by Michael
If you love to cook, this upcoming Thanksgiving may be a real challenge for you. Thanks to the resurgence of bird flu, turkey supplies are getting tighter. Unfortunately, the same goes for eggs. And as you’ll see below, reduced milk production is sending the price of butter into the stratosphere. Thanks to rising prices, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner will be out of reach for millions of American families this year, and that’s extremely unfortunate. Of course, this is all happening against the backdrop of a horrific global food crisis that is getting worse by the day. Yes, things are bad now, but they will get much worse this time next year.
The bird flu pandemic that has killed tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys was supposed to go away in the hot summer months, but it didn’t. And now that the weather is starting to cool down again, there’s been a resurgence of bird flu and that’s “devastating turkey and egg operations in the heart of the country”…
Turkeys are selling at record high prices ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday as a resurgence of bird flu wipes out US supplies.
Avian flu is devastating egg and turkey operations in the heart of the country. If only one bird gets it, the entire flock is culled to stop the spread. Millions of chickens and turkeys have died in recent weeks. As a result, turkey hen prices are nearly 30% higher than a year ago and 80% higher than pre-pandemic costs. Equally concerning are inventories of whole turkeys, which are the lowest for the US winter holiday season since 2006. That means there will be little inflation relief for Thanksgiving dinner.
In the coming months, we could see tens of millions more chickens and turkeys culled.
Egg prices have already tripled by 2022 and the price of turkey meat has increased by 60 percent. Unfortunately, this is likely just the beginning…
Turkey hens cost $1.82 a pound this week, according to Urner Barry, compared to $1.42 last year and $1.01 before the pandemic. Meanwhile, wholesale egg prices are at $3.62 a dozen as of Wednesday, the highest ever, down from the previous record of $3.45 a dozen set earlier this year, John Brunnquell said , CEO of Egg Innovations, one of America’s largest producers of free-range eggs. Consumers have seen grocery store egg prices triple this year, while turkey meat rose a record 60 percent, according to a Cobank report.
Meanwhile, butter supplies are also steadily dwindling…
Lower milk production at U.S. dairy farms and labor shortages at processing plants have weighed on butter production for months, leaving butter in cold storage facilities across the U.S. United at the end of July the lowest since 2017, according to the Department of Agriculture.
The tight supply has pushed up butter prices in US supermarkets, outpacing most other foods last year. U.S. grocery prices in August rose 13.5% over the past 12 months, the biggest annual increase since 1979, according to the Labor Department. Butter topped those gains, rising 24.6% over the same period.
The trends driving the price of butter up are not going away anytime soon and we are therefore being warned to brace ourselves for “high” prices for the foreseeable future…
The forces at work in butter highlight the challenge of reducing inflation. Economic pressures fueling high livestock feed prices, labor shortages and other factors could persist, keeping prices of kitchen staples high over the long term.
To me, spreading a big hunk of butter on a piece of warm bread is one of the best things about Thanksgiving.
And most of us will keep buying butter no matter how much it goes up.
But the truth is that rapidly rising food prices are forcing large numbers of Americans to adjust their shopping habits. Here’s an example…
For Carol Ehrman, cooking is a joyful experience.
“I love to cook, it’s my favorite thing to do,” she said. She especially enjoys cooking Indian and Thai food, but storing the spices and ingredients she needs for these dishes is no longer feasible. “When each ingredient has gone up, that adds up to the total bill,” he said.
“What used to cost us $250 to $300 … now it’s $400.” Ehrman, 60, and her husband, 65, rely on their Social Security income, and the increase was stretching their budget. “We couldn’t do that.”
The global food crisis is beginning to affect many Americans and we must understand that this crisis is still only in its early stages.
David Beasley is the head of the United Nations World Food Program and he’s actually using the word “hell” to describe what 2023 may bring…
“It’s a perfect storm on top of a perfect storm,” Beasley said. “And with the fertilizer crisis we’re facing right now, with the droughts, we’re facing a food price problem in 2022. That created havoc all over the world.”
“If we don’t get it done quickly, and I don’t mean next year, I mean this year, you’re going to have a food availability problem by 2023,” he said. “And this is going to be hell.”
The World Food Program continues to sound the alarm, but very few of us in the Western world seem to be taking these warnings very seriously.
People are literally starving in some areas of the world right now, and a new report just released by the WFP says there are 19 “hot spots” where we could see a “massive loss of life” between October and January. ..
The World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have published a new report that describes countries that are “already dying of hunger or on the brink of disaster”.
WFP and FAO found 19 hunger hotspots worldwide, with most countries in Africa, the Middle East and even some in Central America. They call for urgent humanitarian action between October 2022 and January 2023 to avoid “enormous loss of life”.
Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Yemen and Haiti are labeled as “points of greatest concern”, facing catastrophic levels of hunger.
The kind of famines we were warned about are starting to happen before our eyes, but most people simply won’t care as long as they don’t starve.
What these people fail to realize is that this global food crisis will continue to spread.
As food supplies become increasingly scarce, prices will continue to rise and shortages will become more frequent.
We are truly in unprecedented territory, and the pain that lies ahead will greatly impact all the lemmings who continued to assume that everything was going to work out somehow.
