would break your food supply. I invite you to remember how thrilled we all were to see wildlife return to certain urban areas and our CO2 levels taper slightly when everyone stopped driving. If we all ate meat once a week or once a month, huge environmental and health benefits would follow. Huge.