Word: meats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Funny, but soon after NBC Newscaster Chet Huntley said that the nation's meat industry was "sick" and that one of the consumer's greatest problems was "too much fat in our beef," a new viand went on sale in New York. The product: Chet Huntley's Nature Fed Beef, advertised by pictures of a lean and hungry Chet and by promises of "quality and flavor, plus low fat and high protein." The fat was in the fire, and NBC, prodded by a local packer, ordered Huntley to trim his name and face from the chopped chuck...
...average American this year will eat 170 Ibs. of red meat, and the typical family will spend at least 5% of its income to buy it. These superlatives-no nation eats or spends more-somehow do not make housewives and wage earners as happy as they should, and for good reason: the average price of a pound of choice beef, which seems to be what most Americans buy, is 810 v. 680 ten years...
Prices in general have gone up since then, of course, but meat presents a special paradox. While its price has. stayed high, the amount the rancher gets for beef cattle has been falling, is now the lowest since 1956. Last week no less a cattleman-and consumer-than Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to unravel the paradox by appointing a 15-member national commission on food to investigate food prices, particularly those of beef...
What bothers Johnson and many another beefeater is that meat prices remain high even though distribution techniques have radically improved. Once, all cattle were trucked to feed lots for fattening, sold at stockyards, slaughtered, wholesaled and finally retailed-and each middleman sent the price a bit higher. Today, 110 supermarket chains sell almost 50% of all the meat eaten in the U.S. Some operate their own feed lots and slaughterhouses; the rest buy in bulk at favorable prices. By all the laws of economics and common sense, beef prices should be falling...
...record high of 24.90. Cattlemen blame this disparity on what they angrily call "supermarket barons." In fact, supermarkets buy in such large volume that they are practically able to name their own price for beef on the hoof. Says John Fryer, research director of the 75,000-member meat packers' union: "If the A. & P. comes to Swift and says, 'We want a million pounds of wieners at 100 a pound' and Swift says 'No,' then A. & P. takes its order elsewhere." Such critics insist that the large chains ought to be able to pass...