Tone Deaf News Stories 1

WaPo has an article on the front page about how expensive meat has gotten.

All I can say is the Washington Metro area must have had it good for the past decade. I’ve had sticker shock on the price of meat since I moved back to Pittsburgh. It has been this way since 2014 at least. For years while I was in the dark days of partial employment, I debated whether to buy even ground beef. It was ridiculous.

There were two reasons why it got so expensive. One, the price of gas was sky high. During 2013-2014, a gallon of gas hovered around $4.00. Two, we were sending a lot of meat to China. Demand in other parts of the world means that large meat producing corporations can make a killing by sending it overseas and let Americans deal with the economics 101 fallout.

The prices never came down. So, even if meat prices go up a smidge, I don’t notice it anymore. It’s still very expensive to buy steaks. I bought short ribs for Easter. It was about three pounds. Don’t even ask. They were delicious but at this price, they will always be a special occasion food. I’ve even switched to chicken thighs over breasts.

By contrast to the meat inflation that happened seven years ago, the increases this year are extremely modest. Beef is up 3.3% according to WaPo. So an already unaffordable single steak that costs about $10.25 here is now about $10.58. Omg, get my smelling salts. A steak at $10.25 was already more than my budget could handle for a barbecue of more than 4 people. At $10.58 it is a bridge too far. I mean, that’s like a whole extra (getting calculator, rounding up, multiplying by 4) $1.34!! Total. Have they no shame? Oh the yumanity!!

The comments section over at WaPo has a lot of smug vegetarians preaching about how cruel it is to eat animals. That’s just effing annoying. I’m sick of eating quinoa and kale. Give me a porterhouse any summer weekend. I want to experience the juicy, fatty mouthfeel of charred cow flesh like my ancient ancestors did. I am not ashamed.

By the way, did you notice that gas prices go up whenever a Democrat takes office? It’s almost like the oil cartel likes to make us feel the pain when Democrats are in charge so voters turned to Republicans in the next election or something. All the more reason to switch to some other sustainable power source. They think they’ve got us by the short hairs and I resent it.