Business & Finance: Low Meat

Last fall, when 5,000 New York City kosher butchers staged a widely-publicized meat strike, even U. S. bachelors recognized a situation which had irked U. S. housewives all year—meat prices were at a six-year peak (TIME, Oct. 4 & 18). By mid-January the U. S. Department of Agriculture recorded retail meat prices way down from their peaks of September 30—sirloin steak from 48¢ to 32¢ a lb., leg of lamb from 29¢ to 26¢, pork chops from 42¢ to 29¢, veal cutlets from 43¢ to 39¢. By last week wholesale cattle prices were off 43% since September 30, lambs 37%, hogs 37% and cattlemen were marketing their herds at losses. In the offing loomed a grave agricultural problem, for meat animals produce almost a quarter of U. S. farm income. Therefore the Institute of American Meat Packers last week undertook to mobilize “the entire meat packing industry from office boys to company presidents in a nationwide effort to get increased interest in livestock products.”

There are 800 U. S. meat packers. The 300 that belong to I. A. M. P. do 90% of the total business of processing U. S. meat. The industry’s annual sales volume is about $3,000,000,000. Last week’s mobilisation started off with a luncheon in the Red Lacquer Room of Chicago’s Palmer House for 457 such friends of the livestock and meat industry as Chairman William Bishop Warner of the National Association of Manufacturers, Hotelman Ralph Hitz, Railroader John Jeremiah Pelley, Editor Glenn Frank, Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick. Convening from all over the nation, the 457 spent 180 minutes eating sirloin beef roast and hearing how the I. A. M. P. was girding up its sirloins to battle against underconsumption.

To prove that underconsumption (not the cattleman’s frequent other trouble, overproduction) is to blame, Chairman Thomas E. Wilson of Wilson & Co. announced that while “normal” U. S. per capita consumption of meat is 146 lb. per year, consumption last year was only 120 lb.. a difference equivalent to 5,600,000 head of cattle. Normal cattle population of the U. S.: 65,000,000. I. A. M. P. plans a nationwide advertising campaign to make people eat up the surplus. Theme: “Market supplies of livestock are such that there is an abundance of meat of improved quality available at attractive prices.”