Word: beefing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...slaughter was dutifully recorded by television cameras and flashed into millions of American homes on network newscasts that evening. The point of the staged massacre was to draw White House attention to the cattlemen's plight. Caught between soaring feed-grain prices and depressed wholesale prices for their beef, farmers claim that they are losing money and in some cases facing bankruptcy. (Consumers have hardly noticed much drop in meat prices, but farmers suspect middlemen of raising their profit margins unjustifiably.) The farmers want relief in the form of emergency loans or reduced meat imports to kick up prices...
Slaughter is a barnacled publicity-getting gimmick used frequently by farmers in bad times. During the Depression, cattlemen killed entire herds because beef prices could not cover costs of livestock shipments. But with the slaughters occurring as they do in the midst of a growing awareness of the world food crisis, the farmers seem to have hurt their cause rather than helped it. President Ford called one Wisconsin slaughter "shocking and wasteful," saying it did nothing to solve the farmers' problem. The Humane Society of the U.S. condemned "the needless killing of any living creature ... for publicity purposes." Some...
...Justice Department also has begun digging on its own for evidence of collusion in suspiciously large price rises, rather than waiting for complaints as it usually does. Last week Saxbe disclosed that trustbusters are looking for evidence that price fixing is inflating the cost of such foods as beef, milk, bread and especially sugar, which in the past year has rocketed from 140 per Ib. wholesale to a record 460. The Council on Wage and Price Stability also will hold hearings to determine whether sugar refiners are making undue profits. Justice teams are further sifting through data about oil-company...
...agriculture. People in developing countries eat roughly 400 Ibs. of grain per capita annually (barely more than the pound daily they need for survival), mostly in the form of bread or gruel; but an American consumes five times that amount, mostly in the form of grain-fed beef, pork and chicken. The industrial world's way of eating is an extremely inefficient use of resources. For every pound of beef consumed, a steer has gobbled up 20 Ibs. of grain. Harvard Nutritionist Jean Mayer notes that "the same amount of food that is feeding 210 million Americans would feed...
...cent of fruits and vegetables going into processing, more than 90 per cent of the broilers (chicken), and a major part of the eggs, are produced under contracts with large corporations or groups. Large feedlots (over 1000 heads capacity) have taken over a dominant share in beef production in the last ten years. In California, large growers have formed marketing boards and growers' exchanges to control production (Sunkist, Sunmaid) and have compelled often by violent means, smaller growers to join. As early as 1939, California had 30 per cent of the large-scale farms of the United States...