If they want to tell Congress or someone that the supply chain is breaking, that's fine. But why a full-page ad? "To inform the public"? Or to panic the public into pressuring the government? If so, pressure them to do what?
What's the motive for a full-page ad? Is it just "Don't blame us, we're doing all we can?" I don't know, but this seems unnecessarily alarmist for a PR exercise.
I thought they were slaughtering animals without benefit because they lacked the labor to slaughter them for retail sale. Iff that's the case, panic buying helps them not at all and maybe makes the PR side of things even worse.
Panic buying also fails to help them if they basically can't raise prices to take advantage of it. It's not like panic buying is going to line their pockets, and certainly nowhere near enough to compensate for the damages they seem to be suffering.
Frankly, if doing that's not the primary point of the ad I don't know what is, since it's going to be the main thing it's sure to accomplish. If they don't want panic buying and shortages they must have had a hell of a good reason to for-sure cause them in service of maybe achieving some other effect.
Panic buying should be one of the main concerns here. The average American who is able to maintain several weeks worth of food supplies between grocery store should be trying to go to the grocery store as little as possible during this time with a reasonable expectation that there will be food there when they go. If panic buying and shortages start occurring, these same people may feel compelled to visit the grocery store increasingly often in hopes of finding the food they want or need. This could increase transmission rates a non-trivial amount since going to the grocery store is one of activities most likely to put us in contact with a contagious person in our everyday life.
Everyone who is working in a 'hard' business (with inventories, capital equipment, and long supply chains) can see that there are huge problems. Many of us are shocked at how little the politicians and public seem to know about how goods get to their doors. Things don't just appear at retail.
Three percent chance coronavirus will kill us. One hundred percent chance not having any food will kill us.
We need to re-open our food infrastructure ASAP.
This is really risky for workers, yes, they'll be exposing themselves to the virus. So let's double or triple the pay for the workers involved due to the hazards. Add generous survivors' pensions for the families of those who die or become disabled from COVID-19, as some certainly will if we send them into factories while the risks are there.
Maybe we need a program to shuffle unemployed people who have already had COVID-19 into high-exposure jobs like meat plants. Or send in the troops and man the plants with military personnel. We need somebody to produce food even during a pandemic. Getting those food plants open before we run out of food needs to be a top priority!
> Three percent chance coronavirus will kill us. One hundred percent chance not having any food will kill us.
Is keeping meat processing plants closed really going to cause food shortages? Eating rice and beans isn't pleasant, but comparing it to starvation is hyperbolic.
At scale, we can't necessarily just substitute things instantly like that. Do you think there's enough calorie-slack built into the rice & beans (& everything else) to supply the drop from animal sources? 'Cause I for one would be very, very surprised.
Not to mention you're also assuming that rice and beans are unaffected... but very little if anything about these plant closures are specifically related to them being animal protein sources. Does no good to shrug and say "people should just be eating vegetarian anyhow" if the vegetarian supply line is also going to collapse.
To expand on your point, even if the vegetarian protien supply chains aren't directly affected by COVID the way that the meat supply chain is, if everyone who eats meat must abruptly switch to alternative protein sources, do we imagine that there is an overproduction of such protein sources such that it can absorb the demand without driving prices out of reach of the poor?
>Do you think there's enough calorie-slack built into the rice & beans (& everything else) to supply the drop from animal sources? 'Cause I for one would be very, very surprised.
Rice and beans is probably not the best example, it's just the stereotypical frugal food. What's more realistic would be corn and soybeans. Massive amounts of corn is used for ethanol production (which we probably don't need since oil is at an all time low), and massive amounts of soybeans is used for meat production (which we don't need because all the meat processing plants are shut down).
FWIW the corn fed to livestock or used for ethanol is usually field corn, which is generally considered inedible for humans. We eat sweet corn, which is only a tiny fraction of the USA corn crop.
I'm pretty sure that field corn is perfectly edible for humans. The problem is that it doesn't taste as good as sweet corn, but it's not poisonous or anything. In fact, if you're starving, it probably tastes pretty good.
Edible in the same sense as paper is technically edible, yes. Nutritionally valuable to humans? Only for a brief window — and with commercial processing, so we're back to "what if the food processing part of the chain fails due to the pandemic?"
> Although not grown primarily for human consumption, people do pick ears of field corn when its sugar content has peaked and cook it on the cob or eat it raw. Ears of field corn picked and consumed in this manner are commonly called "roasting ears" due to the most commonly used method of cooking them.
So: Only in a brief window? Maybe, though I doubt it. (Unless you're trying to say that, in the form of corn on the cob, it won't keep for all that long, which is true.) With commercial processing? Hardly. (Unless you are trying to say that we can't, say, can it or freeze it in quantity without commercial processing, which is true.)
All that said, people would happily eat field corn on the cob if it meant that they got to eat. It may not be the whole answer to a food shortage, but it's an answer that could help a significant amount.
Unfortunately, I'm relatively sure that field corn isn't harvested the same way as sweet corn, and so there might not be a way to collect those cobs before they dry.
You are correct. Field corn is (usually) harvested by a giant combine harvester and shucked/processed automatically in the machine, with the kernels dumped into a waiting truck parked alongside. Then it's stored in grain elevators for days, weeks, or months until it's processed for fuel or feed.
Sweet corn is (usually) picked by hand on a much smaller scale, left in its natural leafy husk, and transported for retail sale within a week or two.
It's a whole different ball game. I'm sure we COULD take big portions of our feed/fuel field corn and grind it into human-ready cornmeal for mush and cornbread, but it wouldn't be a walk in the park :-/
True, but nixtamilization isn't used at the scales needed for this, we'd need to build new processing plants. That'd probably take about as long as just growing new sweet corn instead.
In the depths of World War II Britain, where food was extremely short, civilians were given a weekly ration of about a pound of meat and half a pound of bacon. (For comparison, modern Americans eat about 2 pounds of meat a week, which I think includes bacon.)
For better or worse, meat is considered an essential food. It would be disastrously, apocalyptically bad if it becomes unavailable.
The rice and beans that are in the supply chain now were planted several months ago, based on projected demand when they were planted. These supply chains are all interconnected.
Why don't you go and work there? We'll give you triple the pay. You reckon everyone is willing to sacrifice health for money? What's the purpose of making money when you can't even spend it or might not even be there to enjoy it?
Crisis has to be met with adjustment. This a pandemic, so don't just expect things to be normal. Things will have to change, whether that is where we source our food, how it is brought to us or even what we eat... something will have to change.
Source from where? It's easy to apply your mental model of a supermarket to the supply chain... oh, chicken isn't available? We'll just go get some beef.
That's not how it works at global scale. If chicken isn't available, there isn't necessarily anything else to pick up the slack. There certainly won't be if other supply chains break too because we neglect them all, one-by-one, thinking something else can just pick up the slack.
Food is a necessity. It's arguably the only necessity being truly threatened by our reaction. It means that, if necessary, the "adjustment" that should be made is that people may be pressed into work by government force if necessary to keep it flowing. Anybody who is necessary, not just "plant workers". (Most likely starting with the National Guard and the military, if necessary.)
Food supply chain breakdowns are not an inconvenience. They are an existential threat, and csense is completely correct; it is 100% a greater existential threat than the pandemic, if it gets going. In fact, the pandemic isn't even an existential threat on the same scale; the absolute worst case possibilities anyone ever posited for the coronavirus are still childs play next to civilization-scale food shortage.
Now, I do not personally have a good bead on how big this threat is right now. There's a world of difference between Farmer Bob had to dump a few thousand gallons of milk and saw a chance to turn it into a photo op and/or blame some other problem he had on the coronavirus, and entire months' worth of production going down the drain across the industry. I do not have a good bead on whether this is a drummed-up talking point or a legit crisis. However, it is important that we find out for real, because if there is a real problem here, it can rapidly dwarf the coronavirus itself.
I'm not sure what the point of your first paragraph is. I'm sure a ridiculous number of people would be willing to work at a rendering plant for $48-60/hr right now.
Food production is already an essential business. Tyson's plant got shut down because they weren't adequately protecting their workers (see https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/tyson-waterloo-iowa-plant-...) We're a long way from "100%" chance of starving to death.
> Three percent chance coronavirus will kill us. One hundred percent chance not having any food will kill us.
This is beyond hyperbolic. Coronavirus is actually happening. Not having any food isn't, and we're not anywhere close to that point yet, either. If anything, the big food problem right now is that it's piling up in warehouses because we can no longer rely so much on restaurants to buy it up and then throw half of it into the trash anymore.
It sucks for Tyson that they can't make their products without bringing humans into too close a contact with each other. But I'm pretty sure that the lines that processes beans and rice doesn't need quite so much direct human involvement, so, as long as the virus doesn't learn how to infect inanimate objects, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to keep eating.
The supply chain for rice and beans can't double its capacity because we suddenly have a meat shortage, we don't have vast amounts of raw material, logistical, and processing capacity just sitting around.
If you need to massively increase the amount of beans in the supply chain, you'll need someone to plant them first and so on.
> The supply chain for rice and beans can't double its capacity because we suddenly have a meat shortage
Yes, it takes 3-5 months to bring rice to harvest, assuming you have a suitable climate for growing it in the first place (which most of the United States does not).
Beans are more forgiving with respect to climate, but they also take 3-4 months to grow.
And, as you say, you can't suddenly turn a meat packing and distribution operation into one for rice. They're different in almost every respect.
What happens when everyone who eats meat switches to rice and beans? The price of rice and beans goes through the roof, and millions of people can no longer afford to eat rice and beans. What do they eat?
Further, the food (and other inventory) piling up in warehouses is itself a major problem because it drives up storage costs beyond what those owning the inventory can pay, and those companies go bankrupt. We can sustain some bankruptcy in our supply chains, but at a certain point, it becomes unstable and it cascades.
You're clearly a low IQ individual. I actually do work in supply chain. Your suggestion is that we ought not consider a looming crisis in the food supply chain until it actually becomes a crisis? Have you ever heard of being proactive? This doesn't "suck for Tyson," it sucks for you. You can't just increase the output for bean and rice production to replace lost supply in the poultry, beef, and pork marketplace. By the way, in my area, you can't even find beans or rice. People don't need to actually starve in order to resort to violence. Not being able to find staple foods on the shelves would be enough. Have you ever read a book? Shutting down any food production facility, for any reason other than food contamination, should be an absolutely unacceptable solution, even in the face of a pandemic.
Yikes, this breaks the rules and posts like this will get you banned here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
I didn't take that as an emotional appeal. If it was that, I would think they'd use a more charged expression ("die needlessly") instead of an industry euphemism ("depopulated").
When has the general public responded better to accuracy over emotions? We've been told for years and in ever greater detail that environment is dying and we won't do anything about it, but we see a video of a turtle suffering because it has a plastic straw stuck in its nose and it's a major legislative issue.
Once the pipeline empties, it takes months to fill back up, because animals take months to grow to marketable size.
Edit: to expand a bit, most meat animals are raised by a supply chain of specialized farms. Some specialize in breeding and birthing them, some specialize in raising them to marketable size (these are called "feeder" operations), and finally they go to a slaughterhouse/processing operation.
If the slaughterhouse stops buying animals from the feeder operation, the feeder operation has to kill them and waste them. Now the feeder isn't buying feeder-sized animals, so the breeder has to slaughter and waste them. Now the supply chain is completely empty.
When the processor opens back up after a few months, that doesn't magically cause market-sized animals to appear, waiting to be turned into meat. The breeder will have to breed more animals and wait weeks to months for those animals to be born. Then the feeder will have to feed them for weeks to months to reach marketable size. Only then can they go to the processor to be slaughtered and sent to consumers.
So, yeah, if the supply chain empties out, it is a Bad Thing.
Because it lets them raise prices without incurring public wrath.... By blaming it on 'the supply chain', when meat prices go up, Congress will be the one to take the blame. Instead of the narrative being that Tyson has decided to raise prices and reduce supply, Congress will be blamed for the immaterial 'supply chain' breakdown.
Lol. Grow up. If enough food production facilities shut down, the federal government will begin conscripting people to work in them. There's a 0% chance that the federal government will go for civil unrest for an issue which has an obvious solution.
Perhaps there's some middle ground between constantly making people sick and closing the plants forever. One obvious one: operating the plants in a safe manner where workers are provided with sufficient space and protective equipment, as well as better virus testing than an infrared thermometer.
It's the same reason why those concerned about climate change inform the public rather than just tell Congress. If our food supply is in danger, that is as concerning as climate change, is it not? Or is this different because it is a corporation warning us rather than a scientist or former Vice President?
Is it possible that supply chains are really under stress? I would love for an expert to weigh in if only to put my fears to rest, but it seems likely to me that supply chains can't just pivot from routing goods to loads of nonessential businesses to retail. I don't imagine supply chains are designed for such anomalous times. For example, think about the food that was previously routed to restaurants, but now must be routed and sold to grocers. If the supply chain can't pivot quickly, that food goes to waste and whoever invested in that food is out a lot of money--probably a ruinous amount. If those businesses have to fold, that sucks for them, but how many of those businesses can fold before it becomes a major problem--buyers can't get the goods they need to sell and sellers can't get their goods to buyers. That seems like it could be a compounding problem with major impact?
Supply chains are in real trouble, especially in the medium-term. Inventories higher up the chain are in trouble, with production of critical supplies coming to a stop due to lack of demand by manufacturers who are either facing lack of production capacity or demand. Capital equipment purchases and upgrades seem to have stopped; this is not sustainable, and will lead to problems.
I am not talking about groceries here; huge numbers of industries are intertwined. plastics, electronics, transportation, steel manufacturing, etc.
I didn't mean that as a criticism; I just don't know much about groceries. Grocery stores and their suppliers will definitely be affected by many other industries though.
Not an expert, but you can see issues with a single supply chain by looking at some commodity prices. Pork belly futures are way up, while the prices for whole pigs is tanking. This is due to meat packing plants closing. It’s an elbow to elbow type work due to expensive refrigerated work areas, and people are getting sick.
I’m seeing similar issues with electronics manufacturing chains from doing hardware design. It’s getting harder and harder to source parts, and you can see inventories dropping in real time as people buy out parts they need to keep running. I’ve heard rumors of factories at 10% capacity, and other rumors of half the factories they work with completely offline.
Then there’s shipping. Much of the low cost of air shipping was due to cargo space in passenger flight. With so little passenger flights, shipping is expensive. This is likely further causing supply chain headaches for a lot of manufacturing for anyone relying on cheap overnight parts to avoid disruption.
I'm not sure 100% cynicism is warranted in all circumstances.
Occam's razor: Tyson's business is at risk of serious losses because of supply chain disruptions. To try and get ahead of the problem, they put their message out to the public, including lawmakers, who may otherwise be unaware.
I guess this whole limited liability ordeal is making me wonder: why doesn't the FDA mandate that all meat packing happens in a clean-room environment?
I'm not sure if I'm serious about imposing that requirement, but it does beg the question of what type of health and safety measures are in place in meat packing plants for the consumer buying the meat _and_ the workers doing the packing.
It lets them introduce the story, get their facts up front, and set the tone. A full-page PR ad is kinda old-school, but very Big Ag PR. It's not about a stunt or pressure because they already have the kind of influence you make a play like that for.
People have a frightful loyalty to the first version of a story they hear. They know that and they're buying it. It's actually a fairly responsible move because the media could go anywhere with the first take on a story like this.
Every single industry is currently trying to get the attention of the government, like restaurants, airlines, petroleum, retail, hotels, etc. This ad is trying to drive the public's attention on food security, so the meat industry can get what they want from the government.
As for what they want, I'm guessing reduced inspections (so the inspectors aren't traveling between plants, potentially spreading the virus), some government money, maybe a law to limit liability if workers get sick, priority with testing and PPE, and maybe immigration enforcement relief.
Part of the reason I would do such a thing is to have something to point at if / when things do fall apart.
As others have said, there is a severe lack of understanding among the populace about how much effort is involved in getting a product from raw materials to store shelves.
They need to be made aware or the response will be "why didn't anyone tell us?". People don't just go looking for that kind of knowledge.
Especially not to those who are working in meat processing plants. Is it enough? Probably not, but if you are working minimum wage with no benefits, $500 makes a real difference.
Our national security is already compromised at the Commander-In-Chief level, this will probably go ignored until it is out of control much like the pandemic itself.
I am a meat eater and huntsman, and I agree. Just say 'euthanised' or 'thrown away' or 'killed and wasted.' Treat readers like adults, not use euphemisms.
For that matter, it wouldn't surprise me were there a traditional term to use. 'Cull,' maybe?
I don't think this will lead to starvation. Meat will get more expensive this summer, but we shouldn't be eating as much meat as we do anyway. (To say nothing of the cruelty of our methods.)
As a vegetarian I agree, it's easy to be healthy on a majority plant based diet (for most people). The first couple weeks are the hardest as you get over the addiction to meat, but it's really not that big of a deal.
They're right about supply chains falling apart though. If everyone were to switch over to mainly plant based a lot of crop land would likely need to be moved from grain to feed animals to plants to feed humans. Who knows what that would take.
Just using the same grain to feed humans instead would be rather easier. It's not like humans are incapable of eating corn, barley, oats, or soybeans.
I think the real problem here isn't that we can't get by without meat packing plants. It's that it's been 2 or so generations since the last time a really large of North Americans have had to adjust their diets in response to a major situation like this, and so we don't know what to expect, and the most psychologically available stories to look to are ones of actual famines.
No. Ruminants eat food that humans can’t. Furthermore, grazing grassland uses marginal land unusable for industrial scale farming. And, locally operated meat processing works just fine.
Virtually all of our problems with the meat supply are self-created and can be fixed — lets just return to the horror show we had 30 or so years ago... wait - it was just fine 30 years ago, and someone who ate the same meat he sold you was responsible for raising and preparing your food.
Source: family owned and run feedlot, and worked at a local abattoir thru university.
Ruminants CAN eat food that humans can't, but they're not - they're fattened up on grain that could be fed to humans. Feeding that grain to humans would be more efficient.
The cereals in the supply chain today aren't going to be convertible into food for humans before the meat in the supply chain runs out. The meat supply chain is much shorter because it's much more expensive to keep meat fresh. Even if you don't care about the people who work in the meat industry and you think it's evil, surely shutting it down so abruptly (with the entailed food shortage risks) should be a last resort?
Crops raised as ruminant food have different mechanical, nutritional, and yield characteristics than crops raised for humans, they are optimized for things other than being easy and palatable for humans to consume.
Consider edible beets and sugar beets. Sugar beets are technically edible but many people would find the experience of eating them to be unpleasant, since they were not bred to be edible by humans.
I eat meat but I am not a big fan. What makes a difference is that it is reasonably easy to season meat and thanks to the Maillard reaction it tastes good.
I love vegetables, but seasoning them so that the taste is not bland requires more work and skill.
For sure, it's always a tell of a good chef if they can cook vegetarian or not. If a restaurant doesn't have a good selection of vegetarian options I'll generally assume the kitchen isn't all that skilled in most cases (back when there were restaurants...).
Seasoning vegetarian dishes isn't all that difficult once you dedicate yourself to learning. You'll often need to look to non-European/American recipes though. I was lucky that I grew up in a household with a North African parent where I learned a lot about seasoning just by osmosis (even if they aren't veg, there were lots of vegetarian dishes). My partner is South Asian and there's obviously a long, rich history of vegetarian cuisine there. It's worth learning!
If meat gets more expensive, people buy more vegetables instead. If people buy more vegetables, vegetables get more expensive. Plenty of people in America already go hungry. In a crisis with increased unemployement and decreased food production, more people will go hungry. It's not a famine (in the US), but it's a serious problem. How many studies have suggested that just giving kids breakfast would be the number one thing to improve school performance?
Not only that, a pound of meat takes like a hundred pounds of veggies to feed the animal (I pulled that number out of my ass for rhetorical effect, whatever the real number it's large. One or two orders of magnitude.)
It's not even close to two orders of magnitude, and usually significantly less than one order of magnitude. For chicken and fish the feed conversion ratio (FCR) can be less than 2. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversi... (FCR can be 1 or even <1, though the difference there presumably comes from water weight--input feed is dehydrated while outputs are measured by weight, which includes some amount of water. Whether FCR includes only dressed meat depends on the data source, but for chickens and fish it's mostly irrelevant because everything ends up being processed into food, and by weight the carcasses are mostly protein. If we're pessimistic about published FCR numbers I think we can ignore the water weight difference.)
Also, farmed animals aren't very picky about the look of their food. In some aspects industrial meat production permits us to make more efficient use of agricultural land in terms of providing calories and especially proteins for human consumption.
What's hidden in the FCR number is the energy required to process the feed stock to get those high FCRs. But a human consuming "whole foods" also needs more of that input for the same amount of useable calories. Flours and similarly processed foodstuffs require more energy than that required for the inputs to livestock. So in terms of energy use we're basically just looking at the fixed overhead of the animal conversion as captured by FCR, possibly offset by some efficiencies that would be absent in direct-to-human consumption.
TL;DR--modern industrial agriculture is crazy efficient. Beef isn't as horribly bad as we think (notwithstanding the methane problem), but consuming pork and, especially, chicken and farmed fish shouldn't be very guilt inducing, ceteris paribus.
I did a little more digging regarding water content. By weight dressed chicken is ~60-65% water, so not insubstantial. Dry feed is ~10% water. But even if we double FCR to offset the water weight we're still under 1 order of magnitude, at least for chicken and fish.[1] I think the point still stands. If we consider all the context, such as nutritional needs (can't simply replace all animal protein and fat with processed corn), maximization of diverse agricultural resources, industrial efficiency, relative inefficiencies of whole vegetables and fruits, etc, then some moderate amount of meat consumption is readily defensible.
[1] Using other metrics there's a lot of literature that defends beef production, but that doesn't make for good napkin math, and I'm somewhat skeptical of it, anyhow--much of it seems to be published by the beef industry, and if you pick your metric you can make anything look good. Nonetheless, beef production is pretty darned efficient as far as it goes.
I hadn't heard about that. Googling it suggests most of this is due to supply chain problems preventing farmers who normally sell to restaurants being unable to sell to grocery stores; and labor not being available to pick food
Well, what is? I mean flat-earthers don't agree the world is round, should we take their objections seriously?
> sounds a bit like a modernized version of "let them eat cake."
Except how am I Marie Antoinette?
I'm just trying to look on the bright side.
It sucks that those birds are going to live and die and go to waste. It sucks that the people working there are out of work. It sucks that the company is losing money. All of that sucks.
The best you can say is, well, it's a good excuse to try to eat healthier.
FWIW, my sister roasted two chickens just the other day and they were delicious. So don't think I'm not feeling the pain here. (Is little joke. Trying to end on upbeat note here. Work with me.)
But the Beyond Meat facility isn't the same miserable hellscape for employees:
>“You can come to our facility anytime,” Brown said in an interview on Tuesday. “Don’t call me, just knock on the door. I invite you to do the same with all of Chipotle’s meat-processing facilities. They won’t let you, and if they did, you wouldn’t want to see it.”
Are there startups working on food-specific robotics automation? I've seen things like pizza and burger preparation, but nothing I can think of beyond that.
Food processing automation is the standard way of doing business - think about each item on the supermarket shelf, and how it got there. Essentially nothing is hand-made and as you go up in volumes you tend towards 24/7 factory operations. And of course there are efficiencies to be gained at scale.
Robots tend to be for lower-volume activities.
There is always work been done - for example on delicate fruit there are a host of companies and machines that do things like sorting and even picking.
https://www.compacsort.com is a good example.
But for foods like potatoes the sorting machinery is pretty simple as spuds are easy to handle.
On the farm there are lots of solutions for automating the various process they have. The larger the farm the more is automated.
For example on a dairy farm you'll see milking machines that range from expensive robots (small, European farms) that allow no-touch operation, to inline or rotary milkers that allow decent volume with low/no touch etc.
> Tyson also implemented a system several weeks ago to check the temperatures of all employees entering the Waterloo facility, using infrared technology to scan their faces as they arrive to work.
> Tyson said it installed plastic or plexiglass dividers along the cafeteria tables where employees eat lunch. Two employees said the cafeteria dividers probably helped to an extent, but they stressed that the cafeteria is always very crowded.
>The production line worker said the company provided bandanas at one point, but she said her colleagues who utilized them complained they were cheaply made and started fraying right away.
It sounds like they were trying to do something, but it's just really hard to keep ahead of this thing. I think food work is just fundamentally less safe right now.
Since I discovered oat milk, I rarely buy cream for my coffee. It steams and tastes good enough. This may push people to eat more plant based food. Which is not bad really.
Things I wish there was a vegan alternative for eggs, and cheese, with somewhat reasonable price/ease of use.
If we shutter all meat production today, then we won't be able to scale production of plant-based alternatives before the meat in the supply chain runs out. This means the costs go up and the poor starve. Everything is interconnected; we shouldn't be so cavalier about condemning entire industries. Although I would suggest we shouldn't be so callous about sacrificing an entire industry (i.e., the families who are supported by work in that industry) even if that industry were magically insulated from the rest of the economy.
Tyson chicken is garbage anyway. My meat suppliers have expressed that things are tough right now, but far from "breaking". I wouldn't be too upset if Tyson foods died.
I don't understand the point of this ad. I thought food production was considered essential work. How is Tyson Foods affected by the stay-at-home orders?
My understanding is that they closed plants of their own volition because so many people were getting sick.
What the government can do is (1) find and prioritize personal protective equipment for food processing and (2) do a better job on enabling mass testing, again prioritizing the food supply chain.
Lobbying the government is more powerful when backed up with the popular pressure that will come from this ad and associated media coverage.
It’s a relatively generous interpretation, and I’m not commenting on the wisdom of it or what it seeks to induce, but it seems plausible to me.
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What's the motive for a full-page ad? Is it just "Don't blame us, we're doing all we can?" I don't know, but this seems unnecessarily alarmist for a PR exercise.
millions of animals [...] will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities
There will be limited supply [...] until we are able to reopen
will waive the waiting period for short-term disability to allow workers who get sick to immediately be paid
The company told CNN plants are sanitized daily [...] the company performs daily temperature checks
In short, "Let us reopen!" I don't have an opinion on whether they should reopen or not, it just seems pretty clear that's the unspoken message.
We need to re-open our food infrastructure ASAP.
This is really risky for workers, yes, they'll be exposing themselves to the virus. So let's double or triple the pay for the workers involved due to the hazards. Add generous survivors' pensions for the families of those who die or become disabled from COVID-19, as some certainly will if we send them into factories while the risks are there.
Maybe we need a program to shuffle unemployed people who have already had COVID-19 into high-exposure jobs like meat plants. Or send in the troops and man the plants with military personnel. We need somebody to produce food even during a pandemic. Getting those food plants open before we run out of food needs to be a top priority!
Is keeping meat processing plants closed really going to cause food shortages? Eating rice and beans isn't pleasant, but comparing it to starvation is hyperbolic.
Not to mention you're also assuming that rice and beans are unaffected... but very little if anything about these plant closures are specifically related to them being animal protein sources. Does no good to shrug and say "people should just be eating vegetarian anyhow" if the vegetarian supply line is also going to collapse.
Rice and beans is probably not the best example, it's just the stereotypical frugal food. What's more realistic would be corn and soybeans. Massive amounts of corn is used for ethanol production (which we probably don't need since oil is at an all time low), and massive amounts of soybeans is used for meat production (which we don't need because all the meat processing plants are shut down).
Can you elaborate on that? It's not like you're eating leaves. Aren't all types of corn mostly starch that humans can digest?
> Although not grown primarily for human consumption, people do pick ears of field corn when its sugar content has peaked and cook it on the cob or eat it raw. Ears of field corn picked and consumed in this manner are commonly called "roasting ears" due to the most commonly used method of cooking them.
So: Only in a brief window? Maybe, though I doubt it. (Unless you're trying to say that, in the form of corn on the cob, it won't keep for all that long, which is true.) With commercial processing? Hardly. (Unless you are trying to say that we can't, say, can it or freeze it in quantity without commercial processing, which is true.)
All that said, people would happily eat field corn on the cob if it meant that they got to eat. It may not be the whole answer to a food shortage, but it's an answer that could help a significant amount.
Sweet corn is (usually) picked by hand on a much smaller scale, left in its natural leafy husk, and transported for retail sale within a week or two.
It's a whole different ball game. I'm sure we COULD take big portions of our feed/fuel field corn and grind it into human-ready cornmeal for mush and cornbread, but it wouldn't be a walk in the park :-/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
For better or worse, meat is considered an essential food. It would be disastrously, apocalyptically bad if it becomes unavailable.
Crisis has to be met with adjustment. This a pandemic, so don't just expect things to be normal. Things will have to change, whether that is where we source our food, how it is brought to us or even what we eat... something will have to change.
That's not how it works at global scale. If chicken isn't available, there isn't necessarily anything else to pick up the slack. There certainly won't be if other supply chains break too because we neglect them all, one-by-one, thinking something else can just pick up the slack.
Food is a necessity. It's arguably the only necessity being truly threatened by our reaction. It means that, if necessary, the "adjustment" that should be made is that people may be pressed into work by government force if necessary to keep it flowing. Anybody who is necessary, not just "plant workers". (Most likely starting with the National Guard and the military, if necessary.)
Food supply chain breakdowns are not an inconvenience. They are an existential threat, and csense is completely correct; it is 100% a greater existential threat than the pandemic, if it gets going. In fact, the pandemic isn't even an existential threat on the same scale; the absolute worst case possibilities anyone ever posited for the coronavirus are still childs play next to civilization-scale food shortage.
Now, I do not personally have a good bead on how big this threat is right now. There's a world of difference between Farmer Bob had to dump a few thousand gallons of milk and saw a chance to turn it into a photo op and/or blame some other problem he had on the coronavirus, and entire months' worth of production going down the drain across the industry. I do not have a good bead on whether this is a drummed-up talking point or a legit crisis. However, it is important that we find out for real, because if there is a real problem here, it can rapidly dwarf the coronavirus itself.
That is the essence of much blue collar / immigrant labor. You sacrifice yourself so that your broader family will be better off.
This is beyond hyperbolic. Coronavirus is actually happening. Not having any food isn't, and we're not anywhere close to that point yet, either. If anything, the big food problem right now is that it's piling up in warehouses because we can no longer rely so much on restaurants to buy it up and then throw half of it into the trash anymore.
It sucks for Tyson that they can't make their products without bringing humans into too close a contact with each other. But I'm pretty sure that the lines that processes beans and rice doesn't need quite so much direct human involvement, so, as long as the virus doesn't learn how to infect inanimate objects, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to keep eating.
If you need to massively increase the amount of beans in the supply chain, you'll need someone to plant them first and so on.
Yes, it takes 3-5 months to bring rice to harvest, assuming you have a suitable climate for growing it in the first place (which most of the United States does not).
Beans are more forgiving with respect to climate, but they also take 3-4 months to grow.
And, as you say, you can't suddenly turn a meat packing and distribution operation into one for rice. They're different in almost every respect.
Further, the food (and other inventory) piling up in warehouses is itself a major problem because it drives up storage costs beyond what those owning the inventory can pay, and those companies go bankrupt. We can sustain some bankruptcy in our supply chains, but at a certain point, it becomes unstable and it cascades.
Everything is interconnected.
I saw that in the article and just shook my head. Those animals die whether the processing plant is opened or closed.
The article could have phrased it better, but instead chose a very hollow appeal to emotions over accuracy.
Once the pipeline empties, it takes months to fill back up, because animals take months to grow to marketable size.
Edit: to expand a bit, most meat animals are raised by a supply chain of specialized farms. Some specialize in breeding and birthing them, some specialize in raising them to marketable size (these are called "feeder" operations), and finally they go to a slaughterhouse/processing operation.
If the slaughterhouse stops buying animals from the feeder operation, the feeder operation has to kill them and waste them. Now the feeder isn't buying feeder-sized animals, so the breeder has to slaughter and waste them. Now the supply chain is completely empty.
When the processor opens back up after a few months, that doesn't magically cause market-sized animals to appear, waiting to be turned into meat. The breeder will have to breed more animals and wait weeks to months for those animals to be born. Then the feeder will have to feed them for weeks to months to reach marketable size. Only then can they go to the processor to be slaughtered and sent to consumers.
So, yeah, if the supply chain empties out, it is a Bad Thing.
tldr: hope you like corn and wheat!
- Cover for raising prices
- Cover for unpopular people practices they may (or will) be implementing that will leak and trying to get in front of the bad press
- PR support for the GOP push to get people back to work
- Cover for outbreaks or contamination that may hit the press
I am not talking about groceries here; huge numbers of industries are intertwined. plastics, electronics, transportation, steel manufacturing, etc.
I’m seeing similar issues with electronics manufacturing chains from doing hardware design. It’s getting harder and harder to source parts, and you can see inventories dropping in real time as people buy out parts they need to keep running. I’ve heard rumors of factories at 10% capacity, and other rumors of half the factories they work with completely offline.
Then there’s shipping. Much of the low cost of air shipping was due to cargo space in passenger flight. With so little passenger flights, shipping is expensive. This is likely further causing supply chain headaches for a lot of manufacturing for anyone relying on cheap overnight parts to avoid disruption.
I'm not sure 100% cynicism is warranted in all circumstances.
Occam's razor: Tyson's business is at risk of serious losses because of supply chain disruptions. To try and get ahead of the problem, they put their message out to the public, including lawmakers, who may otherwise be unaware.
https://www.rollcall.com/2020/04/17/as-workers-face-virus-ri...
I'm not sure if I'm serious about imposing that requirement, but it does beg the question of what type of health and safety measures are in place in meat packing plants for the consumer buying the meat _and_ the workers doing the packing.
People have a frightful loyalty to the first version of a story they hear. They know that and they're buying it. It's actually a fairly responsible move because the media could go anywhere with the first take on a story like this.
As for what they want, I'm guessing reduced inspections (so the inspectors aren't traveling between plants, potentially spreading the virus), some government money, maybe a law to limit liability if workers get sick, priority with testing and PPE, and maybe immigration enforcement relief.
Part of the reason I would do such a thing is to have something to point at if / when things do fall apart.
As others have said, there is a severe lack of understanding among the populace about how much effort is involved in getting a product from raw materials to store shelves.
They need to be made aware or the response will be "why didn't anyone tell us?". People don't just go looking for that kind of knowledge.
That's around $500 per person. Is this monthly or yearly? If it's yearly it's a negligible amount of money.
Where is discussion about workplace safety and sick leave? The coronaplague keeps spreading because employees cannot afford to take time off.
For that matter, it wouldn't surprise me were there a traditional term to use. 'Cull,' maybe?
If this worries you plant a Victory Garden now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
And buy some chickens.
They're right about supply chains falling apart though. If everyone were to switch over to mainly plant based a lot of crop land would likely need to be moved from grain to feed animals to plants to feed humans. Who knows what that would take.
I think the real problem here isn't that we can't get by without meat packing plants. It's that it's been 2 or so generations since the last time a really large of North Americans have had to adjust their diets in response to a major situation like this, and so we don't know what to expect, and the most psychologically available stories to look to are ones of actual famines.
Virtually all of our problems with the meat supply are self-created and can be fixed — lets just return to the horror show we had 30 or so years ago... wait - it was just fine 30 years ago, and someone who ate the same meat he sold you was responsible for raising and preparing your food.
Source: family owned and run feedlot, and worked at a local abattoir thru university.
Still, growing crops to feed to cows to feed to people is an inefficient path to getting calories to people. Grow people crops, skip the cows.
Consider edible beets and sugar beets. Sugar beets are technically edible but many people would find the experience of eating them to be unpleasant, since they were not bred to be edible by humans.
I love vegetables, but seasoning them so that the taste is not bland requires more work and skill.
Seasoning vegetarian dishes isn't all that difficult once you dedicate yourself to learning. You'll often need to look to non-European/American recipes though. I was lucky that I grew up in a household with a North African parent where I learned a lot about seasoning just by osmosis (even if they aren't veg, there were lots of vegetarian dishes). My partner is South Asian and there's obviously a long, rich history of vegetarian cuisine there. It's worth learning!
Also, farmed animals aren't very picky about the look of their food. In some aspects industrial meat production permits us to make more efficient use of agricultural land in terms of providing calories and especially proteins for human consumption.
What's hidden in the FCR number is the energy required to process the feed stock to get those high FCRs. But a human consuming "whole foods" also needs more of that input for the same amount of useable calories. Flours and similarly processed foodstuffs require more energy than that required for the inputs to livestock. So in terms of energy use we're basically just looking at the fixed overhead of the animal conversion as captured by FCR, possibly offset by some efficiencies that would be absent in direct-to-human consumption.
TL;DR--modern industrial agriculture is crazy efficient. Beef isn't as horribly bad as we think (notwithstanding the methane problem), but consuming pork and, especially, chicken and farmed fish shouldn't be very guilt inducing, ceteris paribus.
[1] Using other metrics there's a lot of literature that defends beef production, but that doesn't make for good napkin math, and I'm somewhat skeptical of it, anyhow--much of it seems to be published by the beef industry, and if you pick your metric you can make anything look good. Nonetheless, beef production is pretty darned efficient as far as it goes.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=farmers+throwing+away+produ...
First, they pretend it is an accident, then, once the freedom to eat the food you want has been destroyed, the real reason comes to light.
Please don’t make the rest of us meat eating conservatives look like morons.
Don't forget to tell your neighbors to stop using pesticides on their lawns. Per acre, Americans use 10x the amount on lawns as agriculture.
This is not universally agreed, and sounds a bit like a modernized version of "let them eat cake."
Well, what is? I mean flat-earthers don't agree the world is round, should we take their objections seriously?
> sounds a bit like a modernized version of "let them eat cake."
Except how am I Marie Antoinette?
I'm just trying to look on the bright side.
It sucks that those birds are going to live and die and go to waste. It sucks that the people working there are out of work. It sucks that the company is losing money. All of that sucks.
The best you can say is, well, it's a good excuse to try to eat healthier.
FWIW, my sister roasted two chickens just the other day and they were delicious. So don't think I'm not feeling the pain here. (Is little joke. Trying to end on upbeat note here. Work with me.)
On the other hand, the nutcases, back up by the meat industry, say present meat consumption rates are just fine.
But the Beyond Meat facility isn't the same miserable hellscape for employees:
>“You can come to our facility anytime,” Brown said in an interview on Tuesday. “Don’t call me, just knock on the door. I invite you to do the same with all of Chipotle’s meat-processing facilities. They won’t let you, and if they did, you wouldn’t want to see it.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/no-beyond-burrito-...
Robots tend to be for lower-volume activities.
There is always work been done - for example on delicate fruit there are a host of companies and machines that do things like sorting and even picking. https://www.compacsort.com is a good example.
Robots tend to be for lower-volume: https://www.roboticsplus.co.nz/robotic-apple-packing
But for foods like potatoes the sorting machinery is pretty simple as spuds are easy to handle.
On the farm there are lots of solutions for automating the various process they have. The larger the farm the more is automated.
For example on a dairy farm you'll see milking machines that range from expensive robots (small, European farms) that allow no-touch operation, to inline or rotary milkers that allow decent volume with low/no touch etc.
https://www.waikatomilking.com/products/milking-parlors/rota...
> Tyson said it installed plastic or plexiglass dividers along the cafeteria tables where employees eat lunch. Two employees said the cafeteria dividers probably helped to an extent, but they stressed that the cafeteria is always very crowded.
>The production line worker said the company provided bandanas at one point, but she said her colleagues who utilized them complained they were cheaply made and started fraying right away.
It sounds like they were trying to do something, but it's just really hard to keep ahead of this thing. I think food work is just fundamentally less safe right now.
whomever did that is a douche
Let businesses set their policies, employees choose their desired level of safety. Let us choose our destinies instead of confining us to quarters.
What the government can do is (1) find and prioritize personal protective equipment for food processing and (2) do a better job on enabling mass testing, again prioritizing the food supply chain.
Lobbying the government is more powerful when backed up with the popular pressure that will come from this ad and associated media coverage.
It’s a relatively generous interpretation, and I’m not commenting on the wisdom of it or what it seeks to induce, but it seems plausible to me.
https://twitter.com/repthomasmassie/status/12547777465274204...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is nothing in those rules mandating being a leftist, or putting your head in the sand, or begging to be enslaved.
Indeed, those rules talk about curiosity and discussion.
You can have neither when only the party line is allowed to be posted.