A few well-deserved squawks about what’s wrong with chicken farming — and how it’s going to smack the average American cluck square in the wallet

Let me start this discussion of chickens with a mention of beef steak. You remember beef steak, don’t you? 

Henny Penny told Chicken Licken that

the sky was falling. She didn't know

the half of it.

It came from cattle. It was red and gave off tantalizing aromas as it broiled and charred. It sizzled noisily sometimes. It came off the grill almost black the outside, and pink, juicy, and flavorful on the inside. Sometimes it came attached to a bone that you could gnaw on while your dog sat under the table, begging. And unless you were very  poor you could afford it on a fairly regular basis.

Well, that went away for a lot of people. Cattle growers began discovering that the price of feed was too high because chemical and bioengineering companies had instituted practices that were driving up grain prices. In addition, the price of corn was  driven up by people who were snapping it up not to eat, but to turn into ethanol. Today, we burn up about 10 percent of our corn crop in our automobiles. Check the chart. That annually-growing swatch of yellow metastasis  is corn-derived ethanol.

But there were always chicken and eggs. Eggs were cheap, and for the moment still are, although don’t count on it lasting for long.

And instead of a steak, you could always cook a chicken. Chicken was cheap. Once  the Republican Hoover Administration had been banished for eternity to the Great American Hall of Shame that we call history, there actually  could be a chicken in almost every pot in America, just as Hoover promised. At least on the weekends. As long as Hoover wasn’t around to screw it up.

Recently, that situation has eroded. These days you can pay for just enough ground beef to make a hamburger what you used to pay for a quarter of a pound of imported, line-caught, artisinally-smoked Scottish salmon. Never mind what the salmon costs these days.

That increase in beef prices drove people to chicken in increasingly growing droves. Which in turn inflated the price of chicken. In my supermarket the other day, chicken breasts were selling for something like eight bucks a pound. And now it’s about to get worse.

The New York Times reports a bird flu epidemic in the midwest and west that’s infecting chickens, forcing farmers to slaughter and destroy them. The infections can spread fast. That’s because the chickens are crammed together by the thousands — actually  the hundreds of thousands — in giant Buchenwaldish poultry barns. For example, the Times story mentioned that one egg farm was disposing of “about 5.5 million hens housed in 26 metal barns.” 

Do the arithmetic. We’re talking about over 192,000 hens per barn. Little wonder the USDA says that if you have an outbreak on a farm, every last chicken must die and then be cremated, composted, or buried. You can have enough infected chickens on one farm to infect the planet.

So now it’s a pretty good bet that the price of every kind of animal protein will move up a notch. The price of Scottish smoked salmon will cost what caviar used to cost. Steak will cost like Scottish smoked salmon. Chicken will cost like steak. 

That’s no skin off the noses of the one percent. If you’re earning a couple-a million bucks a year, so you pay 30 bucks extra for a sirloin steak. What’s the big deal? And why are all those middle class and working folks whining again?

As for the rest of us? Well, you remember what Marie Antoinette said. Or what she might have said, had she been living today.

“Let them eat cockroaches.”

A message concerning climate change – especially for those who like to eat something once in a while

I picked up a bag of raw shelled almonds at my local supermarket today. They wanted $9 for eight tenths of a pound. I remember when people blanched at paying that much for sirloin steak. 

All of which brings me to the point of today’s blog entry.

Think he's shafted? What 'till you find

out what climate change will to do you.

And please note that I’m addressing you climate deniers who can’t get it through your thick skulls that the weather isn’t merely a matter of opinion, and that polar bears aren’t the only ones up the creek without an ice floe.

You may have noticed frequent news reports about an historic drought in California, with the state imposing water rationing  while various parties, including, alas, some of my progressive friends, are grumbling that farmers who use 80 percent of the water aren’t getting rationed at all. Or at least not enough.

But wait a second. Just wait a damn second. California is America’s fruit and vegetable basket. According to a California state government report, the state two years ago was producing $5.6 billion worth of grapes, $1.7 billion worth of lettuce, $1.2 billion worth of tomatoes,$2.2 billion of strawberries and $5.8 billion of almonds.

If all that productivity dries up – and it already is drying up – you may be paying nine bucks per nut, and shaving it like a truffle. You won’t be able to afford a salad. Or a tomato. Or an orange.  Or a grape. Or a bottle of California wine. 

What’s that you say? Let them drink milk? Shucks, Mr. Denier. California produces $7.6 billion worth of milk, or was producing that much. And when people from California have to buy milk from out of state instead of shipping lots of it out of state, guess what happens to the price of milk all over America?

“Hey Joe, set ‘em up. A shot glass of milk with a beef broth chaser.”

No, wait a second. Forget the beef broth. Cattle are a $3.05 billion industry in California, too. And when the grass dries up and burns up….well of course you can get your beef cattle from Wyoming. But here comes your favorite law: supply and demand. Guess what you’re going to be paying for steak? Or beef broth.

It has already come to the point where a standing rib roast costs more than the first car I ever bought. Yes, I admit it was a used car and it was a very long time ago. But even so.

Climate change isn’t just changing the climate. And it isn’t just going to starve the polar bears. It’s going to starve you too, starting from the inside of your wallet and your bank account and then straight to your fat head, you knuckle-brained, climate change-denying, psychopathic nincompoop.

Quarter the production and quadruple the prices, a billion bucks worth here, a billion bucks worth there – and pretty soon you’re talking food riots in the street and bloodshed over a bunch of shriveled grapes.

Well of course, you’ll also be armed. Gun rights and self defense and all that. Good thing, too. Because if the climate change you’re denying, and the food shortage that goes along with it, keeps on going along, your gun will be the only thing you’ll have left to eat.

Bang!

Oh, and P.S.: