(OPINION) The era of cheap meat is over. For those that are carnivores, that is really bad news. For decades, Americans have been able to count on the fact that there would always be mountains of very inexpensive meat at the local grocery store, but now those days are gone and they aren’t coming back.
As I was writing this introductory paragraph, it struck me that what is happening to meat prices actually parallels what I wrote about yesterday. Just as the left doesn’t want us to use traditional forms of energy because they believe that doing so is “bad” for the climate, so they also detest that a lot of us like to eat a lot of meat because the production of meat causes levels of certain greenhouse gases to rise.
Sometimes we joke about the methane that comes from “cow farts”, but radicals on the left take this stuff deadly seriously. And at the same time that gasoline prices are soaring into the stratosphere, the exact same thing is happening to meat prices. In fact, we just learned that the price of beef in the U.S. has risen more than 20 percent since last October…
Behind unleaded gasoline, beef prices have risen the most on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) since October 2020, rising 20.1% in the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. An increase of over 20 percent in one year is deeply alarming. Unfortunately, it isn’t just the price of beef that is soaring.
Tyson Foods just released some new numbers which show that beef, pork, and chicken prices are all rising dramatically… The biggest meat company by sales in the United States has announced significant price rises for the fourth quarter, as the impact of the highest inflation for 30 years continues to be felt.
Tyson Foods, based in Springdale, Arkansas, announced on Monday that chicken prices rose 19 percent during its fiscal fourth quarter, while beef and pork prices jumped 33 percent and 38 percent, respectively. During the early portion of this crisis, Tyson Foods was reluctant to pass increasing costs along to consumers, but now we are being informed that they don’t intend to make the same mistake again…
Stewart Glendinning, the chief financial officer of Tyson Foods, said that they have been slow to increase their prices, in line with inflation, but are now making up for the delay. ‘We expect to take continued pricing actions to ensure that any inflationary cost increases that our business incurs are passed along,’ he said, on the company’s quarterly earnings call.
Sadly, this is just the beginning. The price of meat is only going to go higher from here, and eventually, it will get to a point where meat prices become exceedingly painful. Of course, there are many that would argue that we are already there. READ MORE
