Meat-onomics

Meat shortages are not happening because there's suddenly less meat. It's because of supply chain. It's not worth it to find alternate sources of processing meat when prices are where they are.

If hamburger goes up to $20/lbs, it now becomes profitable for farmers to start slaughtering their own beef and getting it to the market.

The market will fix the supply chain for beef if we let it. In the mean time this should be a climate change person's perfect outcome. We don't need meat in our diet and meat production and the meat industry is a large consumer of fossil fuels.

And at that cost, meat would become a luxury good.

Perhaps meat, like gas, should be more expensive in order to reflect the true cost of its production, environmental and true labor costs included. I mean, few US citizens want to do those jobs for that compensation, so an entire industry is based on a model of employing undocumented labor and periodically calling in ICE if the workers try to organize.

Me personally, I love meat, but we've gone to meatless Mondays and Thursdays. I've been using this recipe off the back of a Red Lentil bag, but experimenting widely with the seasoning. I used a jalapeno once. Delicious. I used curry once -- also delicious. Spice it up and enjoy!

As someone who's been buying locally produced beef for quite a while, (shout out Appleton Farms in Ipswich) it is indeed an enormous luxury, but part of the reason why is because regulations make it so expensive to sell meat that only the wealthy can afford to buy organic and humanely raised meat.

All over Massachusetts people are buying "black market" shellfish, fish and lobsters because the restaurants aren't buying them. We should be able to do the same thing with eggs and chickens.

Big eggs farms can't sell locally because of laws that require USDA inspections if you make over a gazillion eggs. Same thing for other farm products. It's Big Agriculture using the power of government to shut down smaller farms in the name of food safety.