August312009
Red Meat Tape
We finally got the latest round of meat back last week. The farmer had quite a bit of trouble getting touch with the meat processor to make sure our beef and pork was ready. They wouldn’t pick up their phone or answer his messages on the day he was scheduled to pick it up, and since it’s a four hour round trip to the processor, he didn’t want to drive all the way there just to find out the meat wasn’t ready. He was calling them several times a day for about three days.
“The worst part is that there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “It’s not like I can go somewhere else.”
“They’ve got you by the sausage,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. And it’s true. If a farmer wants to sell their meat directly to consumers, which is what the farmer does at the Knoxville farmer’s market, they can’t get it processed just anywhere. The animals have to be butchered, aged and packaged at a USDA-certified processor, and the closest one to the farm is two hours away in Bristol, Virginia. This might seem surprising, but it makes sense. Around here, in rural Tennessee, a lot of people raise cattle. If you drive for twenty minutes along the country road the farm is located off of, you’ll probably see one hundred cattle. The majority of those are owned and raised by family farms, but they’ll be sold at auction to a huge buyer who represents an even bigger company—like McDonald’s, for instance. After that, they’ll be “finished” in a feed lot, where they eat themselves sick on corn before being sent to slaughter. Since most of the rural farmers in our area are locked into this conventional system, they don’t need a USDA-certified butcher anywhere near them. So this one dinky place in the next state ends up being our only choice.
But he did eventually get the meat back, about four days late. The folks at the processor didn’t offer any explanation for their tardiness, but the taste made up for everything.
