And Again
It’s Groundhog Day. The market, like the movie, happens over and over, mostly the same. Patrons shop the same vendors. Vendors in their same spots. As for the real rodents, they’re still snuggled deep in their burrows away from the cold. I haven’t seen a single warren dug open or one who didn’t make it across the road. But I know soon they’ll be everywhere.
No, this time we are experiencing Groundhog Day Bill Murray style, but not in a fun way.
We’ve seen this before and it didn’t end well then. I’m talking about a pandemic, one with the capacity to upend our food supply or worse. Sure, there have been egg shortages and empty grocery store shelves before. Give it a week or month and all will be back to normal.
Only it’s not.
I’d give anything to have a farmer back in the Oval Office, but we’re stuck with a commander-in-chief who doesn’t believe there’s anything wrong so much, he’s pulled us out of the World Health Organization. I guess if you leave the club that doesn’t make you the super-spreader. I don’t know where everyone else gets their news, but mine tends to come from outlets that cover agricultural issues. From what I’m seeing, those same farmers who were begging for government intervention in their mega-dairies less than a year ago when their cows and workers first fell ill changed their tune to stay out of our business. They are calling it overreach and telling state health officials to back off.
But scientists are scientists for a reason. It’s their job to solve problems and they’re not going to let politics get in the way of tracking a potential pandemic. Even the Principal Deputy Director of the CDC said at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting earlier this year acknowledged the threat by saying, “We’ve all seen how a virus can spread around the globe before public health has even had a chance to get its shoes on.” They wanted to err on the side of caution by sending federal teams to farms to monitor the health of farm workers. With the CDC involved, they are obviously looking for avian influenza in people, otherwise APHIS (Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service over) at the USDA would be running the show. They’re the ones responsible for tracking diseases among livestock.
But officials continue to play political football between state agriculture offices and federal agencies. At the start of this outbreak even Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Agriculture tried to pawn this off as a workforce concern and not a public health issue. But it seems like every time I open my local news apps there’s another story about H5N1 being detected here in PA—a commercial flock of layers in Lehigh County and wild geese at Gettysburg College—both this week. Call me Chicken Little, but this has the potential to affect my business and you, dear customers.
Another bit of recent news that hit hard was the order to halt all federal public health updates from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and FDA (Food & Drug Agency) until further notice. Are you f#@*&~g kidding me?
So let me lay it out for you. Those are the two federal agencies responsible for tracking diseases that are spread between food and people. The reports and websites are information that have been bought and paid for by our tax dollars. It’s critical data for our public health officials and farmers to be able to coordinate as to what is happening with what the New York Times called “a dangerous virus” just last week. Three days prior they reported about Crescent Duck Farm having to destroy over 100,000 infected ducks on Long Island.
Let’s just add that to the more than 140 million domestic commercial poultry that have already been culled for bird flu. That’s what is causing the prices to rise in your weekly dozen of eggs, your fried chicken, your Thanksgiving turkey, and now your Lunar New Year duck. One of these days it won’t be about price, but about access.
Over 1,300 dairies in 16 states have been infected since March 2024. At least the cows are not de-populated. Imagine what effect that would have on milk, cheese, butter, and ice cream prices.
Oh, and we haven’t even begun to discuss the human factor of this impending train wreck.
Who do you think milks cows and works in commercial poultry houses? I’ll give you one big undocumented guess. It’s the most marginalized and vulnerable of the immigrant populations. These are the people who want to fly under the radar and are willing to accept the most egregious working conditions. Un-docu-ment-ed, meaning not only that they don’t have the proper papers to reside and work in this country, but when they get sick and/or die from an infection that could be a simmering pandemic one mutation away from a rolling boil, well folks, that’s one Groundhog Day movie I care not to watch again, but the way it’s going, it doesn’t look good.