This One's For You...Part Two

The second part of this series covers the NY Times article, Push to Eat Local Food Is Hampered by Shortage. The article's significance lies in the issue facing small farmers raising animals in the US today: the limited number of slaughterhouses able and willing to process their meat.  It's a problem because the number of small farms is rising and small slaughterhouses are not following with the same tenacity, although this recent Washington Post article gives me hope that this is beginning to change.  Let me give a short background on why the US lacks the proper facilities for small scale slaughter...

Within the past 40 years, America became a factory farm mecca and many slaughterhouses were forced to shut their doors.  Several things attributed to this including but not limited to the new rules and regulations implemented to control industrial farming methods.  They were conceived to protect us from the food safety risks industrial farming poses, i.e. salmonella and e coli outbreaks (They're doing a great job, right?).  Who the rules and regulations* forgot (or simply ignored) were the smaller slaughterhouses that remained safe as always, but were forced to update their facilities to the safety code of industrial giants.  Their decline happened relatively quickly because many could not adhere to the updates.

Fast forward to the present - Some people are up in arms about their food.  No longer will they eat the industrial system's slaughter.  They want to know their farmer and meet their meat.  Small farmers want to fulfill the need and slaughterhouses can't keep up.  Too me, this article is nothing more than the title suggests a hampering, small glitch in the system, delay of game, minor set-back.  There is adversity in this movement at every turn, but this too shall pass.  It won't take long for someone in the US to discover there's profit in opening small scale slaughterhouses (as the Post article infers)...it'd be un-American not to.



*(If you're interested in learning more about the fantastical rules and regulations the industrial system brought on the small farmer, Joel Salatin wrote an amazing book, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.  I highly recommend it.)