Big Porkers Threaten California’s Bacon Supply
An Associated Press story making it sound as if bacon and other pork products would soon be scarce and/or extremely expensive in California made the rounds recently.
Bacon -if it could be found-- we learned, could go for $9 a pound. A Korean-American restaurateur was profiled, agonizing about “small restaurants whose customers can’t afford big price increases and that specialize in Asian and Hispanic dishes that typically include pork.”
If this doom and gloom forecast sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because we went through a similar scare just a few years back.
“California could be on the verge of a severe egg shortage, and it will affect the whole country” was the headline in the Washington Post on December 14, 2014.
In both instances, these news accounts amounted to little more than gussied up industry propaganda created in the expectation of voter imposed standards for how livestock are treated.
Any day now I’m looking forward to seeing a heart-rendering account of a “small” pork producer facing the impossible demands of Big Gubmit.
“Big Gubmit” is actually the voters of the State of California, who overwhelming voted in 2018 for Proposition 12. It set new standards (to be in place by January 1, 2022) improving living conditions for farmed animals raised for consumption sold in the state.
These new norms weren’t about the temperature of sparkling water served to chickens, or the quality of avocados mixed into feed for pigs. Nope. All they said was that animals needed to have a little more space to exist in.
And, yes, this additional space will raise prices; not as much as the industry is threatening us with and not enough to pay small farmers more than 12 cents on the retail dollar that they currently receive.
Egg prices did go up in 2015 when we had the last 'scare.' There were even a few weeks where product was scarce. And then the prices came back down. Before long eggs were being treated as loss leaders by chain stores. To this day, eggs remain one of the best bargains for protein you can buy.
If voters/consumers knew the reality of many farmed animals, we’d all be seriously considering giving them up. The processes used to produce mass quantities of the cheap protein at the root of many chronic health conditions are harmful to land, air, and water, along with being hazardous for the humans required to make those operations work.
What Proposition 12 asked of livestock producers wasn’t much and it theoretically would reduce the need for massive quantities of antibiotics used to keep diseases to a minimum among closely packed animals.
From the New York Times:
American pork producers use antibiotics at a rate seven times higher than that of Danish farmers, according to a 2018 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The overuse in both humans and livestock is giving dangerous germs more opportunities to evolve and outsmart drugs designed to kill them.
Drug-resistant infections now claim 700,000 lives a year around the world, including 35,000 in the United States. Without bold action, the United Nations has estimated drug-resistant pathogens could claim 10 million lives globally by 2050.
These days, most female breeding pigs are confined in gestation crates, metal enclosures so small the pigs can’t turn around for virtually their entire lives, while most egg-laying hens are crammed into battery cages that restrict them from even fully opening their wings for 18 months.
Waste matter falls through slatted floors collecting in a deep pool below. Often, that pool will run through a pipe to a manure pond or lagoon that holds the overflow. Large fans are used to keep air moving in these confinement sheds; a power failure will allow enough ammonia to accumulate to kill all the animals in a matter of minutes.
Communities near hog operations report higher rates of asthma, kidney disease, tuberculosis, sore throats, runny noses, coughs, and diarrhea than comparable areas without hog confinements. That might be on account of all the big fans sucking up foul odors (that can be smelled for miles), or it could be contamination of local water tables.
In the pork industry the drive for profits means that collateral costs are foisted off on local communities. Although they’ve had three years to prepare for the requirements of Proposition 12, the industry has spent enormous amounts of money paying lawyers to challenge the constitutionality of the law. And little on actually making the habitat changes looming on the horizon.
So now they're having a temper tantrum. No bacon for you!
In the past month Big Pork has lost two huge cases, one before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and another in front of the Supreme Court. Egg producers, on the other hand, have seen the handwriting on the wall.
Via Vox:
Meanwhile, egg producers — including the largest one in the US, which raises about 12 percent of the nation’s hens — have been rapidly converting cage operations to cage-free.
Compliance will be a lot of work, both the initial project of converting operations, and continually providing compliance documentation. But as the egg producers have shown, compliance is squarely in the realm of the doable.
And these pork producers are some of the largest, most lucrative food businesses to ever exist, some of which enjoyed enormous windfalls in 2020 as consumers panic-bought meat and other groceries. (And some of the meat companies that are warning that letting pigs turn around will result in pricier pork are the same ones accused of conspiring since 2009 to limit pork supply to inflate its price.)
Proposition 12, when all is said and done, should be remembered as the first step in a process of our society re-examining what it takes to feed us all. Going beyond the cruelty to animals concerns are also an increasing awareness of the environmental impact of the way food gets produced.
Finally, there’s the question of fairness. It’s unfair that ⅔ of what we pay for groceries has nothing to do with producing or getting them to market. (We're ultimately paying the other 2/3 through taxes & healthcare) What farmworkers and meatpackers get paid and how they’re treated ain’t close to being right.
The problem right now is Big Pork. And Big Chicken. And Big… Their vertically integrated operations are remarkably short sighted and cause way too much harm in the pursuit of quarterly profits and the CEO bonuses they generate. Whether it’s climate change, health-driven shifts in consumer preferences, or simply burning out, what's happening now isn’t sustainable.
What we eat and how we get it are increasingly becoming moral questions. I’m old school and will probably miss most of those changes; but I’m smart enough to see they’re coming.
Presently I personally am confined to a vegetarian diet of formula derived from pea protein thanks to cancer. That might change in the future with a little luck and some skilled reconstructive surgery in September. I'll probably want the taste of bacon at some point, but I'll be a lot more conscious of why it should be precious rather than common.
Hey folks! Be sure to like/follow Words & Deeds on Facebook. If you’d like to have each post emailed to you check out the simple subscription form on the right side of the front page.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com