California Does It Again / meatingplace.com

California Does It Again

Meat Your Markets by Mack Graves, Meatingplace.com

(The views and opinions expressed in this blog are strictly those of the author.)

On January 1, 2022, California is set to implement a law that severely restricts animal agriculture anywhere for eggs, pork and veal sold in California. This law establishes minimum space requirements based on square feet for calves raised for veal, breeding pigs and egg-laying hens and bans their sale as food if they are confined to areas below minimum square feet requirements.

California’s restaurants and groceries use about 255 million pounds of pork a month, but its farms produce only 45 million pounds, according to Rabobank. The difference must come from hogs produced out of state with most coming from Iowa. The cost to comply could raise bacon prices by 60 percent.

Most of you are too young to remember when Coors beer had limited distribution and Oregon had no availability, but Idaho did! So, those of us Oregonians enamored with Coors would drive to Idaho, buy cases of Coors and clandestinely return to Oregon so our friends could imbibe in that cult classic. Coors soon expanded their distribution footprint to include Oregon and our surreptitious trips were limited to the local grocery store to pick up a six- or 12-pack of Coors.

I give you this background because bacon is under siege in California and, like my late-night trips to Idaho, some youthful entrepreneurs may just start to make trips to Oregon or Nevada or Arizona to pick up their favorite bacon to bring pork back to those soon to be porcine-starved California citizens. I am being facetious, of course, but implementing California’s Proposition 12 may bring bacon sales, along with pork butts and chops, to a squealing halt beginning January 1, if the hogs — no matter where they were raised in the U.S. — were not done so according to the California law’s dictates.

Are there voices of reason somewhere in this debate or will it soon devolve into name-calling, as so many of us are wanting to do in this current political climate?

California has one-sixth of the U.S. population (and maybe a greater percentage of the nation’s fringe elements) but they have a sway in our current public affairs, as evidenced by Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy, both of somewhat different political persuasions who hail from California. It can, therefore, be surmised that diverse views are rampant in the California state legislature where opinion has devolved into laws that make little sense if you ever have had to toil in animal agriculture hoping for a profit somewhere down the line.

Because, you see, it is profit that allows this great country of ours to continue. I am not suggesting we shouldn’t have laws to rein in aberrant behavior, but laws must reflect reality. Does mandating animal-raising regulations anywhere for meat delivered and consumed in California cross the line or should we attempt to embrace them, or at least make them more sensible?

I think these California laws are precursors to our animal agriculture future. When you couple them with the plethora of alternative “meats” currently available with many more on the horizon, the future for those of us making our living on bringing live animals to their ultimate fruition as nutritious human food is threatened. However, of more concern for me is the fact that many of the progenitors of these altmeat companies have stated their specific purpose is to put animal agriculture totally out of business.

In the bleating cacophony emanating from some plant-based and cell cultured startups, there is one that has proposed a transition from animal agriculture as we know it to a future of both animal agriculture and cell-cultured meat, and that is Aleph Farms, as espoused by its head of sustainability, Lee Recht, PhD. In a July, 2021 white paper, “An Inclusive Transition to a Sustainable and Resilient Meat Sector,” Dr. Recht lays out a reasonable alternative to the rabble surrounding those calling each other names.

Dr. Recht’s white paper is well worth an exploration and response to see if it is really a means to work toward a future that includes both animal agriculture traditionalists, cultured meat as well as those plant-based meat alternatives.

Mack Graves has worked in animal-food proteins for the past 39 years, specializing in corporate strategy, management focus and marketing effectiveness across the protein chain. ▫

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