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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

In the US there are three major meat producers that dominate the market and thus when they go down, so goes the meat. Europe on the other hand has lots and lots of smaller producers, often focused on the local area, and no one dominates. Right now in Europe there is no meat shortage. Distributed production is less likely to be disrupted. It's less cost effective (from a pure business perspective) but much more robust in the face of problems.

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Worth mentioning as well that the cost of meat in an EU grocery store is comparable to that in the US. However you aren't likely to find the super-cheap 'CostCo/WalMart' class of meat in the EU.

It wouldn't surprise me if the fast food industry in the US has basically driven the smaller producers out of business by giving the larger producers better efficiencies.

Minor nitpick: Costco does not sell cheap meat. They don’t sell cheap anything, really. They sell high quality products in bulk, which makes them less expensive than buying comparable quality products at other retailers. But there is a whole class of low quality products that you simply will not find at Costco.

That's a major nitpick! And accurate - Costco is the best way to source expensive high-quality meat as a mere individual consumer.

> you aren't likely to find the super-cheap 'CostCo/WalMart' class of meat in the EU

Part of that is probably that style of meat being regulated against. I don't personally eat meat, but I know that one of the concerns that people have with a potential US trade deal is the lowering of meat-safety standards.

>Worth mentioning as well that the cost of meat in an EU grocery store is comparable to that in the US.

We did a three week tour of the UK last August and cooked most meals... the cost of meat at chains like Tesco, Sainsburys, and Waitrose was comparable with US national chains, but the quality was far superior. As you point out, I didn't see any mega packs of cheap chicken breasts or pork ribs. I felt too like the quality of fruits and vegetables was on par with our high-end stores for prices similar to our "typical" stores.

Costco/Walmart is an inaccurate bucketing because they are completely different stores tailored to entirely opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.

I have been shouting this point (the preferability of distributed, redundant means of production) vs. ( large-hyperoptimized/hyperspecialized, maximally-centralized means of production) for years, but you might as well not even bother. All business/finance centric folk see is redundant waste in the face of a perfectly efficient minimal input consuming industrial monolith that falls down to a stiff breeze and brings everything else down with it.

This very contention played out during the country's founding in the constant friction between the Federalists and anti-Federalists which tended to line up with either a Jeffersonian economic approach vs. a Hamiltonian economic approach which I'm fairly sure had roots in the contrasting philosophies of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes... It probably goes back further, but that's as far as I've traced it.

> All business/finance centric folk see is redundant waste in the face of a perfectly efficient minimal input consuming industrial monolith that falls down to a stiff breeze and brings everything else down with it.

What do people look for when they pick an ETF to invest their retirement savings in?

They look for highest return, lowest fees. You get what you pay for.

In many cases I agree that you get what you pay for, but low-fee passive funds actually tend to outperform higher-fee actively managed funds, even before taking fees into account.

That’s my point. People want returned, they don’t want to support distributed farming that results in robust distribution with redundancies. All of that reduces returns and costs more. So we get what we pay for.

Actually, if all these small farms are looking to expand, I'd love to invest in a few. I've been buying from these types of things all my life, when I can.

>It's less cost effective (from a pure business perspective)

Perhaps it's because we live in a rural area, but my kids and I talk about this a lot. For example... our area is a major onion producer. But guess what? In our major national chain grocery store right now you'll find onions from Vidalia, Georgia - trucked from the other side of the country.

Our area also produces a lot of wheat, that then gets shipped 4 and 5 hours away to two major cities with large commercial bakeries, who then put the loaves of bread on trucks and ship the bread back to our local stores. Now granted, those loaves of bread get sent to lots of other places too, so I'm not discounting that there may be an efficiency overall, but nonetheless there is a local irony... once upon a time every town in this area had a local butcher, baker, creamery, etc - and now instead we produce the raw produce here and it comes back to us as value-added good from elsewhere.

And on top of that, even without disruption it tends to provide more varied, better quality meat.

I am a Yankee (now in upstate New york) through and through but I love Southern style bbq pork where you buy a whole hog from the farmer down the road. Also I like lamb and other meats from the Halal supply chain.

I was talking to a neighbor who has a large garden this morning and she told me that she sold $2500 of tomatoes to a bistro last summer and those are definitely better than california or greenhouse tomatoes when in season.

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