Have you been stockpiling meat?
I admit to freezing a few pork chops, along with a family-sized package of chicken thighs. If I had more refrigerator space, I would probably buy a ham.
I”m not proud of this, but like most shoppers, I expect the selection in the meat cases to dwindle. The dire news about COVID-19 deaths of workers at America’s packing plants doesn’t bode well for future supplies.
On Tuesday, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to keep these plants open. CBS reported that the administration would also issue guidelines limiting liability of employers, should their workers get sick.
It’s more than ironic that so many of these workers are the very immigrants Trump has tried to keep out of the country.
“The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States,” he declared while running for office.
Last year, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted to make a showing of its crackdown on illegal immigration, where did agents go? To poultry plants, where they rounded up hundreds of workers.
Also ironic is the fact that the owners of these plants, now being protected by the Trump administration, actively recruited Mexicans to man the packing lines.
As Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, pointed out last year in the Atlantic, “What Trump has described as an immigrant ‘invasion’ was actually a corporate recruitment drive for poor, vulnerable, undocumented, often desperate workers.”
Now, with the pandemic, these workers are not only desperate but essential.
Now they’re wanted.
It will be interesting to see if Trump quietly loosens restrictions on traffic over our southern border in order to maintain a steady stream of expendable, er, essential, workers.
The meat case at your local grocery will become not only a measure of the food supply, but of immigration policy.