Good Meat, Bad Practices

Good Meat, Bad Practices…

Unlike butchers of the past, the craft butcher defines themselves not just as someone that drags a knife, stocks a case, and dispenses with a recipe or two. The craft butcher has been a proxy for the farmer, an advocate for social programs such as SNAP, and a conduit into a world that is obfuscated by regulatory jargon. Some of us have farmed, hunted, cooked in kitchens or worked in slaughterhouses. But, we are all bonded by a single phrase; We don’t sell meat, we sell trust. We echo this phrase to each other, we teach it to our apprentices and our students. It is the antithesis of the industrialized, commodity system. 

This past May a former employee of Bel Campo, a vertically integrated meat company founded in 2012  with the purpose “to create meat that’s good for people, planet and animals.” ,that started as “one mom’s desire to feed her family the healthiest meat possible”, exposed the company through a series of Instagram stories as a fraud. By controlling its entire chain of supply, Belcampo was able to operate in a shroud of secrecy. The company marketed their organic, pasture raised, and 100% grass-fed meat, raised on their own farm through a network of shops, restaurants across California, in NYC, and online. The employee posted to Instagram a series of videos revealing the company has been selling other brands’ products and labeling them as their own. Aggregation is not uncommon in the industry, even selling aggregated product under one’s own label. The issue here is that Belcampo’s narrative of a vertically integrated company, sourcing only from its farm, was clearly a lie. In addition, some of  the products Belcampo sourced did not meet their own standards for organic and grass-fed, even though they were sold as such. An apology video was posted to CEO, Anya Fernalds, Instagram page, that deflected responsibility from leadership and placed it on one rogue shop, claimed it was an isolated incident, and that supply chain issues due to Covid-19 necessitated their need to source outside the company, even though they continually posted to social media that they were not experiencing any disruptions due to their own secure supply chain.  Several former employees, under conditions of anonymity due to Belcampo’s widespread use of NDA’s began making allegations of widespread fraud relating to the sourcing, relabeling, and selling of non-Belcampo product. 

To many of us in the good meat world the exposure of Bel Campos actions comes as no surprise. Since the genesis of the good meat movement there has been a constant pressure to grow, to scale. The only way to survive is to mimic the model of the commodity system, vertically integrate, and control all aspects of the supply chain. Even though we’ve seen time and time again the inherent weaknesses in this system. And so in employing these measures, some have become what we have been fighting against.  Values and ethics alone are not enough to keep you in business. But in violating the core tenants of our trade, we jeopardize the reason for our being. Belcampo’s lack of transparency stands in stark contrast to the ethical tenets of craft butchers, like Hudson & Charles, who can always verify the quality of their meat. Not only because of the symbiotic relationship with our local farmers, but because our business is run on a sustainable whole animal model that encourages customer education.  But this is not an argument about grass fed versus grain finished, boxed meat models versus a whole animal model.  This is about honesty and integrity. This is about not lying to your consumer base. 

Good meat has a bad problem and it existed long before the exposure of Bel Campo’s leadership. While greenwashing is a term mostly associated with the restaurant world, it’s roots are also deeply planted in the butcher world. A thumb on the scale has been replaced by a heartfelt social media post, causing far more damage. Affirming confirmational biases and lulling the consumer into a false sense of security. Photos of farm visits, trays and cutting boards stacked with meat and sausages, staff, heads down and knives sharp all belie a much darker truth. That for some in our trade the pressure and realities of owning and operating their  own business has caused them to flout the values it’s all built upon. For some it might be ego and narcissism, for others a fear of failing. But the results seem to be the same, small family farmers don’t get paid, employees suffer abuse, and consumers are misled.

Food media has exacerbated this problem with hyperbolic praise for some. Very seldom does a statement get challenged or questioned. I don’t fully condemn food journalists, the agricultural landscape is a convoluted mess that even those of us deeply embedded have difficulty making sense of. But it appears as if content for coverage is the currency traded in. Supply us with the type of content that our readers want and we’ll keep it flowing to them. More advertisement than journalism. But who then do we rely on to help uphold accountability?  We need to hold those in the good meat industry accountable. We need to hold ourselves accountable.  A closed mouth doesnt get fed. 

Our industry is a tiny fraction of the meat industry as a whole, but we are a passionate and vocal few. Our impact has clearly been seen over the years. There’s a reason why the meat counter at some Whole Foods’ looks like a traditional butcher shop. It's why you see hanging carcasses in their glassed coolers, why food manufactures have adopted the lexicon that we helped establish, and why traditional trade magazines, more sympathetic to the industrial model, have featured some of the most prominent figures and voices from our tiny part of the world. And this is why Belcompo’s and others in our industry actions are so devastating.

Belcampos apology (and the ones that should be given by others in this industry) does very little to help the true victims of their fraud. It deflects from the reality that they have endangered the livelihood of many of us in this industry. Their selfish actions have given fuel to the anti-meat movement and the propaganda that surrounds it. It will embolden the commodity meat producers that have long said the good meat movements models don’t work. This erosion of trust stands to jeopardize everything my colleagues and I have given our lives to.

But, of all the lies Belcampo has perpetrated over the years, I find none worse than the lie that they had any intention to be the change in our food system they claimed to be. In fact there would seem to be every indication that Belcampo’s only intention was to elevate the platform of its co-founder Fernald and other leadership and to  continue their legacy of generational wealth, access to capital, and privilege that so many have been denied. A section of their website  reads “We’re transforming the food system one farm, one community, one table at a time”, yet there are large segments of the communities that Belcampo operates in left out of this transformation. In an effort to help the most vulnerable in our communities, The Butchers Guild, during the height of the pandemic,  set out to assist shops in navigating the often confusing process of applying for and accepting SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) in their businesses. After several messages to discuss SNAP with Belcampo and more than a few deleted social media posts when those attempts went unanswered (a tactic Belcampo pursued in scrubbing negative comments from Anya’s apology as they amplified those of supporters and paid social media influencers) an answer, equating to we’ll look into it, was given. Unfortunately, it's a refrain I have heard all too often throughout my career. What came as more of a shock were allegations of rotten meat being sent out as donations during the pandemic, and in true Belcampo character, denials, deflection, and yet again the blame being placed on others.

But there is hope. We are strong and resilient. Flexible and intelligent. We are not one model, but many models all with the same goal. Not to feed the world, but to feed those in our community. To do it with honesty and integrity. We don’t need to own every part of the supply chain. We know what we are good at and we rely on others within the  good meat community to perform the tasks we can’t. We may not all survive but the system continues.  We’re not here to disrupt anything  or to license our techniques which aren’t ours. We are simply trying to honor what was done before us by building community with trust.