By Nicolette Hahn Niman
LATE on Saturday, Feb. 8, news broke of the recall of 8.7 million pounds of beef that had come through a Northern California slaughterhouse. Social media buzzed with tweets and posts pronouncing it the latest example of a dysfunctional industrialized food system incapable of producing safe meat. “Buy local!” “Know your farmer!” “Eat grass-fed beef!”
The problem was that this slaughterhouse, the Rancho Feeding Corporation, didn’t handle only commodity beef.
We know all about this. We suspect it is some kind of effort to herd (sorry about the pun) business toward much bigger (gigantic corporate) facilities as well as shut down our local producers… It makes no sense otherwise.