Op-Ed: There’s No Need to be Chicken About Locally Processed Meat

The following was submitted as an op-ed by Julie Vogel, a Lexington resident, who wrote about locally sourced meat. If you would like to submit an op-ed, please email samantha.mercado@patch.com.

My family has always shown its love through food. So, a few months ago, when shoppers were first ravaging the grocery meat department shelves, my sister called breathlessly and urged me to sign up for home delivery of meat from a nearby livestock farm.

If anyone would know how to get quality food during a pandemic, it would be my sister, who handles marketing for local farmer’s markets and has amassed an extensive network of Massachusetts providers of high-quality meats, cheeses, produce and baked goods offering home delivery.

But I’m a creature of habit. Her suggestion made me queasy. I imagined that hunks of meat hacked-up in back of a local farm, still quivering in white paper, were going to be delivered to my door every week. When I do buy meat, I’m used to buying the brand I know, wrapped in a familiar plastic package, from a familiar section of the store.

So I declined. And she sighed.

Yesterday, she called with greater urgency: The local livestock farm she buys from now has a 1000-customer waiting list. In fact, all local livestock farms were seeing a huge spike in demand. Would I like to start tacking on my family’s meat orders to her weekly one?

Partly, the local race to find reliable sources of meat is consistent with a back-to-basics movement taking hold as Americans try to be more self-reliant in obtaining food. Yet COVID-19 has made Americans particularly fearful about the safety and stability of their meat supply. Thousands of meat processing workers in crowded facilities have fallen ill, and many have died, closing dozens of plants. Thousands of animals have been euthanized because farmers can’t afford to keep them. But unlike gardening, canning and raising hens, rearing and slaughtering livestock is not something most people can take on in their backyards.

Before revisiting my meat-buying practices, I reached out to a few local farmers and meat processors to better understand how our local meat supply works. The report back on the safety and stability of our regional meat infrastructure encouraged me.

One of these processors is Meatworks of Westboro, Mass., a recently-opened, USDA-inspected slaughterhouse for cattle, hogs, sheep and goats that services nearby livestock farms.

“Having a small, regional meat-processing infrastructure is critical to maintaining a secure food system, and the pandemic has shown us the strengths and benefits of this type of structure. When you buy meat locally, you have the ability to know that the animals are raised properly, fed properly, handled with respect and processed properly,” Barry Gross, the plant manager told me. Gross is also the founder of The Livestock Institute of Southern New England, a non-profit organization dedicated to revitalizing and strengthening livestock farming in the region.
Smaller scale processors can also better control practices to observe COVID-related safety protocols, helping to avoid shutdowns being faced by larger meat processing facilities.

In a 20-worker slaughterhouse, it is easier to monitor workers’ health, maintain distance between staff, and limit people coming in and out of the plant. With slaughterhouses located close to livestock farms, animals can be transported a short distance to processing and then picked up and delivered directly to consumers, reducing the number of touchpoints and risk of contamination in the supply chain.

Will the instability of our national meat supply drive New Englanders en masse to their local livestock farms and slaughterhouses? For some, yes; but for some, no. It costs more to produce pasture-raised meat in an area of the country short on farmland, resulting in higher prices compared to meat produced by large Midwestern conglomerates benefitting from vast economies of scale. And this is a tough time for many people to spend up for meat.

But those who can make it work, and love high quality meat, can take comfort that Massachusetts, more recognized for its biotech, engineering, higher education, health care and financial services industries, also does a fine job raising and processing quality livestock. And because of the safety controls smaller operations can put in place, local meat may be safer meat. Every livestock farmer I spoke with agreed on one thing: Americans should eat less meat, and smaller portions, and appreciate all the steps involved in getting that meat on their plates. But when they do it eat, support the regional farming infrastructure and economy by investing in quality, locally-raised and processed meat products.