The Free Market And The Food Desert, Ctd

The coronavirus has sickened workers and forced slowdowns and closures of some of the country’s biggest meat processing plants, reducing production by as much as 25 percent, industry officials say, and sparking fears of a further round of hoarding.

Several of the country’s largest beef-packing companies have announced plant closures. …

This week there probably will be around 500,000 head processed at U.S. plants still in operation. That’s 25 percent less beef being produced.

Some of the slowdown is because of facility closures. Two of the seven largest U.S. facilities — those with the capacity to process 5,000 beef cattle daily — are closed because of the pandemic.

And the consequences are not how I would have predicted them, because of course I’m not a freakin’ expert:

“The first problem is we don’t have enough people to process the animals, and number two is they can’t do carcass balance because restaurants are down,” he said. “What’s selling? Freaking hamburger.”

Restaurants typically use the expensive stuff — strips, ribs, tenderloins and sirloin, Bormann said, while retail takes the chucks and rounds and trims. With restaurants mostly shuttered, “all of a sudden 23 percent of the animal isn’t being bought because food service is gone,” he said.

It’s a good article, worth a full read.