Two Billion Burgers

     I was maybe twelve years old, prone on the back seat of an older four door Ford, reading comic books, while my Dad drove up the twisty Big Thompson canyon between Loveland and Estes Park, Colorado.  My Mom was riding shotgun and trying to get me to appreciate the mountains. 

     On a long left corner, she yelled “Sop, Red. Pull over.” My dad eased to a whoa on the gravel shoulder. Mom jumped out and went running downhill into the borrow pit where she picked up a nicely wrapped shiny blue package, half the size of a shoe box, tucked it under her arm and hustled back to the car. She hopped in and said “Go, Red, go.”

     While my Dad was going through the gears she was tearing at the wrapping. When she plunged her hand down in the box she found that someone, who was probably watching, had carefully packaged chicken guts and left them along the road for an optimist like my Mom to find. She did not comment, merely rewrapped the package and tossed it into a waste bin at the next rest area. 

   This memory bubbled up recently when I imagined myself to be a cow-calf rancher who voted for Trump, thinking that a Republican administration would loosen up some of the federal controls that impact my ability to raise meat for a living. Then last week we learned that Trump, in a play to make someone even wealthier, decided to import three hundred thousand tons of hamburger from Argentina.  Three hundred thousand tons. That is 2.4 billion quarter pounders.

     Couple the influx of tons of foreign burgers with the unknown effects of various tariffs and five dollar fuel, and the nation’s rural dwellers have found the chicken guts at the bottom of Trump’s promises. My Dad said when cattle went on the futures market, “Now the price of beef is controlled by people who think a polled Hereford is a cow with a stick up its butt so it can eat leaves.”