First they came for the straws. Now, they’re coming for the bacon.
California seems like a confusing place. With so many actual societal problems that could use more attention, the state is instead choosing to focus their time on essentially trying to ban bacon.
And this isn’t a joke about pork barrel political spending, it’s literally about potentially outlawing the world’s favorite breakfast meat, or at least making it much harder to buy.
I mean what’s next. Banning beer? Banning jokes? Banning sex?
Isn’t the second amendment in place to defend things like bacon?
Get it together California.
The situation is being called the Great California Bacon Crisis. It’s a result of a citizen driven ballot proposition that was passed in 2018 while being framed as an animal welfare initiative.
The measures will go into at the beginning of 2022 thanks to the Humane Society of the United States attempt to take advantage of California’s political climate to disrupt the meat-based food supply chain. While it’s going to have the biggest impact in California, it causing issues in other parts of the country as well.
In order for meat products to be sold in California the facilities where livestock is raised must comply with certain square footage requirements, and while those new requirements are expected to have little impact on beef and chicken production, it will greatly impact hog production.
Californians currently consume about 255 million pounds of pork a month, but the state only produces about 45 million of those pounds themselves. The vast majority of pork in America comes from Iowa, and reportedly only 4% of hog production facilities in Iowa currently comply with California’s new requirements.
If pork producers are going to retrofit their operations to comply, it’s going to cause pork prices to sky rocket. If they don’t adjust how they operate then they risk losing the ability to sell their products to the huge California market. It’s truly a lose-lose situation that is either going to cost farmers money or cause the rest of America to pay for California’s stupidity.
According to NPR, the situation could cause bacon prices to jump by more than 60% and it could cost some farmers millions of dollars in production value.
While national pork prices may eventually settle back down after producers have the chance to modify their operations, it is expected to cause a major pork shortage and insane prices in California in the mean time. Unless courts intervene, there is expected to be virtually no bacon in stores in or restaurants in the state early next year.
I can’t wait for the videos of people brawling in grocery stores over the last package of bacon.
There are already reports of people stockpiling bacon in California and many folks are starting to regret not giving this idea more attention in 2018 when it received very little pushback while becoming a law.
