American Slaughter
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In this post, I go into detail about the slaughter of animals for our food. I understand that it is not a pleasant topic for some, so please proceed with that caveat, or avoid this post entirely.
This is written with the acknowledgement that Americans eat meat and much of our meat is processed in huge slaughterhouses that often employ vulnerable workers and the mere industrialization of this process brings into question the humaneness of it. By now, we’ve all seen (or had access to see) documentation revealing the actual abhorrent conditions of some slaughterhouses and pre-slaughter industrial farming practices.
These exposés are not a blanket indictment of eating meat or our inspectors.
They do, however, reveal the absolute failures of the centralized processing system that produces 85% of Americans’ meat. There is such huge consumption with such little respect or honoring of the workers, the animals, and the process.
We must make serious and significant changes.
But how?
In the days since the election I’ve seen a tumultuous avalanche of social media posts, blogs and videos that talk about Trump’s incoming leadership and those he might choose for different cabinet positions.
Someone is going to be the Secretary of Agriculture.
Whoever is in there, can’t make changes alone.
We all need to step up too.
Let’s examine one issue:
Animal slaughter for our meat in America.
There is a bottleneck right now that all of us working in the farm-to-consumer space are profoundly aware of. And that is the slaughterhouses.
There are simply not enough USDA inspected slaughterhouses to give our small-scale farmers enough options.
This means:
Farmers have to schedule appointments way ahead (before they actually know when their animals will be ready).
Processing prices are consistently going up due to high demand.
Farmers are having to travel far–sometimes 3-5 hours one way–just to get an animal processed.
There is a proposed solution to this problem.
Congressman Massie and I have worked together now for close to 10 years to bring awareness to, and pass, his federal legislation called the PRIME Act.
What does the PRIME Act do?
In essence, it allows small, custom butchers to kill and process meat from small farms and sell it within the state where it is born and raised without a USDA inspector present.
There’s a lot of nuance in that above sentence that I’ll try to break down here:
Every USDA slaughterhouse/butcher must have a USDA inspector present for every kill.
For US raised meat to be sold in the US, it must be killed at a USDA facility.
“Custom” butchers must follow a litany of state regulations for safety, humane kills, etc, but the farmers using a custom butcher may not sell the meat that gets processed there. They may only sell the animal before the kill.
Make sense so far?
(Here’s a video of Congressman Thomas Massie and I explaining it, if you’d like more info.)
We’ve worked hard to get the bill passed, and finally got it successfully added to the House version of the 2023 Farm Bill.
But Congress refused to take up the farm bill, stalling the progress and keeping our meat production and processing drastically centralized.
With a new administration, could this be the time to work towards better policies for small slaughterhouses?
Yes. It’s entirely possible for us to see better options.
Let’s fast forward 2 years from now…. The policies spelled out in the PRIME Act are in effect.
But……
There’s still not enough processing options.
Why not?
We need workers.
And that’s another hard part.
People like you and I must be willing to do a portion of the work, or respect those who do, or we will not make any progress in a decentralized food system.
I’ve been on the kill floor of a few modern butchers. I’ve seen the meat lined up for processing and I've seen the carcasses hanging, waiting for further processing.
It’s not exactly “enjoyable.”
Even the cleanest, most humane kill is still quite unpleasant.
After the kill comes the requisite removal and inspection of various organs–the gutting. It’s a bloody sight, making it obvious why horror movies often use slaughterhouses as backdrops.
I say this as a conscientious meat-eater. As someone who has thought through the options many times and seen hundreds of scenarios. I’ve studied the history of meat processing here in America as someone who reveres the animals, the ecosystems, and the humans involved in our food system.
I’ve also seen plenty of on-farm kills for family meat. And been part of a few.
For understandable reasons, these are far less gruesome, if for no other reason than difference in volume.
We need more of both options.
We need people in the slaughterhouses who are willing to do this very unglamorous, hard work that gets zero social recognition in our culture which wants to outsource all those unpleasant tasks to “others.”
When was the last time you met someone who works in a slaughterhouse and said… “Your job is so noble. Thank you for what you do?”
When was the last time you gave them the kind of attention you give to “influencers,” or your favorite athlete?
Right, probably never.
Telling someone you’re the kill or cut guy in a slaughterhouse will probably end whatever conversation was just starting. Used car salesmen get more respect in our culture than a measly butcher. Right?
50 years ago, we had a much higher population here in America of hunters and farmers who had the knowledge and skills of killing their own food and a level of social respect that went with it.
They were respected as good providers.
Today, there is a social degradation of those who are actually bringing our meat to our tables. With very rare exceptions.
So, as amazing as a policy change would be, we must go beyond that.
People like you and me have to be willing to step up and do the work, one way or another. We’ve got to be able to feed and steward our own animals, or be willing to work jobs like slaughter and cutting up a carcass.
It ain’t pretty.
So we at least better be able to directly support those that are willing to do so.
If we get these better policies in place, it’ll be time to step up and learn to do the work.
Once a rite of passage for boys in many populations, their first kill–whether through hunting or slaughtering a farm-raised animal–is now an obsolete path towards manhood.
So obsolete that we have, effectively, lost our food security.
Meat processing is now a disdained job, set for vulnerable outsiders, or other populations who have less capacity to say “no” and are thus stuck with the unpleasantness that is our centralized butchering and processing system.
This is not about “going back” to anything, or making something great again, but coming to a new understanding of our food, and the processes that nourish us.
It is about respecting and cherishing the role of death in our food system and bringing what dignity we can back to it. We can deeply honor the lives of the animals we harvest for our meals AND give those humans involved in that process a dignified place in our communities, not relegate the hard, dirty work to the most vulnerable among us or treat it as some kind of curse.
Is there hope for food policy change in the new administration?
Yes, there is.
But with that change comes your responsibility to step up to the mental/emotional challenge of really knowing where your food comes from and being willing to see the animals take their last breath and the physical challenge of stepping up and doing the hard work of harvest.
Our meat slaughtering process is not a well known necessity for most Americans anymore. And yet, these deaths are a profoundly important component of our lives. It’s time to know more about how these animals live and die, and to be an active part of the process.
And this knowledge and reverence is the only way to create the food security we desperately need right now.
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Thanks, Liz. I'd really be honored to witness this process. And as my kids get older, I'd like them to, too. I wish I had the skills to self sustain. I've spent a lot of years even just learning to really cook and process food 🙈 - so much more to learn!