It was a revolution of peanut butter sandwiches.
Hundreds of thousands of American women — mostly suburban, middle-class mothers who did not work outside the home — boycotted the meat industry from April 1 to April 8, 1973. They refused to buy beef, pork, and lamb, setting the table instead with “onion quiche, vegetable chow mein with cashews and lots of cheese and eggs,” according to the New York Times. They held rallies and passed out meatless menus with what the paper called “genteel militance.” The protests made national news, earned a political cartoon on the cover of Time magazine, and left meat magnates fuming.
That year, meat prices were about as bad as they are now. In March 1972, ground beef cost sixty-nine cents per pound, or the equivalent of $5.03 in November 2024. (In November 2024, ground beef cost $5.63 per pound.) As one shopper told the Times: “I’m not buying. I’m just looking at the prices and laughing.”
Prices soared so high that canned ham heists were popping up on the interstates. Latter-day cowboys plucked up unbranded, free-grazing cattle, selling them for as much as $500 a head, according to the Times. One hundred pheasants, intended for shooting practice, were stolen from a trap and field club in Pennsylvania. Inventories were low, and opportunism was high.
The causes of the price surge were, as they are now, variable. Some attributed it to a blighted Soviet grain harvest, which sent them to buy up $1.2 billion worth of US grain that otherwise would have served as livestock feed at home. Some attributed it to Richard Nixon’s generous spending on farmers during his reelection campaign the previous year. And some pointed to that messy web of inflation causes and effects, which included the…
Auteur: Olivia Oldham
