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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Re: NYT article: push to eat local meat hampered by shortage
They should eat local non-meat products instead.
Its interesting that the article is about a lack of slaughterhouses, rather than the actual animals to be killed.
You'd think a few producers could get together and fund an abbatoir like Thundering Hooves', where its in a semi-truck. I know regulations are strict, but still...
This is not surprising to me. Here in MA we have TWO slaughterhouses. One of them burned down a few years back (as referenced in the article) and it was quite a problem for local meat producers. They're open again...but still, only 2 for the entire state.
With such a high demand for slaughter, I can imagine they move the line pretty quickly, which definitely concerns me. In January our local slaugherhouse issued a recall of beef with E Coli that had been processed in November, only one week after our cow was processed. THAT bothers me. I buy local meat not only for a more humane way of life for the animal, but for our health too. For an E Coli recall to occur on a small local farm scale is disturbing.
I'm surprised that the article didn't mention what my research indicates is one of the key reasons slaughterhouses shut down: the lack of a USDA inspector. The law regarding USDA inspection are ridiculous, like their has to be a dedicated bathroom just for the inspector's use. A large scale processing plant like Cargill or Tyson can accomodate the USDA's demands easily because of their huge scale. But if the USDA thinks a small local slaughterhouse isn't doing the volume of business that they think is worth the inspector's time (think several hundred animals an hour), the USDA pulls their inspector and the slaughterhouse can't operate any more. It's all a big scheme to make sure only the big guys survive. It's the USDA's motto to "Get Big or Get Out."
In VA, our local producers are having the same problem with small slaughterhouses shutting down. The chicken farmer at my market was telling me last week that the slaughterhouse he uses shreds up to 30% of his birds, so he can't sell those whole (which is apparently how everyone wants to buy them), he has to pay more to have them cut into parts and packaged. When I asked why he didn't switch to another slaughterhouse, he said the next one that fits his needs is several hundred miles away in NC. He said he can make that trip for his turkeys, and does to preserve whole birds for Thanksgiving, but it's not cost effective to do that for his chickens. His small, local place went out of business.