Grace Worwa – Opinion Columnist
Gyro Fridays are a Gustie favorite; it’s a well-known fact. However, you all may have noticed that something has been missing from the caf’s gyro station since September.
That something is lamb, and although its absence may feel nothing short of a catastrophe, it represents only a teeny tiny scratch in the gaping wound that the pandemic has gouged in the meat processing industry. By feeling our way down the supply chain, we can explore how our lambless gyros are symptomatic of a nationwide meat crisis.
First, let’s get one thing straight. The “lamb” gyro meat is not 100 percent lamb. It is not even 25 percent lamb, or 10 percent. In fact, it was a blend of beef and lamb, with lamb as a very secondary ingredient. I know, it’s shocking, but this is coming straight from Dining Service Purchasing Manager Shari Jacobson.
“We never just got plain lamb gyro cones. It was mostly beef with some lamb in the recipe for the cone,” Jacobson said.
There you go.
Now, even if our “lamb” meat wasn’t pure lamb, it is still worth asking why the all-beef gyro cone survived and the beef/lamb blend didn’t. According to Jacobson, the company who supplies them simply discontinued the product.
“[Grecian Delight] stopped providing the cones, and they replaced them with the all-beef recipe,” Jacobson said.
As a result, they were forced to do the same in the Caf.
So, what happened to the lamb? The answer is COVID-19 (of course, what else could it be). The pandemic tied the nation’s meat supply chain into knots, and Gustavus is one of the many parties along the line who suffered the consequences.
There are many potential factors at play here, but let’s start with the one closest to home: lack of demand. Companies like Grecian Delight rely upon schools, restaurants and colleges like Gustavus for business. When pandemic lockdowns enveloped the Midwest, many such institutions shut down and stopped providing food suppliers their business. As such, the demand for certain products became so low that there was little incentive to continue offering them. According to Jacobson, Gustavus’ lack of business over the summer may have contributed to Grecian Delight’s decision to discontinue the beef/lamb cone.
Another culprit is the infamous bottleneck in meat processing plants near the beginning of the pandemic. Plant workers laboring in close proximity to each other on the processing line were particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 and were hit especially hard. According to PBS News, over 27,000 meatpacking plant workers had been infected by the end of June, and nearly 100 had died. As a result, many plants had to temporarily shut down and update their safety measures.
“They had to close down completely to renovate, and then they had to space people apart and slow down the line, and so all those things contributed to being able to process none or fewer animals,” Statewide Director of the University of Minnesota Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships Dr. Kathy Draeger said.
The effects were devastating. Without access to meat processing facilities, large farmers had nowhere to bring their pork and beef and faced frightening surpluses.
According to Dr. Draeger, large farmers in Minnesota redirected what they could to smaller plants to be processed. The problem is that small and medium-sized farmers, the ones who normally used the smaller plants, were left with nowhere to send their animals. And in Minnesota, these tend to be the farmers who raise lamb.
“Gustavus probably got caught in the middle of a pandemic, a supply chain disruption, and this ongoing tension between small and medium-sized farms and large industrial farms. I’m guessing Gustavus got their lamb from these small and medium-sized farms,” Dr. Draeger said.
Since the spring, the meat industry has begun to recover, and despite its additional challenges, lamb will not disappear.
“I think individual farmers will continue to sell lamb. I know that there are constraints for meat processing, but I would be hopeful that that supply chain from farm to consumer is still holding,” Dr. Draeger said.
So, where does this leave us and our gyros? According to Jacobson, the beef and lamb gyro cone will not return in the foreseeable future, but our food distributor offers several alternative options.
Specifically regarding gyro meats, the caf is limited to Grecian Delight products because the company rents us the equipment for free to make the gyros.
“Grecian Delight makes a pre-sliced gyro meat that has lamb. “The quality is not as good as carved off-the-cone like we do at school. It just comes in identical sheets of meat, like turkey bacon almost,” Jacobson said.
Another option would simply be carved lamb served on the rotisserie. While our gyros would still be lambless, lamb itself would still be available to students. The problem is that carved lamb is extraordinarily expensive, so students would really have to want it.
“Lamb is $6.20 a pound (raw weight), which is a pretty steep price for a student meal, but salmon is more expensive than lamb, so it’s definitely not out of the question if students want it,” Jacobson said.
So, we probably aren’t getting our old lamb/beef gyro cone back, but lamb is available if we want it. We just have to ask.
The thing is, isn’t the only food product missing from the caf. COVID has disrupted our nation’s food chain beyond just the meats, and we have felt the effects right here at Gustavus. To hear more, watch out for my article in next week’s issue of THE WEEKLY