The Meat and Food Supply Breakdown

One of the biggest tragedies of our tragic battle against Coronavirus occurred within the nation’s massive network of meat packing facilities. When Smithfield’s Sioux Falls, SD facility announced in April hundreds of positive cases, shut down for 2 ½ weeks of deep cleaning, and then announced hundreds of thousands of animals were being slaughtered weekly because they couldn’t be processed, a whole slew of issues spilled into the public eye.

The first was the fickleness of our national food supply chain itself. The meat packing plants were already stressed because of a run on meat and dairy products by panicked buyers when the Coronavirus lockdown began. Companies struggled to process more food to be distributed, in overcrowded worker conditions far from hygienic, where social distancing was a pipe dream. Not surprisingly, they were hit by waves of positive Coronavirus cases from coast to coast — hundreds per plant, in some cases.

Many plants closed down to deep clean, for days to weeks, throwing down the second nail on the food supply. Suddenly, meat, dairy and cheese products shot up 25% or more — if you could find them. Worse, farmers were forced to slaughter millions of animals over a month-long span, which will be felt in the food supply in the coming months.

In late April, President Trump used the Defense Production Act to require meat packing plants to open, a decision that called into question what was more important: the food supply? Or the health of 130,000 workers? Many plants remained closed to continue cleaning, with each passing day showing how exposed and prone to disruption our food supply is, in a nation where meat and dairy reign supreme.

The second tragedy was the plight of the workers. While some meat packing plants work hard at creating sustainable solutions, the vast majority run old-style assembly-line factories. Workers stand next to each other, engaged in the most gruesome and least sanitary jobs in our food supply — turning whole animals into food products. These women and men already take their health into their own hands as they kill, cut and process the cows, pigs and chickens at the backbone of our food supply. This exposes them to countless animal-borne diseases (Coronavirus is another example of an animalborne disease).

To their vast credit, most of the 130 or so different meat processing companies, including the big guns — JBS Holdings, Tyson Foods, Cargill Meat Solutions, SYSCO Corp., Smithfield, Hormel, Oscar-Meyer, and Perdue Farms — came out of their shutdowns with safer, more hygienic plants that also accounted for social distancing and other basic worker safety features. Increased sustainability, though, is another matter. It is a dynamic, ongoing problem: as recently as May 18, Farbest poultry processing plant in Indiana shut down after 100 workers tested positive.

As of our late May deadline, almost half of U.S. Coronavirus hotspots exist in meat packing facilities, reported The Guardian. Chances are, until there is a vaccine, meat packing plants will be one of the most vulnerable workplaces on earth for contracting COVID-19.

The plants have had to adapt. When the Coronavirus reached the U.S., none of these facilities were equipped with ways to mitigate the fast-spreading virus — social distancing, regular sanitizing of hands and workspaces, personal protection equipment, etc. Not surprisingly, the virus raced through the packing plants at warp speed, the percentage of workers infected far higher than the national average. As of May 25, more than 17,000 out of 130,000 total employees tested positive for COVID-19 in 213 plants, according to the CDC and the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

“The pandemic has shone a light on the meat industry where for years workers have been exploited in these plants including being penalized for not showing up even when they are sick or injured,” Tony Corbo, senior lobbyist at the not-for-profit Food & Water Watch, said. “Even now, it’s taken plants to be shut down for companies to provide protective gear for workers.”

The thousands with Coronavirus weren’t the only ones to suffer. While store shelves were stripped of meat products, and the meat-centric food supply was squeezed, farmers started slaughtering or euthanizing millions of cows, pigs and chickens because they couldn’t be brought to a meat processing plant to be killed for food. On top of that, Reuters reported that, as of April 27, farmers were killing 700,000 pigs per week.

Meanwhile, meat and dairy products have become more of a premium on grocery shelves — and food banks and free distribution programs are stressed due to the more than 35 million out of work. Imagine a food supply protocol, or Plan B, where farmers could safely process meat and re-distribute locally or regionally to stores, farmer’s markets and food banks. It used to be that way in North America, before agribusiness centralized our food supply. Now, only 8 percent of U.S. farms distribute locally.

The other core food supply issue that has emerged from the pandemic concerns the health and sustainability of our food itself. Just how healthy is our food? In two words, not very. Our reliance on meat and dairy comes at an enormous resource cost to the environment; for instance, it takes 100 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, but only one gallon to produce one pound of plant-based food.

Further, our food supply is spiked with highfructose corn syrup to preserve and enliven its taste, causing all sorts of long-standing health issues. Our means of distributing food, on trucks or trains from coast-to-coast, is both logistically and environmentally stressed. We often do not eat foods grown in our local areas, which makes us less immune to disease.

What is the solution? How can we fully emerge into a post-COVID-19 world with a far more efficient and healthier food supply chain?

First, thanks to COVID-19, meat processing plants will become safer and cleaner, at least in the short run. Second, grocery shelf shortages and focus on health have prompted many more people to consider partial or entire plant-based diets, which eliminate all of the dangers posed by the meat and dairy industry.

The implications could be vast. Worldwide, more than 60 percent of people live on plantbased diets — while only 15 to 20 percent of Americans do. Our food production system currently uses 50 percent of the total US land area (90 percent of that for our 9 billion livestock and their feed grains — corn and soybeans), 80 percent of fresh water and 17 percent of fossil fuel, according to The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Our meat dependency, and the gutting of the environment to produce it, has been called out for decades; Earth Save founder John Robbins (who renounced his inherited Baskin-Robbins ice cream fortune because of the use of dairy to build it) started an activist group and wrote a bestselling book about the problem, Diet for a New America, in the late 1980s. Now, at this crisis point for the food supply, plant-based diets are taking on a new life, for both ease of acquiring and health benefits.

Regardless, the way forward with our food supply will be with healthier and more sustainable practices, such as those practiced by ten of the nation’s finest sustainable food companies (see story on page 34). A more regional distribution system will also alleviate systemic breakdowns like we saw in March and April, and the shortages that followed. With practices like these, and a focus on healthier eating in general, we can create a post- COVID-19 food supply that truly has the public health interest in mind.