The High Cost of Cheap Meat
Posted by Jay on Monday, 5 October 2009
FOL Doug sent the link to this BoingBoing post, highlighting an NYT story about a young woman who became a casualty of the industrial food system, in this case of Cargill in particular.
Innocent people being killed or maimed by corporate food is hardly news anymore. What makes this story interesting is the provenance is what is sold as premium “ground beef” — in this case, “Chef’s Selection Angus Beef” — in the US:
As a society, we’ve insisted that meat be impossibly cheap and abundant. Cargill’s methods of producing cheap meat follow naturally from our priorities. The only way for us to opt out of these horrors is for us to value food that is raised right, even if it’s expensive.
October 5th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
[…] to imagine our city eating well as long as it’s somehow more “authentic” to eat the kind of mystery meat that kills people because “food served with beer should be cheap” or because this is the kind of stuff […]
October 6th, 2009 at 7:10 am
And there is an actual dollar cost in the article as well. By grinding together scraps instead of using whole cuts of beef, Cargill’s costs go from $1.30 per pound to $1.00. Hell of a compromise.
December 13th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
[…] supposedly best stuff. Heck, probably the best tasting corn-fed beef is the (really unappetizing if you know what’s in it) fast-food burger meat, ’cause its flavor is just concentrated grease and salt, and who […]