I mentioned this yesterday on another thread - but I sometimes reach out to mobile pantries rin by the Mid-South (Memphis) Food Bank, due to high medical bills for my wife, who has cancer.
We have always been treated good at these events, and I usually drive away with a goodly amount of fresh, frozen or decent quality “rescue” food.
But yesterday at tne mobile pantry I attended, they were loading one 40 pound box of frozen chicken thighs into each car that drove up, until all the boxes were gone.
These boxes (on pallets) were shipped directly from the Tyson chicken processing plant in Eastern Arkansas to the Mid-South Food Bank facility in Memphis. Tyson sent an entire tractor trailer load of this meat (not all thighs) to the food bank, or so I was told.
The folks at the food bank warehouse then sent a full pallet of unopened boxes to each of their the mobile food pantry sites, where the pallets are broken down, and one box is loaded into each car, no matter how many (or how few) people the car was there to collect food for.
The chicken thighs themselves were the same high quality that you buy at your local grocery store, but there was no effort by Tyson to package them into individual family size units. They literally tossed 40 pounds worth of chicken thighs into a big, resin coated box meant to hold frozen meat, put the lid on the box, and froze it in one of their super deep freezers that freezes stuff at 100 degrees below, or whatever. Believe me, those super freezers DO FREEZE stuff more throughly than normal freezers.
When common, ordinary yokels like me got the thighs home, they were so frozen that I was literally up till 4am this morning, struggling to separate the pieces so that I could repackage some of it, cook some of it for right now, and get the rest ready for canning in my new pressure canner.
Of course, I cannot begin to tell you just how grateful I am to get that meat - even if I lost most of a night’s sleep repackaging it.
But in light of all the comments I read here, and what I hear in the daily Boots on the Ground reports, I have been trying to figure out how my overly generous - if deeply frozen - box of donated meat fits into the overall picture of what is going on in this country right now.
First of all, with chicken shortages in many parts of the country - how is it that a large number of families in Memphis (at least 200 at my mobile pantry alone, by my best estimate) were given 40 pounds of high quality, frozen Tyson chicken thighs in the first place? We are more likely to be given “rescue” food than a large quantity of high quality meat, when we roll through a mobile food pantry.
That is the easier question to answer, IMHO.
Ours is the closest Feeding America food bank to the massive Tyson chicken plant. It would take less diesel and fewer trucking resources to ship the meat to our food bank, than to any other - although I feel certain that the Little Rock food bank will get a similar donation as we got. They might be a little farther down the road, but they are close neighbors nonetheless.
But what about the way it was packaged? Most individual families will have difficulty with the frozen, bulk donation. I spent all evening and night trying to break individual pieces free to repackage them. If Tyson had broken the meat down into smaller packages - say plastic bags with only 10 pounds of meat each - they could feed a whole lot more families. One 40 pound box could feed 4 families instead of just one. Tyson’se PR folks would be able to announce to the world that they had fed 4 times as many hungry families with that donation, than they can when bulk boxes are donated.
So - as I busied myself defrosting and repackaging the huge box of meat - I began to ask myself: what does this donation tell us about the state of affairs in this country?
It looks to me like Tyson is NOT suffering from a shortage of birds to process - at least not at their East Arkansas facility.
If there was a bird shortage - why would they have donated that large of a quantity to individual families in a nearby state?
But this IS an unusual donation…
If it is not a bird shortage, than what IS the problem?
Plastic shortage, perhaps?
To divide this meat up into 5 or 10 pound packages would require alot more plastic - to make up the bags the 10 pounds would be stored in.
Diesel or truck/trucker shortage?
Very likely.
Folks seeing chicken shortages in their local grocery stores probably don’t live just a hop, skip and a jump from the Tyson chicken processing plant, like the Mid South Food Bank does.
What do I think this tells us?
The chicken shortage in your stores might not be so much the result of bird shortages as it is Tyson does not have enough packaging materials (plastic, styrofoam, etc) to package all of the birds coming into their plants.
Rather than let the meat go to waste for lack of packaging materials, Tyson elected to package some ot it in a “bulky” way that would require significantly less plastic but would preclude most retail sales.
I think it also tells us that trucking costs have gotten so high that it is financially more adventageous for Tyson to donate the food to a nearby food bank for free than it is to ship it to your hometown grocery (in the normal, individual family packaging), where they could sell the product at the current, prevailing price.
Just my humble opinion, of course, coupled with intelligence coming from this website and SouthernPrepper1’s Boots on the Ground.