A MORTGAGE FOR MEAT

We do not go to the butcher store very often. We don’t eat a lot of meat, so it is often some time in between butcher store visits.

Well, talk about “sticker shock!” We stopped in a busy butcher store in Queens, NY and almost fainted at the price of meat.

When we were growing up (admittedly a long time ago), skirt steaks were considered offal. As a result they were very, very cheap. Not no more they ain’t! How’s $16 per pound sound? Wowzers! Hey Toto, it ain’t offal no more- not at that price.

We wandered over to the rib steaks. Plain old, nothing extraordinary rib steaks were $12 per pound. A chuck roast (good for potting and not much else) was $9 per pound. Ground chuck hamberger was $6 per pound. As a point of comparison, when we were in college, a pound of ground chuck was fifty cents per pound. (Then again, a container of yogurt or a can of tuna fish were only twentyfive cents.) A whole minute steak roast (complete with the membrane on top adding to the weight), was over $8 per pound.

A friend who owns a kosher take out store tells us that he pays $1.59/pound for whole chickens. That’s wholesale, boys and girls!

Hey, did we sleep through the winter and early spring? Is it Passover already?? If that is what prices are now, what will they be come Passover?

The shame of it all is that we are sure that there are many people for whom kosher meat has simply become prohibitively expensive. And that is tragic.

There must be someone who can do something about this. Why is no one trying? Where are the big, national agencies? Why aren’t all our rabbis (this one included) standing up and screaming? We have no answer. Perhaps some of our readers might?