My wife found this article from a blog for Sugar Mountain Farm. It’s basically an education on the various cuts of pork (not the political kind, the actual meat) yet is interspersed with profound yet common sense lessons in economic justice.
Reality of Economics and Social Justice
All of the pig is good, nose-to-tail but some of the pig sells for a lot more than other parts. This is not a social injustice. This is simply an economic reality. There are only two tenderloins on a pig and twenty people want them. There is only so much bacon to a pig and virtually everybody wants that. You can’t buy a pig and ask for it to be all cut into chops and bacon – pigs just don’t work that way although I’m trying to get there through our selective breeding program.
Supply is limited and the rest of the pig must be eaten too in order to avoid waste. The people who are willing to pay the higher prices for the high demand cuts make the rest of the pig available at lower prices to the rest of us. Be thankful that the 1% likes and pays for tenderloin. This is not social injustice – this is just economic reality.
and …
When we’re out of one high demand cut some week we’ve had people say, “well just butcher another pig.” But it isn’t that simple. Without a market for enough of the pig we don’t want to take another pig every week. That would be wasteful, take up freezer space which uses energy and fail to encourage people to be more adventurous eaters. So sometimes we have the outtas. Sometimes we have to tell a new chef they’ll need to wait, they’ll need to work with us on this and earn seniority for picking the high demand cuts. The price of the high-on-the-hog cuts goes up and the low-on-the-hog goes down to adjust. This is economics. The process works, each week’s batch of pigs sells and we use the pigs nose-to-tail. For the most part.
This all goes to show you that even a pig farmer knows more about how the world and its economy works than the fat cats in Washington and the lackeys that march along to their failed ideologies. If we could only have them give up their own pork …
The sad truth is that this is does, for the most part, reflect how capitalism operate. Everyone gets a slice of the pig, some get a tiny slice, others get a large slice. Everyone looks in his own plate (greedily looks in other people’s plates), and no one wants to see the “invisible hand” behind the curtain that exploits, tortures, and eventually slaughters an innocent living being.