Bugs for thee, beef for me: How big business monopolizes meat
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/Andia/Getty Images
Corporate cleavers
The story is no different across the Atlantic. In Europe, the meat trade has been quietly butchered by the same corporate cleavers. Small abattoirs — the lifeblood of rural France, Ireland, and Spain — have disappeared beneath the weight of regulation and consolidation. What used to be an honest trade of handshakes and hanging carcasses is now ruled by faceless conglomerates answering to Brussels and shareholders in Frankfurt. The European Union speaks loftily of “sustainability,” but its policies have done more to sustain monopolies than livelihoods.
Ask a French farmer about EU policy, and you’ll get a shrug somewhere between despair and disgust. In Ireland, cattle farmers — men like my father, who once fed nations through famine and war — now feed debt. In Germany, abattoir workers live in company dorms, shipped in from Eastern Europe to keep costs down. The romance of the pastoral has been replaced by the cold arithmetic of the spreadsheet.
From beef to bugs
Meanwhile, consumers are told to eat less meat “for the planet.” How convenient for the corporations that now sell the alternatives — lab-grown patties and insect protein, neatly packaged in recyclable guilt. They’ve found a way to profit from both sides of the moral ledger: first by monopolizing real meat, then by marketing its replacement. It’s a master class in hypocrisy and a catastrophe for the working class.
Trump’s decision to investigate the industry won’t fix a century of collusion overnight, but it is a long-overdue reckoning. For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike treated Big Meat as too big to question. The lobbyists wrote the laws, the lawyers buried the lawsuits, and the bureaucrats looked away. The result is a landscape where cattle ranchers depend on corporations that despise them and consumers rely on supply chains that could snap at any moment.
Food, the most basic human need, has become another instrument of control. When you own the meat, you own the man. Farmers used to raise herds; now they herd invoices and inspectors.
It’s tempting to believe that this system is simply broken. It isn’t. It works exactly as designed — to enrich the few and exhaust the many. The old rural ideal of self-reliance has been slaughtered on the altar of efficiency. What we are left with is a parody of plenty: full shelves, empty towns, and even emptier pockets..
Trump’s probe may not slay the beast, but at least someone is willing to pull back the curtain and show the nation what’s really being carved up. For decades, the Big Four packers have sliced the market to ribbons, fixing prices while farmers starved and consumers paid the bill. Now, for the first time in generations, there’s a man in power with the will to carve them up instead. Call it poetic justice: The butchers may finally find themselves on the block.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.