Meat School Episode 1: Will COVID Wake us up to Ethical Meat?
This is the transcript of a video broadcast for IGTV ‘Meat School.’ You can watch the archived broadcast here.
I’m Meredith Leigh
I’m the author of “The Ethical Meat Handbook” and I work to improve food systems and food system literacy. When I say food system literacy I mean the ability for everyone who eats to understand how food happens. The importance of that isn’t limited to meat but meat provides an immediate and controversial lens for talking about all the issues. This is why I do what I do.
So what is ethical meat? Without going into two day’s worth of detail it’s meat from an animal that had a good life, good death, good butcher, good cook. (I didn’t make that up. This is from a hopeful movement of people actually working on this, we have been working for years).
So, if it’s good life, good, death, good butcher, and good cook- that means it runs the whole gamut. From the farm to the grill or the braising pot. That means we’re talking about the whole supply chain.
Supply chains. That’s a concept that most eaters probably haven’t had in their daily news feed, until now. The “supply chain” is a quick way of talking about how everything you consume gets from its point of origin to your home. And we are hearing about it now because COVID is putting a hitch in some of the points along that supply chain. Some people say that it is breaking down.
That is one way of saying it. In so many ways it was broken already.
And this is what we have been finding so hard to face.
This is what COVID is showing us. The skeletons WE ALREADY HAD in the closet when it comes to the food system. When we hear the CEO of Tyson saying “This is going to be massive” – plants are closing due to outbreaks of the virus. And before this, we saw reports of workers dying because of close-contact working conditions, and being offered higher wages to risk their lives to get your chicken processed. People have died, facing that choice. (look up Annie Grant, a poultry worker in Georgia.) Now, as states open back up, people will again be forced to decide between work and life. Yesterday, I got an email from one of my partners in good food letting everyone on his list know that a pork farmer was faced with the fact of having to euthanize up to 4000 baby piglets because he no longer had buyers or processors for them when they came of age. 4000. 4000 baby pigs, in one place, anywhere makes sense only under very, very VERY particular conditions. And now those conditions are no longer available.
Let me be clear. I do NOT blame that farmer. I do not blame Annie Grant for working in that plant. I believe every citizen in this country is caught, unless he or she is very very wealthy and enjoys all the social permissions available to an individual—every citizen is caught up in this like a wild animal in a trap. It is not the farmer’s fault if he or she cannot run a business under normal economic circumstances without finding himself with 4000 pigs at a moment in time. It is not Annie Grant’s fault if she works in a chicken processing facility that forces her to choose between her life and her job. Do not mistake my words or my work for being blameful of honest people, doing what they can, or saying that some farmers are better than others. We don’t have time for that mess right now. We’re talking about the fact that the majority of people- you and me. Do not have a fair CHOICE in how we can run our businesses, make our money, buy our food, put into our bodies. That’s the issue at hand, and it runs deep.
This is messy, folks. We have pictures of farmers tilling onions and potatoes into the ground. The cost of harvesting them and getting them to market is higher than the cost to waste them. DID YOU HEAR WHAT I SAID? Under what backward circumstances does that make sense? That farmer is not to blame. He had no CHOICE.
While COVID is showing us all of this, COVID is not the beginning and end of the problem. The reason COVID is devastating this system is because it isn’t built properly. Humans who had a choice built it with their eyes on the money- not the people, the animals, the land, the healthy growing child, the cancer rate, the food justice, the clean water, the proud line worker, the land-loving farmer.
Big and consolidated. That’s our food system. It’s a few major companies owning the infrastructure and the supply chain. Animals crammed into feedlots and houses, workers crammed into facilities, businesses crammed into one-size-fits-all laws and federal codes, people of all kinds crammed into limited options for buying, limited nutrition, and limited ability to pay.
But a virus that loves big consolidated crowded places, for which you don’t have a vaccine and you don’t really understand at all actually. Now your pants are down.
News flash: the mainstream system hasn’t been working for us—you and me-- for a while. It’s been working for a few corporations, but not for the land, the animals, the workers, the taxpayers, the cash strapped eating public, the American diet…
And so, my friends. Time for some good news. Heroes have been working in the margins of society for decades to build a system up alongside the huge failing monster of an industry. These are the smaller scale farmers and butchers and processors that are working super hard right now to keep food in circulation even as the larger system shows is rear end.
When we talk about SHORTENED SUPPLY CHAINS, this is what we mean—finding a way of shrinking that road that your food and other products travel so that it is all closer to home, more manageable within a system where the land, and workers, and animals can be treated fairly and honorably. It’s based on relationships. It’s resilient and responsive to the true needs of the people participating within it.
Like I said. People have been working on this for DECADES.
It’s hard work. If you want to look at why it is hard, life-consuming work, look in “Ethical Meat” in my Instagram story highlights. There are some slides there that talk about why making good meat available on a smaller scale is hard considering the status quo we’ve been working with. We might go into that in another episode.
Even though it is hard, there’s a framework for shortened supply chains. There are kinks in the framework, and there are also opportunities. Consumers have fueled this framework largely out of health concerns, rather than motivation for SUPPLY CHAINS to work for EVERYONE, so the shortened supply chains have organized themselves into two camps:
- Legal, taxable, commercial good meat available in communities of wealth
- Bartered, cooperative, exempt or illegal good meat available outside of wealth
ITS TIME FOR ALL OF US TO COME TOGETHER with the primary goal of a functioning supply chain, recognizing that the other things we want will follow.
Here are the opportunities:
- Find out if there are local butcher shops in your area who are already operating on the smaller supply chain, ready to serve you. If so, support them first.
Cooperation – share the work, money, resources, products
If you are facing a lack of butcher shops and can’t find farms in your area it’s time to organize.
Find the skilled laborers- the farmers, butchers, people who know how to process meat and are ready to serve
Use our virtual networks to find each other, to pair those people together and to people who are in need
It’s time to not exclude bartering and trade as means of exchanging goods. Money doesn’t always talk anymore
Make sure we are aware of educators and knowledge bearers. People who can teach us how to handle meat— how to process how to butcher for alternative support systems. The time for skilling up is now.
- Empty restaurants with coolers and workspace
We need to understand where the bottleneck exists. Right now the bottleneck exists within the cut and wrap phase. So when an animal is ready to harvest it goes to a USDA inspected facility and it is slaughtered and dressed meaning that it’s organs are removed. That process is called “the kill.” Then it moves on to the :cut and wrap” process, where it is taken down into all the smaller and more familiar cuts that you might be used to seeing at the farmers market or the grocery store. But a lot of processors still offer “kill only” options (even though they might be booked through the end of the year, they might be offering kill only services) which means if you are a farmer, ask if your processor is offering kill only and you can get the animals slaughtered and sell them in halves or quarters, for people to either butcher themselves, or to transfer to custom exempt facilities.
Custom exempt processing facilities are facilities that can take in those whole half or quarter carcasses and butcher them down into retail cuts. The hitch there is that custom exempt facilities typically cannot sell product off premises. So that means that the customer has to own it before it goes into the custom exempt facility. So this is when we are looking at shares of the farm or “live animal ownership. These are the creative ways of doing business that we need to be looking at during these times. Customers buy the animal live, they own it “on the hoof” as we say in the industry, and they’re just turning it over to the slaughter facility and the custom exempt facility in order for that animal to fabricated and then returned back to its owner.
OK. there are platforms. Platforms so that we can work in these ways. there is a group of us who have set up some avenues:
Local Meat for Everyone Network Signup. you can access it via my Instagram profile. It’s a google form where you can indicate your skills or your needs, and there is a team of people working to link folks up as appropriate.
You can go to the Good Meat Project Switchbaord, which is another place for your enter in your haves or your needs and find your people.
Learn about buying meat in bulk- Theres a great video at NC Choices YouTube page that you can check out.
You can go to the Niche Meat Processors Assistance Network and search for a processor in your area both state and federally inspected in your area.
you can also skill up. Learn how to cut your own meat, and cure your own meat. Check out my books, The Ethical Meat Handbook and Pure Charcuterie. I’m also working on some new online courses, I’m working on it as fast as I can taking what I usually travel around teaching people to do in community—working together to achieve smaller scale meat processing and cooperative processing, butchery and curing meats— and putting that all online.
So, know that there is hope. There is another way to get food, to get better food, to honor the land, and people and animals while doing it. We just have to unlock the knowledge, find our people, work together, and ensure that the systems that have been striving to become adequate come out of this stronger than ever before.
Thanks for listening.