Monday Moaning: Butchering Industry!

Monday Moaning: Butchering Industry!

I use Monday to moan, blowing of a little steam about our worldly issues. But are they as worldly as we think. Does it show through enough the problems we cause. I talked about what advertisement and how smart they are to make us think how much better on product is to the former one. How a simple name change can make us think just that. Food production and how we need to eat more organic while every veg pretty much has undergone some change.

But than there is also mass production, we all know of it and it is pretty much to keep the prices down. After all when there is to much of it prices go down. When we use cheaper recourses from our planet it becomes even more cheaper. Shall we cut in labour cost it is the cheapest of them all. Just how well does that all work when veggies are mass produced as well and thrown away when it is not eaten. Or used in cheap meals and cans.

Not spending much is something we all look at, More so since wagers have gone down or have been stalled for so long due to a crisis. Now who to blame for the crisis is not even debatable since we all have some say in that. So I am not going to go there.

So cheap is good for our wallet, but how good is it for the economy. Now speculating on some issues might just be a way to think about it. and I for one have done so in the past. As cheap as we produce things still are getting more expensive as raw materials are harder to get or are being controlled. Best example might be oil. Last week a news item suggested that oil was being shipped out to sea till the price is right again to sell it. In large tankers it is just drifting till the price goes up. Unreasonable taxes on boxing materials, like the cardboard for your breakfast crunchiness or the bag for the evening crisps make up for the higher prices. This is said to be some kind of tax to reduce litter and help the environment.

But how much does that help if we produce even more than we can eat or buy. Is it still good for the environment.There is also another issue playing that might be a bigger question to ask. Not sure if it true or not but the speculations of some specialists do not deny it.

Getting your groceries cheap is one thing, even more so when your pay check does not let you buy much in the first place. Not spending a lot is the best option. What I am going to suggest here has to do with a job I used to do 20 years ago. And it is in that same time I seen the industry change. It covers a large scale of things, like how even the gap between rich and poor gets bigger. Sounds silly right.

I used to be a butcher and loved doing what I did. It was a skill at the time I learned it. And old fashioned job you will. That slowly got taken over by mass production. The meat wars have started.
Keeping it cheap means getting a lot of it made ready for consumption. Now if it took around 4 hours to completely get the bone from the cow when doing it alone. It got shortened to a single hour. by simply adding more people to the line with less to do and a lower pay rate. One bone each and te cow flew through the system. still getting more expensive I might add. As prices pretty much have doubled in these years as well.

The meat industry still has a lot of hands on work but the skill need is nothing more than that of a single bone all day every day. Producing faster to keep prices as low as they can. My expertise has become obsolete. And in many other industries you see machines taking over jobs, because they can do it faster and thus produce more while only one person keeps it in check. It does make one think that my diploma and expertise is used to say I am to expensive to be put on  a line. And small time butcher can’t compete with the prices of a supermarket. Yet people are out there on the street not making money.

Not having it and buying mass produced products that cost less to make and only make the big guns of that company richer. But what we cannot spend means more gets thrown away and prices will go up. No job I no money. No money means we can’t buy. What we can’t buy need not to be made. When it isn’t made it need less people to make it. Less people with a job means there are less people that can spend money. And while products gets more exclusive they get more expensive. Making the big guns making money while we cannot spend it.

But back to being a butcher. The meat industry. Would one believe that a leg of a pig would go for less than 1 dollar a kilo. An entire pig is about the same price. The drop has been to an even record low of 40 cents. Still one leg is about 35 kilo or 70 pounds. To get the bone out of there, I would have usual got around 2 dollars each leg and do around 30 an hour. Yeah that raise the price a lot right. For I would make 60 dollars an hour, but than again I would work only 4 hours a day. The other way around is simple. 60 dollars an hour would mean they can have 6 people working for 10 dollars an hour. And cutting up 60 legs an hour.

For your benefit I cannot work the job I learned so hard for. Or else I need to blindly be on a line like a cog in a machine. I understand. It is cheaper that way to produce more. But still the price went up.

Still lets keep a dollar a kilo it s sold for around 4 to 5. And worse most pigs are sold in central Europe so slaughter houses in western Europe can up their rate. So they can kill more, produce more and make more money. This is an industry that uses mafia practises to claim a better deal. The chicken industry is pretty much the same. because what we cannot do here we can do elsewhere. And again there is a shift in where one can work, and how cheap it has become, while we still pay a normal price for our meat and veggies.

When will we stop producing more than we can eat and still have normal price for the food we eat. Does it ever occur to us that we are killing our own economics and opportunity. That we ourselves are the cause for the gap getting bigger between the corporate world and those who need to work. This endless circle of making money spending money making products will collapse if we keep going on using faster and cheaper ways by eliminating human labour cost. While the meat industry can use 6 instead of one, other industries can use none rather than 10. The question is do we need that much food if we know we sell it cheap elsewhere to the price stays high here. If we know the box our cereal is in is more expensive than the cereals due to tax. If we know veggies are thrown away if it is not sold. Do we need so much food.

This is one side of a story of what this corporate world s coming to. A small tip of a mountain pile of money getting lost in a bin or in the pocket of the corporations. If we do not have money to spend how can we than make money if less needs to be produced. What way will we turn this carousel. Are we on the right track, or did we loose sight of what truly is important.

Ooh well what the fuck right. cheap is good. Who needs professionals/craftsman, they are a dying breed after all.  Did you know there is a shortish as well for professionals and craftsmen. Since less and less of the youth would choose a craft or skill.

Monday Moaning: Food Works

Food work I thought it was a fun title to work with. Last week we talked about food and today I will continue on that note. About what t means to eat organic or biological. How food has changed through out the years and what we call food today might not be as healthy as we think.

Though how is that possible. The workings of food and the industry have changed our way of thinking and eating. We are told what to eat and we are like the dumb sheep to follow their lead. It changed how we like our food and our perception of what would be nice to eat.

If someone would come up to you and said that the food we are eating today is artificially grown to a point it is two times sweeter than what it was used to be 20 years ago. You probably would call me a liar. But through research and artificial crossing breeding and planting we have done so. What is organic today is what used to be normal 20 years ago.

I can recall a granny smith to be really sour. So much so it would have you have a shock at the first bite. these days they are so sweet I can hardly call them granny smiths. Strawberries as well. try those from a supermarket and compare them with home grown garden ones. I am fairly positive the ones form your garden are slightly less sweeter but so much nicer.

Let us face it this is how it has been for many years and in what way can we than say it is organic when manipulated to that extant it is not what it used to be. Chicory has been less bitter just like sprouts and yes I eat all of these. Even the most blend of them all, broccoli has been sweetened. And all so, and so we thought, to improve our green intake and have children eat more of it to.

Now that  all nice and stuff, but when you sweeten more products our taste buds get used to it. So as soon as we have something not sweet we find it gross. Another thing is that more sugar isn’t healthy. Doubling it in vegetables might not seem harmful in the end it is as we eat more sweeter all together. Even pre-packed foods have doubled or sometimes doubled in sweeteners. Can we still say that our now so much more expansive organic foods are truly that much organic.

It is a shame though from the industry to fool us and trick us with their clever campaigns for advertisements. A shame on the industry for making every thing sweeter just to make people eat more of it. And alter it so much we can produce more as well.

Producing enough is al it takes to feed a planet and doing so in an straight forward way. Without all those artificially produced new vegetables. Organic these days is just a selling point, as f it is something new.

Would it e possible to grow things in your own garden. Why do we need so much modern techniques to grow a plant? Just to make sure there is enough for everyone and it s cheap. But as it turns out it wasn’t that great heath wise.

But how hard is it going to be getting people to eat less sweets. The industry now fools us with saying things like the organic sugar. Will the food industry use less sugar and maybe loose consumers. Yes even that special K had more sugar in it than when thy first started.

How used have we gotten to the sugar in our foods. Kids scream sugar and still dislike veggies. We adults do the same as we to have eaten less veggies and more take away and easy instant meals. Are each and every one of us ready for a new food revolution or better yet, go back in time to where food was food before we started tempering with it.

It will take time and all we can do is either have faith in the food industry to cut down on artificial grown whatevers and use organics more and more. Or step up your self and start eating more fresh vegetables, eat organic meats and save the world, the animals and our health all in one go. And tell you what. The farmer 6 miles down is sometimes half the price you pay in a supermarket.  Support your local farmers.

Best Wishes
Ranting Crow