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Time for a 🧵 thread 🧵 on everybody’s favorite topic: animal slaughter in America. How it became the way it is, what’s wrong with it, and how it could be improved for all parties: animool, prodoocer and consoomer. (Not gonna include any pictures like usual for obvious reasons)
You probably think I’m speaking in morbid jest when I say it’s everybody’s favorite topic. I’m not. People actually are obsessed with slaughter: it’s often the second or third question I get after folks learn that I raise livestock for a living: “do you slaughter them yourself?”
This supports my theory that what the modern food industry sells is not food/nourishment but *obfuscation*—people would rather not know or have to think about the brutal truth of what goes on to keep them warm, fed, sheltered, & emotionally pacified. But when they meet a farmer
They are confronted head-on with the reality that pork chops come from the longissimus muscles of recently-living pigs, the same ones that run along your own spine. And so their macabre curiosity is piqued; blood and gore become, as they often do, weirdly fascinating.
Now, you may remember back at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a brief panic about the supply/price of meat, because the virus spread among workers at a certain slaughterhouse. But why would it matter that one slaughterhouse had a flu going around?
Well, because this particular slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, NC, is the largest plant operated by Smithfield Foods, which controls a quarter of the pork processing in the United States. This plant slaughters nearly 30,000 animals *per day* www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2020/05/01/smithfield-struggles-to-contain-covid/
Which, although the exact numbers aren’t publicly available, is roughly 10% of all the pigs slaughtered in the US annually. In one plant. About a 2.5 hour drive from Charlotte, NC. Similarly, over 90% of beef in the US is slaughtered in only 50 plants.
It should be obvious that this insane degree of concentration benefits no one other than Smithfield, which, by the way, is owned by a company called WH Group, a Chinese foodstuffs-focused private equity firm based in Hong Kong.
To give you a big picture sense of the degree of concentration, today there are 800 USDA inspected slaughter plants in the US. In order to sell a pork chop, you need to have your animals slaughtered at one of these facilities. There are loopholes around this…
Involving the ~1900 custom slaughterhouses, which are inspected by the state with the same regularity as a restaurant. These places get by on processing wild game for hunters and farmers selling half or quarter cows, pigs and lambs.
(The loophole here is that the meat technically cannot be sold after it has been slaughtered. So if you are buying a custom processed half cow from a farmer, he has technically sold it to you and another 1/2buyer while it was alive, and doing you the favor of having it processed)
In 1967, when the law was passed requiring a federal inspection in order to sell retail cuts, there were 10,000 meat processing plants in the US. In 50 years, more than 7000 small scale butchers have gone out of business.
Now, I’m not a lolbertarian in the abstract, but are we really meant to believe it’s a coincidence that this drastic increase in concentration only came about immediately following the passage of regulations requiring the presence of a federal inspector in order to sell steaks?
By the way, the USDA doesn’t pay these guys’ salaries. The private business does. They also have to provide him/her with her own office & bathroom. Here’s the thing: I’ve been to a lot of slaughterhouses. Some USDA, some custom. Some clean, some disgusting. I am here to tell you
That it makes ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER TO FOOD SAFETY whether some rando in a USDA hat is there cutting into each jowl looking at the thyroids for some novel disease. I’ve watched USDA guys trudge through filth unconcerned. Their presence is totally inconsequential.
The other thing to note is that processing is the biggest headache/bottleneck/expense for small farmers like me. We spend an absurd amount to time drive to slaughterhouses. Coming up with solutions would do wonders to make life and business easier for these sorts of enterprises.
Funnily, in the domain of poultry, one such solution already exists: in most states, farmers can become licensed to slaughter any poultry on farm so long as the annual total is fewer than 20,000 birds. A scale-friendly regulation: what a novel idea!
Surely, at the very least, we ought to allow farmers under a certain volume to sell retail cuts from custom processors. What difference does it make to public health that the customer buys an individual ribeye or a ribeye as part of a half cow share? None whatsoever, obviously.
Beyond that, I would love to see a proliferation of MOBILE processors (some such examples already exist under custom inspection). The reason that I like the mobile idea is that the most humane, stress-free slaughter can only be achieved in familiar surroundings.
It blows my mind that there was an average of 200 slaughter facilities PER STATE only fifty years ago. Nowadays, many farmers have to cross state lines to get animals slaughtered, booking dates months or even years in advance. Total insanity.
Point is, it wasn’t that long ago, and such a system could easily be reinstated. But as usual, the current system benefits the fraternity of corporate parasites and government rent-seekers far too much for them to part with it willingly.
For now, I recommend honing your skills to cut out the middle man as much as possible. No need to slaughter your own hogs tomorrow, but learn to make your own bacon/ham/sausage. (It’s not hard, maybe I do thread?) Buy whole chickens instead of cut ups. Become a cottage producer.
That’s all for now. Happy to discuss further if there are any questions. God bless
—WW
—WW
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Allen Farrington @AllenFarrington
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Feb 23, 2022
still a great thread though 👆