Slaughtering Locally: Can It Work?

Nice article here  about the realities of trying to make "local" and "high-quality" meat. It's also a near-perfect illustration of the way in which short-term perspective skews the story. (Or, put another way, it illustrates the way in which long-term perspective can enrich the story.)

Here's the money quote:

 Despite the fees they charge the farmer (which can account for as much as half of the cost of the final product), small-scale meat processing is no wildly profitable business. And, because they can’t afford to pay a lot, it’s hard to attract staff for the difficult, unpleasant work.

The fees need to be put into context.

Yes, a small slaughterhouse charges high prices, and that in turn creates high prices at the wholesale/retail end, far higher than is charged by a "regular" slaughterhouse that operates on a large scale.

Why can't a smaller house compete with a larger facility? Because small slaughterhouses  don't have access to the one thing that pays the bills at large slaughterhouses: (literally) tons of leavings (bone, hides, blood, etc.)

Byproducts subsidize the cost of dressing the carcass and shipping the meat to large markets. If packing houses relied only on the profits from selling the meat (especially beef), they'd fail. And fast.

Put another way, if someone wants to run a small-scale "local" slaughterhouse, the owner is catering to a tiny audience of livestock producers who can and will pay the high fees for slaughtering. But they're also relying on a tiny audience of people who can afford to pay $25.00 a pound for steak that comes out of the small slaughtering house. (*1)

The other money quote:

The state’s landscape is ideally suited for smallscale, pasture-based livestock. 

Um, not so much. Sure the soil and terrain may be "ideal," but it doesn't follow that it's financially ideal. Indeed, New York livestock producers stopped using that "ideal" land for raising stock for food well over a century ago.

Why? Because they couldn't compete with midwestern and western producers who had access to cheaper land.

As important, however, they couldn't compete with other demands for that land --- especially from dairy producers who raised cattle for milk (for the great urban complex in the southern part of the state.) (Milk is more perishable than meat; economics dictate that it be produced fairly close to the retail market.)

I made the  mistake of mentioning a short version of all of this on Twitter, and was immediately told that the problem is "consolidation" that's destroyed the "diversity" of the marketplace.

Again, not so much. The American meat industry "consolidated" more than a century ago. The impetus was two-fold.

First, Americans demanded, and I mean demanded, inexpensive meat. But second, and as important, American urbanites, who made up the bulk of the population, demanded that  meat processing be stashed away in large facilities far away from the markets where that meat would be sold. They wanted their meat out of sight, out of mind.

So livestock production and meat processing moved to the center of the country. The only way to move the meat back to the urban centers was to ship it. And the only way to keep expenses low was by, you guessed it, using every single part of the animal: the byproducts paid the tab for keeping American tables piled with meat.

So --- more power to these people who want high-quality meats. But I wish they'd look past the allure of the "new"economy and the grooviness of the "local" for a larger perspective on the issues at hand.

___________

*1: By the way, I can't think any better way to reduce the amount of meat consumed in the U.S. than to switch to "local" slaughterhouses. Few people would be able to afford to eat meat. Voila! Meat consumption drops and, in theory, the climate improves. Two fer one.

Jeremiah McWilliams Looks Back At The First Year of A-BInBev

The always entertaining (smart, funny, etc.) Jeremiah McWilliams and his colleagues at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch are looking back at the first year of the "new" Anheuser-Busch (ABIB to you).

For the coverage so far, see the links at this Lager Heads entry. There will be more tomorrow and the rest of the week, so follow along.

More Nitwittery: Please, May I Just Have a Plain Ol' Beer?

I'm not a beer aficionada (I'm a historian, folks; not a gourmet). The whole beer-as-object-of-devotion-and-adulation thing is annoying as hell. Don't ge me wrong: I appreciate well-made beer, but as a fetish, well . . . Anyway, this today from Alan at the Good Beer Blog. Now Alan is something I can see as an object of devotion/adulation, me being a serious fan of contrarianism.

Livestock, Methane, and Facts; Or, Nitwittery Is Not My Friend

Indeed, nitwittery may end up sending me screaming right over the edge. Or maybe today I just like the word "nitwittery."

In any case, breathless excitement today in the "profood" world over a new report that livestock (read: cattle) and therefore meat-eaters are to blame for all the world's woes.

The short version is here.

But please, see this for a more balanced, nuanced view.

Guess which version is gonna set the world afire?

In the Kitchen: Spinach-and-Pasta In A Hurry

Tonight I planned to make risotto with spinach and porcini mushrooms. But husband came home and announced he was going to an evening event and had to leave early. Okay. No problem. Had a crap day and wanted to relax with the risotto, but truly, no problem. (Because why make a bad day worse?)

Made this instead. Think of it as a fake pasta carbonara. (In this case inspired by a recipe from Lynn Rossetto Kaspar's Italian Country Table

• 1 box frozen spinach
• a bit of diced red onion
• a bit of chopped garlic
• a quarter cup or so of grated romano and parmesan cheeses
• 2 eggs
• pasta (I used fusilli) (or however that's spelled)

I put on a pot of water to boil. Thawed the spinach in the microwave (isn't modern life amazing?). (Am not sure what's more amazing: the convenience of frozen spinach or the microwave.)

While I waited for the water to boil, I put the eggs, most of the cheese, and some salt and pepper in a bowl and mixed it with a fork. I heated some olive oil in a saute pan and added the onion and garlic. After about two minutes, I added the spinach and some salt, pepper, and dried pepper flakes and cooked it over medium-low heat for five or six minutes.

When the pasta was done, I tossed a quarter cup or so of its water in with the spinach and cooked it a minute. Added the pasta and tossed. Then added the eggs and cheese mixture and tossed gently and cooked it for a couple of minutes, just enough to cook the eggs.

Dished it up in a couple of bowls, sprinkled the rest of the cheese over it, poured some Shiraz. And the day's woes vanished. As did my husband not long after. Leaving me with the dishes. Hey! Life's not perfect.

A Historian At Work: In the [Secondary] Research Grind

I love my work. I know, I know: Sometimes I grouse. But honest: I love my work.

But it can leave my brain feeling like an old sweatsock that's been hit by a Mack truck.

Like today. For the past week, I've had my elbows planted on my desk, reading stacks of books. Stacks of 'em. My elbows are numb and so is my brain.

So: I'm taking a break. Which brings me to my point: How do historians find all those pesky facts? (You know: Those facts that allow us to tell stories.)

As I noted here in another rumination on doing history, historians engage in two kinds of research: Primary and secondary. Most of my work is based on primary sources and if I'm not writing, I'm usually reading those (newspapers, diaries, letters, government reports, legal documents).

Sometime I spend weeks reading nothing but primary sources. But at some point, I have to turn to the secondaries. It's the least  favorite part of my job.  I just can't get as enthused about secondary sources. But they're necessary --- indeed, fundamental --- to the process.

For example: I'm writing a history of meat in modern America. To do so, I need to know about property law, anti-trust regulation, federal land policies, food legislation, and seventy-five other topics that are not directly related to the main topic of "meat." That's where the secondary sources come in.

Take anti-trust regulation. (Please!) Anti-trust laws play a crucial role in the history of modern American meat processing and distribution. But I'm no legal historian, so to learn about anti-trust, I turn to scholars who specialize in its history. (Bless their geeky hearts.) I've waded through several scholarly books and articles on the topic, trying to get a sense of what happened when (and, with any luck, why).

Now that I've done that, I have the background I need to turn directly to the anti-trust cases themselves. Put another way, I use the secondary sources to ground myself so that the primary sources in a specialized field like the history of law make sense. If I tried to just read the anti-trust rulings on their own, I'd be lost. Once I've got some basic background, however, I'm confident I can make my own judgments about the primary material.

But these mini-crash courses are exhausting. Scholars tend to assume their readers are already experts, so I spend half my time decoding their jargon. (That's especially true of legal and economic historians. Jargon City.)

Anyway, that's what I've been doing for the past ten days: Taking crash courses in law, federal land policy, and changes in cattle ranching in the early twentieth century.

And yes, I know what you're wondering: "How do historians know when to focus on primaries and when to rely on secondaries?" "How do they know what's "tangential" to their topic and what's not?" Good questions! I'll answer them later.