- The coronavirus response is a story about class. White-collar workers are being told to stay safe at home. This includes executives at Tyson Foods. As chairman, John Tyson's total compensation in 2019 was $10,322,100, and CEO Noel White was paid $10,398,160.
Meanwhile, meatpacking workers are being required to show up at crowded job sites for mediocre pay, so no one has to change their eating habits. Nearly half of meatpacking workers live in low-income families — $52,000 or less for a family of four. 12.4% of meatpacking workers live below the poverty line. On average, workers are paid just $15 per hour.
The industry is also disproportionately comprised of people of color. 34.9% of meatpackers are Hispanic, and 22.5% are black. More than half are immigrants.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds (R) said that workers that don't return to meatpacking plants will not be eligible for unemployment benefits. "If you're an employer and you offer to bring your employee back to work and they decide not to, that's a voluntary quit," she said.
I saw a lawyer comment yesterday that there's nothing in the Defense Production Act that authorizes the President to do this. The law allows him to compel a producer of a good to sell that good at a set price to the federal government and to prioritize government orders over any other. The other side, is that to test that in court the state or the company would have to sue. And let's be real about the odds of that happening. How about we try the other thing that we could try which is to stop subsidizing the fuck out of meat?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/climate/florence-hog-farms.html I had a thought. What if... Chinese pork demand never recovers? What if... the economics of our meat production shifted from environmentally-apocalyptic "staple" to luxury good? What if... like fracking when oil drops below a certain price, industrial meat production is no longer cost-effective? I mean, the agriculture industry didn't rally around organic farming because they wanted to achieve enlightenment. They rallied around organic farming because the fucking margins are higher. I am not a vegetarian. I doubt I ever will be. But much like my wife and daughter's choices for food have increased exponentially as the yuppies decide they're "gluten intolerant" I can easily see a better future in which meat is more optional, less essential. Would I eat gardenburgers if they cost less than normal burgers? I mean, I eat gardenburgers now and generally, if I'm making a burger for myself I start with a decent cut of meat and grind it myself. My deepest, sincerest hope is that this crisis renders any number of our externalities uneconomical. What if we subsidized solar and wind instead of coal and oil? What if we subsidized specialty crops instead of corn, wheat, soy and potatoes? What if fucking Michigan decided that every Kroger worker in 2020 deserves a free associate's degree? Sure, we're swapping externalities but we'd be giving the many a leg up instead of the few.
I decided to eat vegan in December after a lifetime of ambivalent meat eating. I was full vegan for a month, then have started eating pizza and/or some non-vegan dessert about once per week since. Haven't touched meat once since. The surprise to me is how little i miss it. There are times when my kid is eating chicken nuggets or something that the Pavlovian response is strong, but that's about it. It doesn't feel like a deprivation, and I am very confident that if the price of meat were to rise by 50-100% we'd be just fucking fine. If I do go back to eating meat from time to time, it will only be for the good shit and only every few months. No way I'm eating a garbage ham sandwich for the foreseeable future. I'm all for that idea from Whitmer. I wasn't enthusiastic about her candidacy, but she is really establishing herself as someone who is a leader, but who knows how to lead while keeping a cool head and s strong heart. Definitely gained my respect.
The basic problem I have with vegetarian eating right now is allergens. My kid is allergic to wheat and all nuts. My wife is allergic to wheat. I'm allergic to any kind of peppers. So you pretty much assemble something involving potatoes, eggs and cheese and you aren't really eating vegetarian so much as you're eating garbage. The number one ingredient in tofurky is "vital wheat gluten." And you can go mediterranean but you're likely to end up with a hidden "roasted red pepper sauce" that you think is tomato and you're on the toilet for 72 hours. It's shit like this that teaches you that the most natural, most organic junk food on the planet is fucking Fritos.
My choice is almost always between "veggie, but milk" and "milk-free but meat" whenever I don't eat at home. And I'm lucky to have Lactaid. (I'm on my last pack by the way, so it truly was a year's supply I brought home.) I care more about reducing meat intake than eliminating it, and I don't get why that's not the norm. It's much easier to convince two people to halve their meat use than to convince one person to get rid of it entirely.