<it makes absolutely no sense that if I go to my local McDonald's that I would get fed Amazonian beef when it is destroying the ecosystem down there, and my neighbors can no longer make a living selling beef to me here in Central Oregon because of the intervention of a coterie of malicious middlemen. >
GeorgeW wears cowboy boots, but you'll notice he is rarely on a horse chasing steak around the paddock. That's because the cowboy has had his day. Now the cattle are in concentration camps with auto-feed systems, thousands of them crammed into small lots. There is no need to go looking for them they are cheek by jowl in the pen. I've seen them on the road from Los Angeles to San Jose.
Even though they are farmed so efficiently, with enormous fields of crops harvested with enormous machines, there is still a significant labour content in the meat from those cattle.
However, in the Amazon, labour is cheap and it is therefore presumably cheaper to produce beef there and ship it to Oregon than to get it from near San Jose. There is also a quality issue. Concentration camp beef is perhaps like modern fruit [big and good-looking but tastes like wallpaper paste with fibre added]. So maybe Amazonian beef tastes better.
But if you are worried about Amazonian beef destroying the ecosystem in Brazil, then they won't after you eat them!
Why should Americans work to produce beef when they can simply get Uncle Al to pixelate some more $$? The USA government hires Americans with freshly pixelated $$, who then send those $$ to Brazil and Argentina, who ship thousands of tons of beef to Oregon. They can keep doing that year in, year out. And do the same for Toyotas, and CDMA phones from Korea and oil from OPEC and mountains of stuff from China and so on and so on. A few pixelated photons for a steak is a great deal for those who know how to produce $photons.
The Oregon beef farmers need to get a real job [like working for Uncle Al, or CowboyW, or whoever he gives the newly-pixelated $$ to].
Mq |
