, Columnist
The Coronavirus Won’t Bring the End of Big Meat
The changes needed to prevent outbreaks at processing plants are easiest for the largest ones to implement.
Don’t ask how it got there.
Photographer: Krystianna Wrocki/Bloomberg
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There’s one obvious culprit in the looming U.S. meat crisis being driven by the spread of Covid-19: The decline of the American slaughterhouse.
Despite being the world’s second-largest meat consumer after China, the country stuns, kills and dismembers almost all of its annual production of 130 million pigs, 33.6 million cows and 2.3 million sheep in just over 800 facilities. Five decades ago there were more than 10 times as many.1