Meat Disappears
Ham for Easter is as traditional as an Easter bonnet, but how about a mess of pig tail and greens for dinner? Or a pig's head, or pork rind cooked up with beans. Plenty of these less attractive odds and ends of the hog were on the counters yesterday. But we didn't see hams- not out on display. But there are some in hiding, of course, for the very best customers.
Clementine Paddleford, New York Herald Tribune
Perhaps foremost in the minds of consumers was the lack of meat in the market. In short supply since the last years of the war, meat virtually disappeared as Easter approached. Its absence was front-page news everywhere that week before Easter. In particular the Hearst papers, the Journal-American and the Mirror, played up the meat “famine” that was "gripping the city," blaming it on government interference and price controls. The New York Times, which had a more benign view of the New Deal, reported that the situation was far less dire than last year. Ham, lamb and beef might be missing from the groceries and butcher shops but chicken, turkey, duck and fish were plentiful, as were many fruits and vegetables.
Where did the ham and the rest of the meat go? Political ideology determined what people believed. The meat packers union and their liberal supporters said the major packers were withholding meat in an effort to pressure Congress to bring an early and permanent end to price controls. As a result, some 25,000 slaughter and warehouse workers had lost their jobs. They pointed to statistics that showed no sudden drop in the amount of livestock on the hoof that would account for the mysterious disappearance of meat.
On the other side, the big meat packers and conservatives blamed the shortages on New Deal interference with the operation of the free market. They said the farmers and ranchers refused to sell livestock at control prices. Most of the meat was flowing into a black market serviced by independent slaughterhouses and crooked butchers who flouted the rules and charged what they willed while the pens of the big slaughterhouses and the supermarket butcher counters, who were more closely monitored, stood empty. The American Meat Institute sponsored surveys that showed that most New York butchers participated in the black market and a large majority of consumers had bought black market meat, with more than a third of them buying on the black market on a regular basis. How could the legitimate, law-abiding corporations compete when they had government inspectors breathing down their neck? The meat packers produced ranchers who testified to Congress that they had to sell livestock on the black market if they were going to make a profit. It was the big packers and the supermarket chains who were the true victims here, Big Business sobbed. It was time for the government to eliminate price controls and to go after the independents, who had been increasing their market share since World War One.
To be fair, the smaller companies were better able to fly under the radar but by “free enterprise” the executives of these big corporations, like other Captains of Industry of the day, meant a government-supported oligopoly where the market was controlled by a handful of major players and competition was limited to the less profitable fringes. Under this system, which had prevailed in the early days of the century before the Progressives and their antitrust laws, fresh meat was a premium-priced commodity and the everyday fare of ordinary Americans was highly processed products like salt pork, slab bacon, and canned and packaged meats produced and sold at substantial profit by Swift, Armour and Hormel, which also supplied much of the premium cuts to butchers. The idea that everyone should eat steak was Communistic nonsense. It took all the fun out of being rich.