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star-spangled-eyes · 5 years ago

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Winner Take All: Part 4: The Club

This alternate universe fan fiction uses characters created and owned by Pixelberry Studios. Character names, descriptions and likenesses are owned by Pixelberry Studios. The MC, Bragnae Bennett, and story is created and owned by this author.

Book: The Royal Romance (Alternate Universe)

Alternate Universe Theme: Senior Year of College for Drake, Leo, Bragnae and Madeleine in the United States

Pairing: Drake Walker x MC / Leo Reese x MC (Bragnae Bennett – *pronounced Brawn-yah)

Warnings for this series: NSFW, Adult content, suggestive and strong language, sex

Series Description: Bragnae Bennett sought adventure when she first went off to college. Now, navigating through her senior year, she finds herself befriending two gorgeous guys, Drake Walker and Leo Reese, who engage in a seemingly innocent bet with her during a game of pool that leads to a surprising threesome.

Their intimate evening prompts deeper feelings than they all expected to arise, and Bragnae is suddenly swept up in both of their charms, unique to each man himself. Through the pressures of college, work and maintaining a social life, which man will prevail and win Bragnae's heart?

Master List

A/N: Where my Leo stans at? Sheesh! This man right here? He’s hot. I love his rebel ass with a passion. Enjoy this!

Warnings for this chapter: NSFW, Adult content, suggestive and strong language

Word Count for this chapter: 5337 (I’m really trying to keep these under 4,000, but… Leo made me do it!)

Setting for this chapter: Bragnae meets Leo for an afternoon of self-defense training, and that’s not all!

Permatags: @burnsoslow @cora-nova @dcbbw @thorfosterlove @emceesynonymroll @edgiestwinter @of-course-i-went-to-hartfeld @msjr0119 @notoriouscs @drakewalker04 @pedudley @desiree-0816 @choices-lurker @kingliam2019 @loveellamae @drakexnadira @flutistbyday2020 @indiana-jr @moonlightgem7

Series Tags: @yukinagato2012 @marshmallowsaremyfavorite @nomadics-stuff @ravenpuff02 @texaskitten30 @themadhatter1029 @randomfandomteacher @queenjilian @princessleac1

Part 4: The Club

Bragnae arrived at the quad on campus. It was a Saturday, so it wasn’t nearly as crowded as it usually was when classes were in session. Still, there were people hanging out on the lawn – some playing music, some kicking a soccer ball around, others reading. The sun was shining, and the weather was perfect – not too hot, not too cold.

Knowing she’d be doing some physical activity, Bragnae threw on a pair of grey spandex leggings and a purple sleeveless work out top. She put her hair up in a high ponytail, and lightly applied make-up to her face.

Looking around the quad, her eyes searched for Leo. She was both excited and nervous about seeing him again. After last night’s awkward moments with Drake, she was anticipating the same with Leo. Although, they didn’t seem to be uncomfortable around each other when he showed up at Mikey’s. It was more pleasant and flirty than anything else.

She took a deep breath to calm her racing heart when she spotted Leo leaning against a big oak tree with the bottom of his foot propped up against the trunk. His sandy blonde hair lightly gelled in a sexy but messy sort of way – his signature style.

He had his phone up to his ear, talking to someone as he looked off in the distance. Leo wore a plain grey t-shirt and light jeans that hung low on his hips. If he had a pack of smokes rolled up in his shirt sleeve he could even be considered a rebel without a cause. Even in such subtle clothes, Leo never lacked for attention. The build of his sculpted body and his pretty-boy face drew in eyes from every direction.

Bragnae headed towards him keeping her eyes trained on his face. She was about twenty feet away when he finally noticed her, doing a double take before a bright smile highlighted his face.

“I gotta go,” she heard him say, his eyes never leaving her, as he ended the call. Leo pocketed his phone and pushed himself off the trunk of the tree as she approached.

The fact that he abruptly ended his call to give his attention to her instead made her feel special. She smiled at him. “Hey, you.”

Leo, like Drake, was a friend to Bragnae. She’d known him almost as long as Drake, but got along with him all the same. He was cocky, funny and known for going rogue on many occasions, which Bragnae found thrilling. He didn’t care what people thought of him and always walked to the beat of his own drum. There was something so freeing about that. Bragnae didn’t consider herself that way, but when she was around Leo, she liked that he brought it out in her.

“Hey, yourself.” Leo met Bragnae halfway, surprising her by pulling her into a soft embrace.

Bragnae breathed in his delicious scent, fresh like the ocean and incredibly sensual. “God, you smell good.” She couldn’t help herself. She was that taken with it.

“Thanks. So do you.” He pulled back to look at her appreciatively. “Cute outfit. Ready to learn some self-defense?”

“You’re really into this, aren’t you?”

“Goddamn right. It’s important, Bragnae. Come on. Let’s go to a bigger clearing and away from the others.” Leo turned on his heel leading her to a spot with shade. He turned around to face her causing Bragnae to stop about five feet away from him.

A smirk appeared on his face as he began to beckon her with his finger. “Come here, you.” His voice was deep and soothing.

A little confused by his change in demeanor, Bragnae still did as he asked out of curiosity, walking towards him until he said to stop. Their chests nearly touched. She looked up at him as he slinked his hands around her waist, then let them curve to the back where he cupped her ass.

Bragnae drew in a sharp breath, surprised at how he was suddenly touching her. “Leo, what are you doing?”

He smiled as he gave her a little squeeze. “I’m a patron at Mikey’s. What are you gonna do about it?”

Oh, so this was part of his lesson. Feeling his hands on her was electrifying. She summoned a strong will to concentrate and answer his question. “I’m going to move your hands away.”

“So, do it.” His expression overflowed with confidence.

Bragnae immediately brought her elbows up between his arms and knocked them away before stepping back.

“Good. But I’m coming back for more. What are you going to do now?” He took a small step towards her.

“Uh, I’m going to… punch you in the face.” He took another step closer making her think quickly.

“Make a fist, let me see.”

She curled her fingers in tightly, her thumb resting on the knuckle of her middle finger. Leo’s eyes looked to her hand.

“Good. That’s how you want it. I’m getting closer. What are you going to do?”

As he advanced, she took steps back to keep the distance. “Leo, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Come on, ya big baby. Hit me. I can take it. In two seconds I’m going to grab you so you better decide quickly.” True to his word, Leo moved swiftly towards her. Just before he could overtake her, she cranked her arm back and connected her first with his jaw in a hard punch. Leo recoiled, a hand immediately coming to the place she just struck. “Goddamn.”

Her hands flew to her mouth, eyes wide with worry. “Ohmigod, Leo. Are you okay?”

He stretched his jaw out, rubbing a hand over his taut skin. “Not bad, Bragnae.” Leo waved to someone in the distance. “It’s okay!” He yelled. “I’m just teaching her self-defense.” He returned his attention to Bragnae. “How’s your hand?”

She shook it out. “It hurts.” He stepped up to her, lifting her hand to his face. Turning it gingerly with his, he inspected it. “What are you looking for?”

“Just trying to see if your knuckles are made of steel. That was one hell of a punch.” He took another second to playfully look over her hand before bringing it to his lips. Leo placed a soft kiss on her reddened knuckles, smiling as he watched her.

Grinning, she slowly withdrew her hand. “Thank you.” She raised a hand to brush over the spot where she punched him. Redness and some swelling was already evident. “God, I’m so sorry. Leo, I don’t think I can do this.” She dropped her hand and her face fell. “I can bring the sass all day, but when it comes to hitting someone… I just… can’t.”

“Why not? You just kicked my ass, and all I did was guide you through it. You did the rest. What are you afraid of?”

She sighed. “I guess I’m afraid if I hit them they’ll come back and it’ll be worse. I’d be helpless against them. I’m not strong enough to win a fight against a man.”

Compassion filled his eyes. “That may be true, but the quicker you react and show him you’re not fucking around, the better chance he’ll leave you alone. You’ve got one hell of a right hook, girl, and you weren’t even convinced I was going to do you harm. I’d bet you’d have even more force behind that strike if I was a real threat.”

She considered his words, nodding.

“Trust me, you come at a guy with a punch like that, and he’ll leave you alone. Those assholes don’t want to mess with a girl who’s going to be a hassle. They want easy targets that don’t or can’t fight back.” He moved closer to her, placing his hands on her waist. “If all you do is yell or say something sassy to them, they’re going to think they can do it again and get away with it.”

She knew he was right. It was already evident to her that some of the same creeps would return to Mikey’s trying to hit on her and touch her inappropriately.

“And if they think they can get away with slapping your ass,” he paused as his gaze deepened with a certain seriousness. “They might try to get away with more.”

Looking away, Bragnae swallowed, understanding the gravity of the situation.

Leo brought a hand up to lift her chin, encouraging her gaze again. “Look, I’m not trying to scare you, but this is something I see happening to the waitresses at the club I work at on a daily basis.” Leo worked at a hot club in town called Inferno as a bouncer, hence his desire to stay fit and buff.

“And Bragnae,” his eyes studying hers, “I don’t want to see that happen to you. I can’t be at Mikey’s every time you’re working, so I want you to feel confident enough to protect yourself. The fact that this sort of thing happens to you once a week is horse shit – especially at a pizza joint.”

“Yeah, I didn’t really expect that to happen there either, but when we get busy and the crowds pour in, it’s easy to do.”

“Just do what you did here today, and remember your goal is to defend yourself, and then get outta dodge. If they still won’t leave you alone, you go get help or call the police.”

She exhaled a deep breath. “Okay. Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to go over this with me.”

He let go of her, taking a few steps back to give her space. “You don’t have to thank me. Just watch your ass out there because there’s plenty of guys already doing it.”

She scoffed a laugh. “I will.” A strong breeze flew by bringing a blue piece of paper from the quad in their direction. In an effort to keep litter off the ground, Bragnae ran a few steps chasing after the paper before bending down to pick it up.

“Jesus Christ,” Leo said suddenly.

Bragnae whipped up and looked around before finding his face. “What? What’s wrong?”

Leo’s face contorted as he tried to get out the words. “I… you’re,” he sighed. “Your ass looks really great in those pants. Just do me a favor and don’t bend over in front of me again, or I might have to do something about it.”

The corner of her mouth curled up. “Leo, you know you’re one of those guys you just described who’s looking at my ass.”

He opened his mouth to retort, but then closed it to think for another moment. Then he held up both index fingers to emphasize his point. “Yes, but I’m not going to disrespect you.” He smirked. “Unless you want me to. I mean, well, you know what I mean.” He chuckled at himself.

Bragnae put a hand on her hip with her head cocked and an eyebrow lifted. The sexual energy he was giving off made her feel flush, but she tried her best not to reveal it.

“Sorry Miss Sassy Pants. I can’t help it that you’re hot.” He grinned playfully. “I’m starving. Wanna get something to eat?”

“Sure.” She started walking and when she got close to Leo she gave him a playful shove on his arm. His very toned arm.

“Hey,” he laughed before straightening his stride to walk beside her again.

They strolled to a burger place near campus, and sat at a table outside to enjoy their lunch.

Leo tossed a French fry into his mouth and washed it down with some cola. “So, if you’re looking for something fun to do tonight, you could come to the club with me. I don’t have to work, but my buddy is DJing, and I told him I’d stop by.”

Bragnae was grateful for the mouthful of food to give her time to think about a response. She didn’t know if Leo was asking her on a date, or to go out as just a friend. He had casually asked her to join him at other places on several occasions before… before they had a threesome with Drake, and it sounded just like this. And the afternoon so far had been comfortable and normal. It was nothing compared to the awkward start of her night with Drake.

And the flirting and touching was not new either. He had playfully interacted with her like that many times. Being open about his attraction to her, but never pursuing anything. She briefly wondered why. Aside from a few nights ago when he suggested a very erotic end to the evening, nothing else had ever come up.

The state of her friendship or relationship with Drake was still up in the air. She had checked her phone on the walk over to the restaurant, but still didn’t have anything from Drake. So, she had no idea where they stood. He didn’t exactly tell her he wanted to be her boyfriend or that they would date only each other. None of that was discussed. Of course, she basically threw him out before any of that could be discussed.

If Leo did truly want this to be a date, then would it be wrong to agree to it? In the past, she had waited for immature boys to never make up their mind about wanting to date her, and wasted a lot of time doing it. When she left for college, another rule she put in place was to not let herself get caught up in the mind games that guys sometimes play. If they didn’t call her or actively pursue her, then she would move on.

If Drake wanted to take things slow, then that was fine, but what did that mean? How slow was his version of slow? And if Leo wanted to take her out and show her a good time, then she saw no harm in that. She knew she’d find out tonight what Leo’s true intentions were, and if she was being honest with herself, she was intrigued. She liked Leo a lot. He was fun to be around, and always kept her on her toes. Not to mention he was unbelievably attractive.

Swallowing her food, she smiled at him. “That actually sounds like a great time. I’m in.”

“You will not be disappointed.” He wiped his hands on a napkin. “I have some things to do between now and then, but what do you say I pick you up at your place around 9:00pm?”

“Sounds good. I’ll be ready.”

As soon as they finished their meal, Leo and Bragnae went their separate ways. She had a few hours before she’d see him again, which was perfect to get some laundry and other things done. One of those things was to call Drake.

Bragnae pulled up his number and pressed the call button. She sat down on the chair by her desk heaving a deep breath as the phone rang. She was a bit nervous, but knew she had to own up to her actions from the night before. The phone continued to ring until his voicemail sounded. Shoot.

His recording was too short to give her time to decide what kind of message she wanted to leave. Brief or detailed. So, she was forced to wing it.

“Hey, Drake, it’s Bragnae. I just wanted to call you to… let you know I was sorry about last night,” she pulled at the fabric of her pants absentmindedly as she continued. “I shouldn’t have acted the way I did. It was childish, and we should have at least finished the movie. Anyway, it’s been bothering me, and I just wanted you to know. I hope you had a good day at work. Talk to you later.”

She ended the call feeling satisfied with her message. Hoping Drake was just busy at work and not ignoring her, she put her phone on her desk and got on with her day.

Later on, she took another quick shower to freshen up. Bragnae stepped into a halter dress that was emerald green on the top with a black skirt falling down to her mid-thigh. It fit tightly, but had a stretchy fabric that allowed her to dance and move without too much restriction. From the stories Leo had told her, Inferno was known primarily as a place to dance and drink. She hadn’t been there yet, but she was looking forward to seeing what the fuss was all about.

She added some loose curls and a glitter hairspray to her hair for definition, and applied the smoky look to her eyes. Bragnae heard a knock at her bedroom door when Madeleine peeked her head in.

“Hey, Leo’s here.”

“Thanks, tell him I’ll be right out,” Bragnae told her as she spritzed perfume onto her wrists, chest and the back of her neck. She sat down on her bed slipping on her rhinestone encrusted strappy heels. Grabbing a small black clutch, she left her bedroom.

She spotted Leo standing in the living room watching whatever reality TV show Madeleine had on. He wore dark jeans and a steel blue button up shirt. His sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He stood with a hand in his front pocket as he leaned his weight to one side. Casual and cute.

“Hi, Leo,” she said. He turned around to face her, and she watched as his eyes focused on her – hard. They trailed the length of her body as an appreciative smirk crossed over his lips.

Blinking a few times, he shook his head. “Damn, girl. You’re gonna give me a heart attack.” He walked over, pulling her into a warm embrace. His wonderful scent filled her nostrils. “You look incredible,” he told her stepping back. His hand lifted hers in the air as he prompted her to twirl in a small circle. A low breathy whistle escaped him as she spun slowly. “Good choice, Bragnae.”

“Ready to go?” She asked with a confident smile. His compliments made her feel unstoppable.

He only nodded as his eyes still trained on her curves. Loving the attention from him, Bragnae turned and led them out of the apartment. Leo followed closely after her.

The night had a slight chill in the air, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Leo put a hand on the small of her back as he led her down the sidewalk. Bragnae stopped in her tracks when she saw a gleaming white sporty motorcycle leaning on its kickstand in the street.

“I didn’t know you were bringing your bike.” Wearing a tight dress as she was would prove tricky riding on it.

Leo walked over to the bike, throwing a leg over it and standing it up straight. He looked at her with a side smirk. “I didn’t know you were wearing a dress.”

She took a few hesitating steps forward contemplating if she should go change. As she looked over the bike, she couldn’t help but notice how attractive he looked sitting on the motorcycle.

“It’s only a few blocks, babe. I think you can handle it.” He winked, looking even more devastatingly handsome.

She sighed against her better judgment. “Okay, but if I end up flashing some guy and he harasses me, I expect you to knock him out.”

He laughed. “Deal.”

Bragnae reached down to the hem of her dress, wiggling her hips slightly as she hiked the fabric up a few inches. Leo watched her the entire time looking pleasantly stunned. It was her turn to wink as she braced a hand on his shoulder and straddled the bike behind him.

Leo looked over his shoulder as she settled in. “That was really sexy.” He tilted his head to the sky blowing out a breath. “Hold on tight back there.”

Bragnae scooted forward so she could wrap her arms around his firm abs. She patted his thigh to let him know she was in place. Leo leaned forward on the handles and revved the engine. They took off down the street with the cool wind blowing through their hair. She leaned her cheek on his back as the thrill of zipping down the streets on the back of a fast motorcycle made her feel utterly free.

When they arrived at the club, Bragnae carefully got off the bike first, thankful no one was in the general vicinity. She returned the skirt of her dress to his proper length, and primped her hair after the wind had tousled it. Leo turned off the bike, kicking out the stand so it could lean on its own.

She admired the tightness in his jeans as his leg swung over the back of the bike. A warm tingle pooled between her legs. There was something about a hot guy and a motorcycle that drove her crazy. Leo pocketed his keys, smiling as he took her hand and led her inside.

He waved to the attendants who were checking IDs, passing by without interference. She felt like a minor celebrity being able to bypass the cover charge and validation of her age as Leo’s presence paid it for her. The club was painted in all black and had neon and black lighting around the dance floor and bar.

The atmosphere was thick with sexual and fun energy. The dance floor was already flooded with couples, singles, and groups enjoying themselves. Leo led them over to a clear space at the bar.

“Hey, Trip, can I get a beer and a,” he turned to Bragnae. “What do you want, sweetheart?”

“Can I get a Smirnoff Ice, please?” She asked sweetly.

Leo looked at her incredulously. “Smirnoff Ice? Such a girly drink.”

Bragnae ran her hand down her body showing off her womanly curves. “I am a girl, ya know.” She followed it up with a playful smile.

Leo reciprocated before turning back to the bartender. “And a Smirnoff Ice for the lady.” Their hands still entwined as they waited another moment for their drinks. He pulled Bragnae in, allowing her to sit on the one free stool that was available.

Trip placed their drinks on the bar, and Leo put a twenty down. He handed Bragnae her bottle, clinking it before taking a drink. She enjoyed the refreshing cold liquid rushing down her throat, and the way Leo looked at her as he swallowed his.

He put a hand casually on her thigh as he leaned in to speak in her ear. “So, what do you think about my club?”

The music thumped loudly in her ears, but she could still hear him. “It’s really nice. I bet you have a lot of fun when you work here.”

“It can be, but more often than not I have to bounce some assholes out because they’re too drunk or fighting.” His gaze migrated to her cleavage, prompting a devilish grin. “You really do look great tonight.”

She took another sip of her drink. “Thank you. So do you.” She ran her hand over his chest. “I don’t see you wearing this type of shirt very often. It looks nice on you.” He leaned into her touch sending more of his delicious scent swirling around her. “And you looked pretty hot sitting on that bike.”

“Yeah? Well, I’d like to see you sitting on my bike in that get up you have on. I didn’t quite have the pleasure on the way over here.”

“Maybe I can show you when we leave.” She bit her bottom lip looking up at him through her eyelashes.

“Only if you promise to do that little shimmy and pull up your dress again.” The tips of his fingers slid just underneath the hem of her skirt. His face inches from hers.

Bragnae drew in a sharp breath, feeling an intense throbbing between her legs. Everything Leo did screamed sex. It was becoming hard to concentrate.

“I think that can be arranged.” His mouth was so close. Memories of how his full lips felt against her two days ago came rushing back in a fury, and she suddenly craved him.

He grinned sensing the mood between them. “Wanna dance?”

It wasn’t a kiss, but she had a feeling it’d turn into something even hotter. His hands all over her body was more than enough motivation to get off that bar stool. She and Leo both threw back another swig of their drinks. He took her bottle and his, setting them back on the bar before grabbing her hand again. He pulled her onto the dance floor, maneuvering his way through the crowd to a space they could both comfortably fit.

A sizzling Latino song with a catchy beat began playing, and Leo immediately drew her in close. Bragnae instinctively threw her hands around his neck as they danced. He ran his hands down her sides focusing on her hips. She rolled her pelvis reveling in his continued touch. They looked into each other’s eyes creating a scorching energy between them.

Leo slid his hand around to her lower back while the other lifted her leg just above the knee, holding it against his hips. He grinded into her with rhythmic purpose. The skirt of her dress pushed up a bit making her feel more of him through the thin layer of her panties. He was a great dancer – sensual as hell, balanced and moved to the beat effortlessly.

After a few minutes, a different song transitioned in with a quicker beat and an even dirtier vibe. Leo released her leg, and spun her around so her back was to his chest. He nestled against her, his hands on her hips rolling them along with his. Bragnae flipped her hair to one side, looking over her shoulder at him as her arm hooked behind his neck.

Steamy arousal surged through her body. If they were naked, they’d be having sex by now. The music stimulated the already lustful environment, and Bragnae found herself leaning into his body more and more. The pleasing movement between them provoked breathy moans. One of his hands slipped over her mound, dangerously close to where she really wanted him to touch her.

She braced her other hand on his muscled thigh, squeezing it passionately as they moved. He pressed into her more. Her head fell back against him as she closed her eyes getting lost in the moment.

Soon, to her dismay, the song changed again, and she felt Leo’s movements come to a stop. Feeling a little breathless, she turned around.

“We should, uh, slow it down a bit,” he said, looking her over with hungry eyes.

Refusing to have a repeat of the night prior with almost the exact words that Drake said, she decided to tease him. “Why? Can’t keep up?”

Leo cleared his throat. “No, I’m definitely keeping up.” He adjusted the inseam of his jeans, exhaling a quick breath. Her eyes were drawn there feeling just as excited as he was. “I just meant we should go somewhere quieter.” He took her hand, and led Bragnae over to a roped off area with a sign that read Employees Only.

“Uh, Leo, I don’t think we’re allowed up there.” Bragnae looked skeptically at the cordon in their way leading to a dark staircase.

“It’s fine. I’m an employee. Come on,” he moved one of the poles out of the way to allow her to slip through. He did the same, returning it to the original position.

Bragnae climbed the dimly lit stair way that curved to a single door at the top. She stood to the side as Leo came up behind her, brushing his hand on her lower back. He knocked twice on the door before pulling out a set of keys from his pocket. In that time, no one had come to answer, so Leo unlocked it. He turned the knob pushing the door open, and gestured to Bragnae to enter first.

The room was dark except for a blue light that ran around the perimeter of the ceiling. It was bright enough to see a couple of couches against the walls, a small bar in the corner, and a sound system. After Leo closed the door, the sound from the club below was muffled. She could actually hear herself think, but her ears felt like she was underwater after leaving the loud dance floor.

“What is this room used for, Leo?” She asked running a finger over the counter of the bar, then walked to the center of the room.

“It’s usually reserved for private parties,” he told her as he headed over to the sound system. Bragnae watched him plug his phone into a cord and fiddle with it for a second before R & B music began playing over the speakers.

Leo turned and walked slowly to meet her where she stood. He picked up her hands and laid them on his shoulders as he stepped closer to her swaying them to the sensual beat. His hands rested comfortably on her lower back with his fingers inching their way over the curves of her backside.

“So, we’re not really supposed to be in here, are we?” She smirked up at him.

He offered her a not-so-innocent shrug.

She chuckled. “You’re such a bad boy, Leo.”

He smiled. “Yeah, but I’m the best kind of bad boy.”

“How do you figure?”

Even through the darkness of the room, she could see how deeply he peered into her eyes. The seriousness of his gaze shifting the energy between them. “Because I’m a bad boy with a good heart. All the rebel excitement plus an intense desire to make someone else happy.” He tightened his hold on her to drive home his point as if she didn’t yet know he was talking about her.

Her breath quickened as she got lost in his eyes, believing in every word he just said. Bragnae’s gaze lowered to his full lips, and soon he was pulling them even closer, leaning down as they connected in a slow kiss. The rhythmic music guided their lips to deepen, and kept their bodies steadily swaying with one another.

Her fingers ran through his hair as he parted her lips with his tongue. Every motion was done to the beat of the song, and it was incredible. As his tongue explored her mouth, his lips devoured hers slowly and deliberately. The rest of the world flitted away as they continued to kiss.

Leo’s hands moved down to caress her tush while holding her hips against his. She felt how much he wanted her through the growing bulge in his jeans. It felt good to be desired carnally and in such a romantic way.

Feeling the heat of the moment, Bragnae arched her back, pressing her breasts against his chest as she leaned her head away from him. Leo worked his mouth over her neck. His hot breath hitting her skin sent a chill down her spine. One of his hands slid up her stomach and over her breast stopping to knead it gently. She moaned at his touch, their hips still rocking against each other in an erotically slow pace.

Leo groaned. “God, Bragnae. I want you so bad.” He gently brought her back up to him, kissing her with more vigor than before. She offered him no protests, only moans of agreement as he walked her backwards toward the couch.

They fell back onto the soft leather. The weight of his body on hers made her writhe with anticipation. A sudden thought made her break their kiss.

“Leo, someone could come in here and see us.”

That wicked grin of his was back. “Yeah, and it’s even hotter knowing we could get caught.” He captured her lips in another satisfying kiss. “Relax. I locked it, and no one else should be coming up here tonight.”

Feeling reassured, she pulled him in again returning to their intimate moment.

#trr #trr fanfic #trr leo #the royal romance #the royal romance fanfic #leo x mc #leo reese #bragnae bennett #trr love triangle #TRR Winner Take All Fanfic #Club Inferno #smirnoff ice

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easyfoodnetwork · 5 years ago

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It’s Still the Jungle Out There

Workers line up to return to work a Tyson processing plant in Logansport, Indiana, which temporarily closed after 900 workers tested positive for COVID-19 | AP Photo/Michael Conroy

More than a century after Upton Sinclair’s novel about exploitation in America’s meat industry, the coronavirus has revealed how little meatpacking has changed

Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson left the Tyson pork processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, in disgust. On April 10, after receiving complaints from workers and community members, he and local health officials inspected the facility, which is responsible for about 5 percent of total U.S. pork production, according to industry estimates. “We walked out of that plant tour knowing those complaints were valid,” says Thompson, who is also chair of the Black Hawk Emergency Management Commission. “They had a huge problem.”

On the factory floor, where 2,800 people slaughter, cut, and package 19,500 hogs a day, only a third of workers wore face coverings, Thompson says, some with bandanas and eye masks over their mouths instead of appropriate masks. “They thought they had three confirmed [COVID-19] cases out of that plant, but we knew they were in the double digits.”

Thompson and other elected officials urged Tyson to close the plant immediately for cleaning and test employees for COVID-19. “They didn’t take action,” he says. Now, 1,031 workers at the Waterloo plant have tested positive, and 1,703 cases total have been confirmed in Black Hawk County, including at a long-term care facility for the elderly. Twenty-six people have died. Thompson traces the outbreak to the Tyson plant, one of the county’s largest employers. “They blew a hole in our defensive line.”

For Thompson, as for many Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic is shining a bright light into one of the darkest recesses of the country’s food system: industrial meat processing, comprising slaughter and packing — an incredibly streamlined and consolidated industry controlled by a small number of companies and reliant on low-paid, immigrant labor. It’s dangerous work on a good day, with steadily increasing production speeds, injury rates twice the national average, and illness rates 15 times normal rates, according to the National Employment Law Project.

“They didn’t start to take it seriously until we started getting cases in our town and in our plant.”

But COVID-19 has made matters much, much worse. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4,913 cases of COVID-19 have been reported at 115 meat and poultry processing facilities in the U.S. as of April 30, and 20 workers have died of the disease. Data collected by the Food & Environment Reporting Network through May 12 puts the number of meatpacking worker deaths at 52 and the number of infected at more than 13,000.

The problems are partly of scale: The CDC points to “difficulties with workplace physical distancing and hygiene and crowded living and transportation conditions,” or thousands of workers laboring in tight quarters and living in small, rural communities. At another Tyson plant, in Perry, Iowa, 730 workers, or 58 percent of those tested, were positive for COVID-19, health officials said. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, more than 900 COVID-19 cases stemmed from an outbreak at a single Smithfield Foods meat processing plant, according to health officials.

Some workers and union groups blame meatpacking companies for acting too slowly to address COVID-19 related safety concerns. “I felt like they didn’t start to take it seriously until we started getting cases in our town and in our plant,” said one meatpacking worker at a facility in Kansas, where masks weren’t implemented even after some workers tested positive for COVID-19, she says. Following a bout of chills and aches, the worker, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, also tested positive for COVID-19 last week. She’s now isolated, with pay, and recovering.

For longtime critics of America’s meat system, the current public scrutiny feels overdue. “The industrial meat system is about as nasty as you can get,” says Brent Young, whose Brooklyn butcher shop, the Meat Hook, was established in contrast to big meat — and is one of many small purveyors currently thriving even as major processors struggle. (Young, along with Meat Hook co-owner Ben Turley, is also the co-host of the Eater video series Prime Time). “I can’t say anything without recognizing that it’s incredibly sad that [this situation] is going to affect millions of animals and undocumented workers,” Young says. “But as for that supply chain being broken, all I can say is it’s about time.”

On April 22, Tyson finally closed its Waterloo plant, with company president Steve Stouffer saying that “protecting our team members is our top priority.” It’s just one of at least 22 U.S. meat and poultry processing plants that had closed due to COVID-19 cases by April 28, according to estimates from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Recent plant closures highlight the meat industry’s decades of consolidation into an oligopoly of four companies: Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield Foods. According to Cassandra Fish, an industry analyst and former Tyson risk management executive, about 50 meat processing plants are responsible for as much as 98 percent of all U.S. meat slaughter and processing. The arrangement has driven prices downward — meat prices in the EU were twice as high as of 2017 — but created a system that’s vulnerable to disturbances like COVID-19, says Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business. “All these animals have to pass through an extremely narrow bottleneck.

“We used to think of this in terms of food-borne pathogens. We used to say, when you have these few plants, if you have a problem at one plant, it can have a cascading effect through the whole food system,” says Leonard. “Now [with COVID-19], this is triply true. If you shut down a single slaughterhouse, it knocks out a huge, measurable portion of the whole meat supply.”

AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

A worker leaves the Tyson Foods plant in Waterloo, Iowa on May 1

AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

Medical workers test a local resident at a drive-thru COVID-19 testing site in Waterloo, Iowa

The measure of the disruption is striking: As of the first week of May, pork production capacity was down 25 percent, and beef capacity was down 10 percent, according to the food workers’ union. Slaughter of both pork and cattle was down 30 percent year-over-year, according to livestock reports from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. All in all, Fish predicts, that’s likely to translate to a 20 to 25 percent reduction in the amount of available beef during what’s typically peak sales season, between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Pork supply could be down by 18 percent during that period, she anticipates.

Meat company executives sounded the alarm, warning the public of potential shortages. On April 27, Tyson chairman John Tyson took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, addressing plant closures in dire public health terms. “The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson wrote, warning of “meat shortages and wasted animals. … Our plants must remain operational so that we can supply food to our families in America.”

But the North American Meat Institute, which represents the companies responsible for 90 percent of U.S. red meat production, points to plenty of meat reserves in cold storage; 921 million pounds of chicken and 467 million pounds of beef, according to the USDA, as of late April. Much of this meat was previously allotted to restaurants that are now closed and won’t need it. Pork reserves, originally bound for export to China, can also be released to U.S. customers.

FDA officials say they don’t anticipate serious food shortages for consumers, just temporarily low inventory at some stores as they restock. And even if supply is lower and there’s less variety, Steve Meyer, a meat industry economist with Kerns and Associates in Ames, Iowa, isn’t worried about Americans running out of meat. “From a consumer standpoint, it’s not a crisis at all, in my opinion.”

Still, some chains like McDonald’s report that they’re bracing for diminished meat supplies. Hundreds of locations of Wendy’s, which relies on fresh beef, rather than more abundant frozen beef, reported running out of burgers at some locations by early May, with shortages expected to last a “couple of weeks.” In grocery stores, fresh meat prices were up 8.1 percent for the week ending April 25 over the same week last year, per Nielsen data. But prices weren’t up across the board, according to USDA data: Ground beef was more expensive, but the price of typically more costly cuts, like rib-eye, went down. And while retailers like Costco and Kroger are placing per-person limits on meat purchases, that’s in part to curtail panic shopping, which could perpetuate shortage fears and panic-buying cycles.

“From a consumer standpoint, it’s not a crisis at all, in my opinion.”

Critics of the meat industry even characterize its claims of a shortage as tactical hyperbole: a calculated campaign intended to gain federal support. On April 28, just two days after the Tyson ad appeared, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring meat production essential infrastructure. Meat industry executives cheered, but workers’ rights advocates howled. “It’s putting profits ahead of public health,” says Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for the watchdog group Food and Water Watch.

“The return on investment for Tyson’s public relations ad was enormous,” says Leonard.

For customers, there may be no immediate meat crisis. But for processing workers, the danger is real. “A lot of us are scared,” says the Kansas meat processing worker who tested positive for COVID-19. “It feels like we’re putting our health at risk, but at what cost?”

Rather than precise OSHA and CDC requirements, the executive order points to looser temporary guidance. “To keep their doors open safely, meatpacking plants — and all essential workplaces — must operate under clear, enforceable OSHA standards — not voluntary ‘guidance,’” says Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. Alarmingly, federal officials seem to downplay the risk: In a May 7 call with lawmakers, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar emphasized the need to keep plants open, and suggested “home and social” aspects of workers’ lives contributed to high infection rates at meatpacking plants.

Debbie Berkowitz, a former senior OSHA official and expert on meat processing who is now director for worker safety and health at the National Employment Law Project, thinks the federal government is less worried about keeping workers safe and more concerned with keeping businesses safe from liability. “Instead of requiring meatpacking companies to implement safe practices, the president prefers to attempt to shield these corporations from responsibility for putting workers’ lives in danger,” Berkowitz wrote in a statement to Eater.

The industry is already under-regulated, says author Christopher Leonard, with processors consistently permitted to push operating speeds faster. “The USDA is controlled almost entirely by the big meat companies, it’s just a categorical fact,” he says. “The meat industry is setting the terms of regulation.”

Even with added safety measures now in place at her factory — plexiglass screens, staggered breaks, and limits on seating capacity at the cafeteria — social distancing is nearly impossible, according to the Kansas meatpacking employee. “It’s very loud, and so a lot of people just pull their mask down to speak to you,” she says. Before she began isolating last week, absenteeism was high: She was forced to pack meat from two conveyor belts instead of one to fill in for a missing colleague. To encourage workers to come in, the plant offered $2-per-hour raises — from $15.90 to $17.90 for her. But if workers miss even one day of work per week, they lose the whole week’s bonus. “It doesn’t even feel worth it,” she says.

Legal experts have questioned the enforceability of Trump’s executive order. It’s “a paper-thin proclamation with limited legal effect,” Daniel Hemel, an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago, argued in a Washington Post op-ed. But the order at least provides some justification and legal framework for big meat companies to push their workers to keep coming in. “The industry is already trying to use this argument,” says Tony Corbo, who suspects companies will invoke the order in an attempt to avoid liability.

But maybe it doesn’t matter: Tyson’s Waterloo, Iowa, plant, for example, remained closed for weeks despite the executive order, in part because of absenteeism: Workers simply wouldn’t show up, and realistically, Tyson can’t force them to. “I think it’s a well-intended [order], but it doesn’t address the real problem, which is getting workers to work, and keeping them safe when they’re there,” said Meyer of Kerns and Associates.

Processing closures are also creating a logjam effect, leading to problems that echo up the supply chain. “The crisis is at the hog farm,” says Jen Sorenson of Iowa Select Farm, the state’s largest pork producer. Before the COVID-19 crisis, the country was experiencing record pork and beef production. Now hog prices are spiraling downward, costing famers dearly. Many animals will be “depopulated,” an industry euphemism for being killed without being processed and sent to market.

Commercial pigs like Sorenson’s are raised inside barns their whole lives, and grow about two and a half pounds a day. If they’re not sent off to slaughter, they get too large for their quarters — roughly 7.2 to 8.7 square feet per animal, according to an industry publication’s recommendation. Slaughterhouses won’t accept animals if they get too big, and they can even become too heavy for their own legs. There’s nothing to do but euthanize them. In Minnesota, 10,000 hogs are being euthanized per day, Department of Agriculture officials tell the Star Tribune. The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announced it will establish a National Incident Coordination Center “to provide direct support to producers whose animals cannot move to market as a result of processing plant closures due to COVID-19,” including depopulation and disposal methods.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Hogs at Illinois’s fifth generation Old Elm Farms

For now, Iowa Select Farms has changed its hog feed to slow growth, holding its pigs at market weight for as long as possible. “This is why we need to keep our packing plants open,” says Sorenson, who is also communications director and president-elect of the National Pork Producers Council. “We need to keep that food chain moving.”

The mass closure of restaurants has also temporarily disrupted the meat supply chain: About 30 percent of pork, for example, is typically shipped to food-service establishments, per council estimates. The meat industry has scrambled to reroute those supplies to retail instead — which is good news for grocery store customers.

Looking out at her farm, Sorenson doesn’t see the makings of a long-term pork shortage. “There are plenty of hogs and we’re not running out of pork or bacon,” she says. “We’ve got a glitch between the farm and packer that’s got to get fixed ASAP. The supply two months down the road, it’s there — we’ve bred those animals, and we are birthing those piglets, and they’re moving through our farms.”

But if losses for farmers continue to mount, a real shortage could be coming in the long run. “The medium- to long-term effect is we could potentially lose more farms, more family farmers, who are not able to withstand these markets and this situation, and go out of business,” Sorenson predicts.

Meyer concurs. “Producers are losing so much money that some of them are going to go out of business. A year or two from now, we’re going to have lower pork supplies, and then you will see higher prices at the retail level, that’s almost certain.”

While the industrial meat system faces public scrutiny and backlash, America’s network of small butchers, farmers, and microprocessors are experiencing new attention of their own. “There’s a kind of validation,” says Ben Turley of the temporarily closed restaurant the Meat Hook, where business is up thanks to retail and delivery.

When Turley saw Tyson’s full-page ad, he called bullshit. “The food supply chain isn’t breaking; that’s just false. It’s Tyson’s food supply chain that’s breaking. Not ours. They want to make it seem like the end of the world to you. But Tyson is not all of food.”

The Meat Hook is supplied by Gibson Family Farms in Valley Falls, New York, and a small slaughterhouse nearby, Eagle Bridge Custom Meats. “If you take an outfit like the Meat Hook, you take us, and you take the people that slaughter the animals for us, and that’s three businesses currently thriving,” says Gibson Family Farms owner Dustin Gibson, who raises his hogs outdoors and grazes his cows on grass. “It’s awesome to see that they’re being rewarded.”

Kate Kavanaugh, owner of Western Daughters, a butcher shop in Denver focused on grass-fed meat raised according to regenerative farm practices, is encouraged by a recent uptick in sales. “The volume that we are seeing now as a business is the volume that could actually sustain us and our farmers and ranchers in the long term,” she says. It offers “a fighting chance.”

“The food supply chain isn’t breaking; that’s just false. It’s Tyson’s food supply chain that’s breaking.”

News stories about the meat industry are finally reaching consumers in a meaningful way, says Anya Fernald, CEO of California meat company Belcampo. “In America, we celebrate the high availability of so many different types of foods at such affordable prices. That’s an American privilege.” It’s no accident that cheap meat goes unexamined, she says. “There’s a willful disbelief.��

Belcampo’s meat — grass-fed, organic, and slaughtered at its own processing plant — is much more expensive than commodity meat. Fernald would argue that it’s also much tastier and healthier. But due to its price, meat from small purveyors won’t replace all the cheap protein Americans consume daily. It doesn’t have to, advocates say. “We need less meat in our diet,” says Turley of the Meat Hook. He just hopes consumers choose a little grass-fed meat over a lot of commodity meat. “We need to be eating more vegetables anyway.”

Cheap meat also comes at a high hidden cost, Fernald warns, and we don’t know when it will come due. The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned the public for years that most emerging infectious disease comes from animals, and industrialized animal farming can increase risk. “When we’re creating cheap meat, we’re actually creating a vast pathogen resource, a potential viral breeding ground, and making ourselves resistant to the most effective antibiotics that we have,” says Fernald.

“Propping up the meat industry is the last thing we need right now,” agrees Dr. Michael Greger, a critic of industrialized meat who runs the website NutritionFacts.org. “Not only because meat overconsumption worsens risk factors like heart disease... but because Big Ag may be brewing up Big Flu, a slew of new swine and bird flu viruses poised to potentially trigger the next pandemic.”

It’s a poignant lesson, says Fernald. “COVID is a broader story about meat, because it came fundamentally, it sounds like, from a wet market where animals are trafficked. … The whole story of COVID is a story of human boundaries with the animal kingdom, extractive mentalities about animals, and short-term thinking about animals and the planet.”

As the nation’s largest slaughterhouses and packing plants struggle and close, smaller slaughter and packing operations, on which independent butchers and small farmers depend, have been able to pick up some of the slack. “This has been just an absolute zoo,” says Christopher Young, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors, which represents about 1,500 facilities with fewer than 500 workers. “I’ve had some of my members describe it as the week before Christmas on steroids.” Young attributes the boom to customers cooking more at home, avoiding crowds at grocery stores, and anticipating possible industrial meat shortages based on news reports.

Workers at small slaughter operations have stayed healthy compared to their counterparts at big plants. That’s by virtue of their size, says Debbie Farrara of Eagle Bridge Custom Meats, which slaughters for Gibson Family Farms. “I do believe it is ‘easier’ for us to make an attempt to keep our staff healthy and to social distance and still get our work done.” Her team of 20 is now spaced out more widely, and she’s also cut back on staff on some days, so that they can have less exposure to one another.

“We’re small enough that with a bit of creativity and effort we can make this work,” says Farrara. “We are grateful that our team has stayed healthy thus far.”

AP Photo/Paul Sancya

A customer wearing gloves reaches for a package of pork

These fewer COVID cases at small plants might be due to little more than simple math, says Mike Lorentz, owner of Lorentz Meats in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and co-owner of Vermont Packinghouse in North Springfield, Vermont. “These large plants in rural areas have to draw employees from a very large circle, and then they take that large draw, and they cram them into a small place. That feels like a formula to amplify a socially transmitted disease… it’s exponential.” But there is a cultural element that stems from size, too: Lorentz has established trust and community with his employees. It’s a family business.

In terms of size, Lorentz is a “big little guy.” Still, “there’s such a chasm between little plants and big plants,” he says. “I used to joke that the first day of the year, by about noon, a big plant has done more than what we’ll do that entire year. Now I think we’ve caught up a little bit — we’d be two or three days into January now.”

As a second-generation processor, Lorentz has watched consolidation shape his industry for decades. The total number of slaughtering plants in the country has gone down 70 percent since 1967, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There just aren’t many meat processing plants in the U.S. at all. Fewer than 6,500 federally inspected facilities, according to the USDA; just 617 slaughtering beef, and 612 slaughtering pork. In response to recent news reports about the industry, two senators, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Josh Hawley of Missouri, have reportedly asked the Fair Trade Commission to investigate the practices of Smithfield, Cargill, JBS, and Tyson.

Putting aside the potential effects of consolidation on animal welfare and environmental health, there’s a major human toll. Initially, higher wages lured workers from small to big meat plants, but pay eventually slumped. According to a USDA study, declining unionization coincided with changes in worker demographics as more immigrants entered the meat labor force. Conditions worsened in response, historian Roger Horowitz writes in his book Negro and White, Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90. “Almost a century after Upton Sinclair’s pioneering expose of meatpacking, packinghouse workers in the United States have tragically returned to the jungle,” Horowitz writes.

When we sit down to eat, are we partaking of a sacrament, or participating in a desecration?

By contrast, Lorentz Meats is guided by a quote from the agrarian writer Wendell Berry. It’s inscribed on the walls, and Lorentz recites it from memory like a mantra. “We cannot live harmlessly at our own expense; we depend on other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.”

“I grew up in a family that processed meat,” Lorentz recalls. “My brother was the one that was in charge of the kill floor until 1997, when we bought my mom and dad out, and I worked on the kill floor, and I knew what it meant... Something is going to die to keep moving us forward, and once you start to realize that, you start doing that in a thoughtful way, and it changes the way you look at things.”

Slaughter on the whole has become a much more humane business, says Lorentz, even among the industry’s largest players. For that, he credits the industry-changing work of professor Temple Grandin, whose techniques have been adopted as USDA best practices. But there’s still work to be done on the farm and the factory floor. “Now the question is, ‘How do we treat the people?’ Are we giving them benefits, satisfying work?” Are our “essential” workers protected as such?

For Americans, our consolidated, industrial processing system has made it easy to consume meat without much thought. Cheap and plentiful, it becomes less a choice or privilege and more a right and convenience. But can it really be? With so much of our daily lives in question and our food system straining into visibility, we can’t help but ask ourselves: When we sit down to eat, are we partaking of a sacrament, or participating in a desecration?

Thinking back to the plant in Waterloo, Iowa, Sheriff Thompson says he’s not just angry at Tyson — he’s ashamed of himself. “I walked out of that plant as an elected official feeling like I’d let [those workers] down, too. So many of them are immigrants; they’re easy to take advantage of. These are hardworking people who do their shift and go home, and we never engage them… I didn’t protect them the way maybe we should have.”

Last Thursday, the Waterloo Tyson plant reopened after more than two weeks idle. Face masks and shields will be required, among other safety measures, and all workers will be tested for COVID-19 before returning to the job, Tyson executives said. To see that they actually do return, the company is distributing a $500 “thank you” bonus to workers in early May. It’s conditional upon their attendance.

Caleb Pershan is an NYC-based reporter and former editor of Eater SF.

Disclosure: Eater has a video series, Prime Time, hosted by Ben Turley and Brent Young of the Meat Hook.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2ySgLIZ https://ift.tt/2T1B8Kt

Workers line up to return to work a Tyson processing plant in Logansport, Indiana, which temporarily closed after 900 workers tested positive for COVID-19 | AP Photo/Michael Conroy

More than a century after Upton Sinclair’s novel about exploitation in America’s meat industry, the coronavirus has revealed how little meatpacking has changed

“They didn’t start to take it seriously until we started getting cases in our town and in our plant.”

AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

A worker leaves the Tyson Foods plant in Waterloo, Iowa on May 1

AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

Medical workers test a local resident at a drive-thru COVID-19 testing site in Waterloo, Iowa

“From a consumer standpoint, it’s not a crisis at all, in my opinion.”

“The return on investment for Tyson’s public relations ad was enormous,” says Leonard.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Hogs at Illinois’s fifth generation Old Elm Farms

“The food supply chain isn’t breaking; that’s just false. It’s Tyson’s food supply chain that’s breaking.”

“We’re small enough that with a bit of creativity and effort we can make this work,” says Farrara. “We are grateful that our team has stayed healthy thus far.”

AP Photo/Paul Sancya

A customer wearing gloves reaches for a package of pork

When we sit down to eat, are we partaking of a sacrament, or participating in a desecration?

Caleb Pershan is an NYC-based reporter and former editor of Eater SF.

Disclosure: Eater has a video series, Prime Time, hosted by Ben Turley and Brent Young of the Meat Hook.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2ySgLIZ via Blogger https://ift.tt/2LshaEO

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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keepitcartesian · 6 years ago

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9 DIY Home Decor Ideas in Summer

Welcome the warm climate cheerfulness and delight as you update your own insides an exciting and lightened arrival this summer.

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Tissue Paper DIY Flowers

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Summer Themed Study Room

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Motivational Quotes Message Board

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Summer Garland with hessian bows and decorative twigs

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Outdoor Solar Lighting

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Floral Arrangement with Sliced Oranges

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Customized Chaise Cushions on Chaise Lounge

9. Add a Summery Swag Light

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Summery Swag Light Mounted on Wooden Angle

Author’s Info:

Amy Lara

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The following blog post 9 DIY Home Decor Ideas in Summer was originally seen on http://www.keepitcartesian.com/

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its-lifestyle · 6 years ago

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This book does not beat about the bush about what it sets out to do, which is to showcase feminist tales featuring bold, bright and heroic women and girls from this part of the world.

This anthology comprises 18 stories that will inspire, entertain and provide food for thought, as it takes young adult readers on a journey of endless possibilities – but with one foot firmly in the here and now, and a reminder of what it is that makes us who we are.

The idea for The Principal Girl: Feminist Tales From Asia (Gerakbudaya) came up in 2016, when Dr Sharifah Aishah Osman from the Department of English at Universiti Malaya’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences wanted to publish a book of feminist folktales.

A call was issued for submissions – and the stories received were more diverse, more colourful, than initially expected. There were contributions from both established writers as well as newcomers.

“I don’t think anyone has published an anthology of feminist tales,” says children’s book author Tutu Dutta, who co-edited The Principal Girl with Sharifah.

“I was aware of (Amir Muhammad’s imprint) Fixi Novo and (Sharon Bakar’s) Word Works’ successful series of very well-written anthologies by local writers.

“I have read a few, including Chronicles Of KK (edited by Ann Lee), The Remang Anthology (Daphne Lee), and Champion Fellas (Sharon Bakar and Dipika Mukherjee).

“We realised there is a wealth of local talent out there. Since we received quite a number of interesting entries which were contemporary stories, we decided to be flexible and make The Principal Girl a collection of feminist tales, not feminist folktales,” says Dutta, who has nine books to her name, including the anthologies Timeless Tales Of Malaysia (2009) and Nights Of The Dark Moon (2017).

Of the 18 stories in The Principal Girl, 10 are original tales set in contemporary settings, while eight are based on Asian folklore and draw on legendary female figures like Hang Li Po, the princess of Gunung Ledang, Cik Siti Wan Kemboja and Mahsuri.

Dutta, 59, describes the stories as positive and self-affirming; they shine the spotlight on resourceful girls and young women with “can-do” attitudes, determined to live life on their own terms.

“They solve problems or surmount the obstacles that life throws at them,” says Dutta.

There is, for instance, a grievously wounded queen who finds the resolve to fight again, a school girl who solves crimes with some supernatural help, a kungfu-fighting Hang Li Po, a woman who fights for her inheritance, a student who overcomes the trauma of being accused of plagiarism, sisters who risk exile to help one another, and young women who are willing to turn down unsuitable men.

Sharifah concurs, adding that all the stories do indeed have an underlying feminist message, in that they feature a female protagonist and privilege her experiences, and in doing so, highlight the numerous ways in which women and girls have struggled with, but also managed to overcome, issues of marginalisation, injustice and oppression in society.

“We need such empowering stories to address the dismissal, the silence, even erasure of such strong women from our history.” These are women whose contributions may have been ignored, or regarded as insignificant due to the dominance of a patriarchal culture – especially as reflected in male-centric folktales that often feature heroines idealised more for their beauty and passivity than intelligence and courage, says Sharifah, 48.

“Through the retelling of these stories, we hope to remind our readers of such heroic and inspirational women from our own culture and heritage, and to make their acts of bravery and agency a source of our own pride as Malaysians and Asians,” she says.

The target age group for The Principal Girl is 13- to 25-year-olds, although Dutta points out that despite their simple language, there is enough complexity in these tales to appeal to adults too.

Ever mindful of the importance of diverse perspectives and characters in storytelling, The Principal Girl has diverse voices, she says, not just in terms of culture and race, but also age.

“We live in a diverse, multicultural and multiracial society. We need young people to have diverse perspectives not just for the sake of ‘living in harmony’ but for our survival as a society.

“The book is supposed to empower girls but if it gives young readers a greater appreciation of the diverse cultures that make up our society, and a greater understanding and respect for what makes us unique, then all the better,” Dutta says.

As for starting them young on the diversity that is our reality more often than not, Sharifah feels it is “absolutely essential” for children’s intellectual, psychological, and emotional growth.

“Apart from partaking in the joys of reading literature, our young audiences need to have stories that cater to their natural curiosity about diversity and difference, especially in light of an increasing polarised and confusing world. They need to understand that everyone, regardless of race, class, religion and gender, deserves to be treated with respect and compassion.

“It is our hope that The Principal Girl will help towards accomplishing this aim as well as cultivate a sense of pride in our heritage and culture,” she says.

Sharifah adds that they wanted young readers, both boys and girls, to have something of their own to treasure and enjoy, a book that speaks to their own experiences as Asians, and in which they can see characters that look and sound like them, or that they could aspire to become.

“As children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop reminds us, to nourish their minds and develop a strong sense of self-affirmation, children need books that serve not just as ‘windows’ to other cultures, but also ‘mirrors’ in which they can see themselves and their experiences being reflected.

“That’s why it was important to us that our readers, regardless of gender, understood that like these ‘principal girls’, they too could be brave, smart, resilient, independent, and masters of their own fate,” she offers.

The book’s title, The Principal Girl, refers to the main character in a children’s play or pantomime. Like the strong female figures in these tales, they do not play second fiddle to anyone.

How truly fitting.

A peek behind the scenes

Anna Tan (Operation: Rescue Pris) Writing Operation: Rescue Pris was an offshoot of my research for my novel, Dongeng, for which I worked with local legends such as orang bunian, pontianak and lang suir. I wanted to do more with the amazing legends I’d discovered. The story ended up as a conflation of several themes: the legend of the Gedembai from Langkawi, the legend of Sam Poh in Penang, and overturning the trope of the knight in shining armour. What I loved best about this story was being able to look at local legends and folktales through a modern lens and reinterprete them for our times.

Golda Mowe (Under The Bridge) Writing the story brought back a lot of old memories. I love my visits to the longhouse in my young days because I was free to roam about as I please. There was always some trouble to get into, and always an adult close by to help us kids out of the situation. It was nice to recall the smell and sound of the old longhouse again. I did not realise how much I missed those days until I had to imagine the sunning verandah for the story.

Hezreen Abdul Rashid (The Veiled Knight) My story is about Khawlah Azwar who was an Arab warrior who fought against the Byzantine army together with Khalid Al-Walid. When I first heard this story two years ago, I was inspired to write simply because it is a beautiful story, one that all girls and boys should know. They should know that women who rode horses and wielded swords don’t just exist in Disneyland. They are real. And they did it for the right reasons.

Julya Oui (Surya And The Supernatural Sleuths) I’ve always been intrigued by our local folklore and supernatural myths. They were my staple diet growing up in a small town. When I started writing this story I wanted an independent and strong female protagonist who wasn’t afraid of things that go bump in the dark. She is the embodiment of fortitude, inquisitiveness and compassion which I believe is what a sleuth needs to solve a mystery.

Krishnaveni Panikker (Priya’s Faraway Tree) Seeing my story, Priya’s Faraway Tree, in print is a joy. It is not every day one gets to see her first creative short story published, what more in a feminist anthology. This story took place over four decades ago, and I am hoping that it will be an inspiring message to young females that nothing is impossible if they set their hearts and souls to it.

Leela Chakravarty (Princess Of Mount Ledang) Since there are numerous versions of Princess of Mount Ledang, I got down to researching more on it. It was wonderful that our National Library had lots of short extracts or pieces of stories. I selected the pieces that would be suitable to entertain YA readers and assembled them into a complete story. In the process, I gained lots of new knowledge.

Preeta Samarasan (Red And White and The Girl On The Mountain) What I loved about working on these retellings was that they forced me to analyse and to create simultaneously: First I had to connect with the original folktale on its level, consider the female protagonist(s), who she was and who she might be between the lines. Only then could I bring out those between-the-lines possibilities. In the same way that you have to understand the rules of art before you break them, I had to understand these narratives before I could twist them.

Renie Leng (Saving Grace) As a poet, I find the short story the most challenging form to write in. When writing Saving Grace, I wanted to create a strong contemporary female character who happened to be born into privilege despite the tragedies in her life, and she used the privileges of a good education to save a culturally integral landmark from developers. Her victory seemed an easy resolution but not at a price.

Sharmilla Ganesan (Gamble) Writing this story – a reimagining of a key sequence from the Mahabharata – was an opportunity for me to address an imbalance I felt from a young age, when I first heard the story. It allowed me to look at the character of Draupadi within a modern context, and address issues like consent, agency and ownership over our own bodies.

Wan Phing Lim (House Of Malacca) My story is a fictionalised rendition of the relationship between Hang Li Po and Admiral Cheng Ho. Li Po is escorted by Cheng Ho from China to Melaka, under the disguise of being Sultan Mansur Shah’s bride. Her true purpose is to protect the Sultan from enemies within the palace and to keep the peace amid escalating trade wars in the region. My story draws parallels with Disney’s Mulan and Li Shang, and was also influenced by Esther, a Jewish queen from ancient Persia. My version of Hang Li Po shows that females can be capable warriors, spies, and protectors, embodying both skill and compassion.

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spryfilm · 7 years ago

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“Night Gallery” (1969 – 1973)

Anthology/Horror

43 Episodes

Created by: Rod Serling

Produced by: Jack Laird & William Sackheim

Rod Serling: “Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of three paintings, displayed here for the first time. Each is a collectors’ item in its own way – not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, and suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.”

This month sees the release of the anthology television show “Night Gallery” (1969 – 1973) in a three series ten-disc box set, that incorporates every episode produced – just great entertainment with some good special features at a modest price.

Night Gallery was an American anthology series that aired on NBC from 1969 to 1973, featuring stories of horror, science fiction as well some humorous episodes as well. Rod Serling, who had gained fame from an earlier series, “The Twilight Zone”(1959 – 1964), served both as the on-air host of ‘Night Gallery’ as well as a major contributor of scripts, although he did not have the same control of content and tone as he had on ‘The Twilight Zone’. Serling viewed ‘Night Gallery’ as a logical extension of ‘The Twilight Zone’, but while both series shared an interest in thought-provoking dark fantasy, more of Zone’s offerings were science fiction while Night Gallery focused on horrors of the supernatural.

Serling appeared in an art gallery setting and introduced the stories that made up each episode by unveiling paintings (by artists Thomas J. Wright and Jaroslav “Jerry” Gebr) that depicted the stories. ‘Night Gallery’ regularly presented adaptations of classic fantasy tales by authors such as H. P. Lovecraft, as well as original works, many of which were by Serling himself.

Looking back at a television series from almost fifty years ago may seem a difficult prospect but Serling was such a good writer as well as arbiter of taste that the vast majority of this stories are so unique that they seem to have not aged a day.

Highlighted episodes not to be missed:

Silent Snow, Secret Snow (Seas. 2, Ep. 5)

Based on a short story by Conrad Aiken, this psychological tale is the story of a young boy’s fascination with the snow outside his home; a fascination that turns him inside himself and towards insanity. This one is incredibly creepy and atmospheric, one to watch with the lights on, as well as having company with you.

The Diary (Seas. 2, Ep. 8)

This masterpiece, penned by Serling himself, stars Patty Duke as an aging movie star with a grudge, she enacts madness-inducing revenge on the scathing gossip columnist who shreds her acting credibility. Truly one of the more chilling and well-written episodes of the entire series, but you would not expect anything less from Rod Serling.

The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes (Seas. 2, Ep. 1)

In this chilling tale, a boy is given a very special gift – to see the future. As a commentary on the media’s fascination with the strange and our unearned trust in the media, this story has a very poignant message.

You Can’t Get Help Like That Anymore (Seas. 2, Ep. 20)

It is the near future, and people are still mean as well as bullies. At least, that’s the concept at the core of this tale. When a rich couple purchase the best robot maid available and then attempt to beat the crap out of her (like all the other robot maids before her), they get a nasty surprise.

Sins of the Fathers (Seas. 2, Ep. 20)

The very next episode although being painfully grotesque (hunchback dwarves, guttural screaming, turkey legs) is actually really creepy Dark Ages.

Midnight Never Ends (Seas. 2, Ep. 7)

Another Season 2 gem by Serling, this story is like a cross between “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “The Shining” (1980). A young woman picks up a hitchhiker on the road and the two immediately feel as though they are caught in a super-strong bout of mutual deja vous. What they find out is a truth that is more chilling than you could possibly imagine.

Whisper (Seas. 3, Ep. 13)

As one of the final episodes, Serling managed to saved the best for last. With a skeleton cast of amazingly talented actors, this story is a truly haunting tale that answers the question: What is the worst thing that can happen when you believe you can speak to the dead?

The Ring With the Red Velvet Ropes (Seas. 3, Ep. 10)

A heavyweight-boxing champion that has just won the world title finds himself on an unknown island, surrounded by sexy ladies and good food. Everything is great until he finds out that he’s not the REAL world champion until he beats an otherworldly fighter with a very long winning streak.

The Different Ones (Seas. 2, Ep. 14)

Once you’ve seen this one, you’ll see almost a direct connection with some of Serlong’s more notable work on Twilight Zone. In this futuristic episode, a hideously mangled teenager is shipped off to a governmental-alien leper colony. In his desire to be a “normal person,” the hero is willing to do almost anything to avoid literal alienation.

The Caterpillar (Seas. 2, Ep. 21)

A colonial tale of unrequited love turned sour, this is about a British military leader in the jungles of Borneo. When he can’t have the girl of his dreams, he decides to take care of her husband by using the deadly flora and fauna of the inhospitable land. One small mistake in the plan is all it takes for him to get an earful.

A Question of Fear (Seas. 2, Ep. 6)

A rich man makes a revenge bet with an old buddy that he can’t stay locked up overnight in a reportedly haunted house. When he starts seeing strange things (beds with knives in them, for example), he decides that the $10,000 is not worth his life. Unfortunately, the house doesn’t let him call backsies without a fight.

The Big Surprise (Seas. 2, Ep. 8)

There’s nothing scarier to a 12-year-old than a creepy old guy who tells you to dig a big hole. In this very short story (on the same powerhouse episode as The Diary), a young boy gets a tip from an old neighbor that something buried under a nearby tree. Thinking he has heard some kind of verbal treasure map, the boy acquiesces. His surprise is not at all what he expects.

The House (Seas. 1, Ep. 3)

In my favorite episode by far, a woman continually has a dream that she is driving towards an unknown house, but that she knows inside and out. After graduating from dream therapy with a “cured” badge, she actually finds the house from her dreams. Not surprising, there is a ghost haunting it, but what it’s trying to do only becomes clear in the last few moments of the story.

The Housekeeper (Seas. 1, Ep. 1)

As the first episode of Night Gallery, this little story comes out of nowhere and mentally screws everyone. An aging housekeeper with low self-esteem is requested for a dream job. This story is all about the consequences of being young and beautiful forever. I choose this tale for those who like their Halloween ironic.

Tell David (Seas. 2, Ep. 14)

I personally believe that this is the most horrifying of them all, in the traditional sense. A woman with some marital problems and a small son gets lost in a freak storm. When she finds a local house for shelter, all the strange objects that she finds inside surprise her.

Special Features:

This 10 DVD collection brings you every episode from this spine-tingling 1970s series.

Penned by legendary twilight zone writer – rod serling

Includes the original pilot episode from 1969

“Night Gallery” is out now on DVD.

DVD review: “Night Gallery” (1969 – 1973) “Night Gallery” (1969 - 1973) Anthology/Horror 43 Episodes Created by: Rod Serling Produced by: Jack Laird & William Sackheim…

#dvd #dvd review #DVD reviews #DVDReviews #night gallery #rod serling

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easyfoodnetwork · 5 years ago

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Workers line up to return to work a Tyson processing plant in Logansport, Indiana, which temporarily closed after 900 workers tested positive for COVID-19 | AP Photo/Michael Conroy More than a century after Upton Sinclair’s novel about exploitation in America’s meat industry, the coronavirus has revealed how little meatpacking has changed Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson left the Tyson pork processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, in disgust. On April 10, after receiving complaints from workers and community members, he and local health officials inspected the facility, which is responsible for about 5 percent of total U.S. pork production, according to industry estimates. “We walked out of that plant tour knowing those complaints were valid,” says Thompson, who is also chair of the Black Hawk Emergency Management Commission. “They had a huge problem.” On the factory floor, where 2,800 people slaughter, cut, and package 19,500 hogs a day, only a third of workers wore face coverings, Thompson says, some with bandanas and eye masks over their mouths instead of appropriate masks. “They thought they had three confirmed [COVID-19] cases out of that plant, but we knew they were in the double digits.” Thompson and other elected officials urged Tyson to close the plant immediately for cleaning and test employees for COVID-19. “They didn’t take action,” he says. Now, 1,031 workers at the Waterloo plant have tested positive, and 1,703 cases total have been confirmed in Black Hawk County, including at a long-term care facility for the elderly. Twenty-six people have died. Thompson traces the outbreak to the Tyson plant, one of the county’s largest employers. “They blew a hole in our defensive line.” For Thompson, as for many Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic is shining a bright light into one of the darkest recesses of the country’s food system: industrial meat processing, comprising slaughter and packing — an incredibly streamlined and consolidated industry controlled by a small number of companies and reliant on low-paid, immigrant labor. It’s dangerous work on a good day, with steadily increasing production speeds, injury rates twice the national average, and illness rates 15 times normal rates, according to the National Employment Law Project. “They didn’t start to take it seriously until we started getting cases in our town and in our plant.” But COVID-19 has made matters much, much worse. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4,913 cases of COVID-19 have been reported at 115 meat and poultry processing facilities in the U.S. as of April 30, and 20 workers have died of the disease. Data collected by the Food & Environment Reporting Network through May 12 puts the number of meatpacking worker deaths at 52 and the number of infected at more than 13,000. The problems are partly of scale: The CDC points to “difficulties with workplace physical distancing and hygiene and crowded living and transportation conditions,” or thousands of workers laboring in tight quarters and living in small, rural communities. At another Tyson plant, in Perry, Iowa, 730 workers, or 58 percent of those tested, were positive for COVID-19, health officials said. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, more than 900 COVID-19 cases stemmed from an outbreak at a single Smithfield Foods meat processing plant, according to health officials. Some workers and union groups blame meatpacking companies for acting too slowly to address COVID-19 related safety concerns. “I felt like they didn’t start to take it seriously until we started getting cases in our town and in our plant,” said one meatpacking worker at a facility in Kansas, where masks weren’t implemented even after some workers tested positive for COVID-19, she says. Following a bout of chills and aches, the worker, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, also tested positive for COVID-19 last week. She’s now isolated, with pay, and recovering. For longtime critics of America’s meat system, the current public scrutiny feels overdue. “The industrial meat system is about as nasty as you can get,” says Brent Young, whose Brooklyn butcher shop, the Meat Hook, was established in contrast to big meat — and is one of many small purveyors currently thriving even as major processors struggle. (Young, along with Meat Hook co-owner Ben Turley, is also the co-host of the Eater video series Prime Time). “I can’t say anything without recognizing that it’s incredibly sad that [this situation] is going to affect millions of animals and undocumented workers,” Young says. “But as for that supply chain being broken, all I can say is it’s about time.” On April 22, Tyson finally closed its Waterloo plant, with company president Steve Stouffer saying that “protecting our team members is our top priority.” It’s just one of at least 22 U.S. meat and poultry processing plants that had closed due to COVID-19 cases by April 28, according to estimates from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Recent plant closures highlight the meat industry’s decades of consolidation into an oligopoly of four companies: Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield Foods. According to Cassandra Fish, an industry analyst and former Tyson risk management executive, about 50 meat processing plants are responsible for as much as 98 percent of all U.S. meat slaughter and processing. The arrangement has driven prices downward — meat prices in the EU were twice as high as of 2017 — but created a system that’s vulnerable to disturbances like COVID-19, says Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business. “All these animals have to pass through an extremely narrow bottleneck. “We used to think of this in terms of food-borne pathogens. We used to say, when you have these few plants, if you have a problem at one plant, it can have a cascading effect through the whole food system,” says Leonard. “Now [with COVID-19], this is triply true. If you shut down a single slaughterhouse, it knocks out a huge, measurable portion of the whole meat supply.” AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall A worker leaves the Tyson Foods plant in Waterloo, Iowa on May 1 AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall Medical workers test a local resident at a drive-thru COVID-19 testing site in Waterloo, Iowa The measure of the disruption is striking: As of the first week of May, pork production capacity was down 25 percent, and beef capacity was down 10 percent, according to the food workers’ union. Slaughter of both pork and cattle was down 30 percent year-over-year, according to livestock reports from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. All in all, Fish predicts, that’s likely to translate to a 20 to 25 percent reduction in the amount of available beef during what’s typically peak sales season, between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Pork supply could be down by 18 percent during that period, she anticipates. Meat company executives sounded the alarm, warning the public of potential shortages. On April 27, Tyson chairman John Tyson took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, addressing plant closures in dire public health terms. “The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson wrote, warning of “meat shortages and wasted animals. … Our plants must remain operational so that we can supply food to our families in America.” But the North American Meat Institute, which represents the companies responsible for 90 percent of U.S. red meat production, points to plenty of meat reserves in cold storage; 921 million pounds of chicken and 467 million pounds of beef, according to the USDA, as of late April. Much of this meat was previously allotted to restaurants that are now closed and won’t need it. Pork reserves, originally bound for export to China, can also be released to U.S. customers. FDA officials say they don’t anticipate serious food shortages for consumers, just temporarily low inventory at some stores as they restock. And even if supply is lower and there’s less variety, Steve Meyer, a meat industry economist with Kerns and Associates in Ames, Iowa, isn’t worried about Americans running out of meat. “From a consumer standpoint, it’s not a crisis at all, in my opinion.” Still, some chains like McDonald’s report that they’re bracing for diminished meat supplies. Hundreds of locations of Wendy’s, which relies on fresh beef, rather than more abundant frozen beef, reported running out of burgers at some locations by early May, with shortages expected to last a “couple of weeks.” In grocery stores, fresh meat prices were up 8.1 percent for the week ending April 25 over the same week last year, per Nielsen data. But prices weren’t up across the board, according to USDA data: Ground beef was more expensive, but the price of typically more costly cuts, like rib-eye, went down. And while retailers like Costco and Kroger are placing per-person limits on meat purchases, that’s in part to curtail panic shopping, which could perpetuate shortage fears and panic-buying cycles. “From a consumer standpoint, it’s not a crisis at all, in my opinion.” Critics of the meat industry even characterize its claims of a shortage as tactical hyperbole: a calculated campaign intended to gain federal support. On April 28, just two days after the Tyson ad appeared, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring meat production essential infrastructure. Meat industry executives cheered, but workers’ rights advocates howled. “It’s putting profits ahead of public health,” says Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for the watchdog group Food and Water Watch. “The return on investment for Tyson’s public relations ad was enormous,” says Leonard. For customers, there may be no immediate meat crisis. But for processing workers, the danger is real. “A lot of us are scared,” says the Kansas meat processing worker who tested positive for COVID-19. “It feels like we’re putting our health at risk, but at what cost?” Rather than precise OSHA and CDC requirements, the executive order points to looser temporary guidance. “To keep their doors open safely, meatpacking plants — and all essential workplaces — must operate under clear, enforceable OSHA standards — not voluntary ‘guidance,’” says Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. Alarmingly, federal officials seem to downplay the risk: In a May 7 call with lawmakers, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar emphasized the need to keep plants open, and suggested “home and social” aspects of workers’ lives contributed to high infection rates at meatpacking plants. Debbie Berkowitz, a former senior OSHA official and expert on meat processing who is now director for worker safety and health at the National Employment Law Project, thinks the federal government is less worried about keeping workers safe and more concerned with keeping businesses safe from liability. “Instead of requiring meatpacking companies to implement safe practices, the president prefers to attempt to shield these corporations from responsibility for putting workers’ lives in danger,” Berkowitz wrote in a statement to Eater. The industry is already under-regulated, says author Christopher Leonard, with processors consistently permitted to push operating speeds faster. “The USDA is controlled almost entirely by the big meat companies, it’s just a categorical fact,” he says. “The meat industry is setting the terms of regulation.” Even with added safety measures now in place at her factory — plexiglass screens, staggered breaks, and limits on seating capacity at the cafeteria — social distancing is nearly impossible, according to the Kansas meatpacking employee. “It’s very loud, and so a lot of people just pull their mask down to speak to you,” she says. Before she began isolating last week, absenteeism was high: She was forced to pack meat from two conveyor belts instead of one to fill in for a missing colleague. To encourage workers to come in, the plant offered $2-per-hour raises — from $15.90 to $17.90 for her. But if workers miss even one day of work per week, they lose the whole week’s bonus. “It doesn’t even feel worth it,” she says. Legal experts have questioned the enforceability of Trump’s executive order. It’s “a paper-thin proclamation with limited legal effect,” Daniel Hemel, an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago, argued in a Washington Post op-ed. But the order at least provides some justification and legal framework for big meat companies to push their workers to keep coming in. “The industry is already trying to use this argument,” says Tony Corbo, who suspects companies will invoke the order in an attempt to avoid liability. But maybe it doesn’t matter: Tyson’s Waterloo, Iowa, plant, for example, remained closed for weeks despite the executive order, in part because of absenteeism: Workers simply wouldn’t show up, and realistically, Tyson can’t force them to. “I think it’s a well-intended [order], but it doesn’t address the real problem, which is getting workers to work, and keeping them safe when they’re there,” said Meyer of Kerns and Associates. Processing closures are also creating a logjam effect, leading to problems that echo up the supply chain. “The crisis is at the hog farm,” says Jen Sorenson of Iowa Select Farm, the state’s largest pork producer. Before the COVID-19 crisis, the country was experiencing record pork and beef production. Now hog prices are spiraling downward, costing famers dearly. Many animals will be “depopulated,” an industry euphemism for being killed without being processed and sent to market. Commercial pigs like Sorenson’s are raised inside barns their whole lives, and grow about two and a half pounds a day. If they’re not sent off to slaughter, they get too large for their quarters — roughly 7.2 to 8.7 square feet per animal, according to an industry publication’s recommendation. Slaughterhouses won’t accept animals if they get too big, and they can even become too heavy for their own legs. There’s nothing to do but euthanize them. In Minnesota, 10,000 hogs are being euthanized per day, Department of Agriculture officials tell the Star Tribune. The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announced it will establish a National Incident Coordination Center “to provide direct support to producers whose animals cannot move to market as a result of processing plant closures due to COVID-19,” including depopulation and disposal methods. Scott Olson/Getty Images Hogs at Illinois’s fifth generation Old Elm Farms For now, Iowa Select Farms has changed its hog feed to slow growth, holding its pigs at market weight for as long as possible. “This is why we need to keep our packing plants open,” says Sorenson, who is also communications director and president-elect of the National Pork Producers Council. “We need to keep that food chain moving.” The mass closure of restaurants has also temporarily disrupted the meat supply chain: About 30 percent of pork, for example, is typically shipped to food-service establishments, per council estimates. The meat industry has scrambled to reroute those supplies to retail instead — which is good news for grocery store customers. Looking out at her farm, Sorenson doesn’t see the makings of a long-term pork shortage. “There are plenty of hogs and we’re not running out of pork or bacon,” she says. “We’ve got a glitch between the farm and packer that’s got to get fixed ASAP. The supply two months down the road, it’s there — we’ve bred those animals, and we are birthing those piglets, and they’re moving through our farms.” But if losses for farmers continue to mount, a real shortage could be coming in the long run. “The medium- to long-term effect is we could potentially lose more farms, more family farmers, who are not able to withstand these markets and this situation, and go out of business,” Sorenson predicts. Meyer concurs. “Producers are losing so much money that some of them are going to go out of business. A year or two from now, we’re going to have lower pork supplies, and then you will see higher prices at the retail level, that’s almost certain.” While the industrial meat system faces public scrutiny and backlash, America’s network of small butchers, farmers, and microprocessors are experiencing new attention of their own. “There’s a kind of validation,” says Ben Turley of the temporarily closed restaurant the Meat Hook, where business is up thanks to retail and delivery. When Turley saw Tyson’s full-page ad, he called bullshit. “The food supply chain isn’t breaking; that’s just false. It’s Tyson’s food supply chain that’s breaking. Not ours. They want to make it seem like the end of the world to you. But Tyson is not all of food.” The Meat Hook is supplied by Gibson Family Farms in Valley Falls, New York, and a small slaughterhouse nearby, Eagle Bridge Custom Meats. “If you take an outfit like the Meat Hook, you take us, and you take the people that slaughter the animals for us, and that’s three businesses currently thriving,” says Gibson Family Farms owner Dustin Gibson, who raises his hogs outdoors and grazes his cows on grass. “It’s awesome to see that they’re being rewarded.” Kate Kavanaugh, owner of Western Daughters, a butcher shop in Denver focused on grass-fed meat raised according to regenerative farm practices, is encouraged by a recent uptick in sales. “The volume that we are seeing now as a business is the volume that could actually sustain us and our farmers and ranchers in the long term,” she says. It offers “a fighting chance.” “The food supply chain isn’t breaking; that’s just false. It’s Tyson’s food supply chain that’s breaking.” News stories about the meat industry are finally reaching consumers in a meaningful way, says Anya Fernald, CEO of California meat company Belcampo. “In America, we celebrate the high availability of so many different types of foods at such affordable prices. That’s an American privilege.” It’s no accident that cheap meat goes unexamined, she says. “There’s a willful disbelief.” Belcampo’s meat — grass-fed, organic, and slaughtered at its own processing plant — is much more expensive than commodity meat. Fernald would argue that it’s also much tastier and healthier. But due to its price, meat from small purveyors won’t replace all the cheap protein Americans consume daily. It doesn’t have to, advocates say. “We need less meat in our diet,” says Turley of the Meat Hook. He just hopes consumers choose a little grass-fed meat over a lot of commodity meat. “We need to be eating more vegetables anyway.” Cheap meat also comes at a high hidden cost, Fernald warns, and we don’t know when it will come due. The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned the public for years that most emerging infectious disease comes from animals, and industrialized animal farming can increase risk. “When we’re creating cheap meat, we’re actually creating a vast pathogen resource, a potential viral breeding ground, and making ourselves resistant to the most effective antibiotics that we have,” says Fernald. “Propping up the meat industry is the last thing we need right now,” agrees Dr. Michael Greger, a critic of industrialized meat who runs the website NutritionFacts.org. “Not only because meat overconsumption worsens risk factors like heart disease... but because Big Ag may be brewing up Big Flu, a slew of new swine and bird flu viruses poised to potentially trigger the next pandemic.” It’s a poignant lesson, says Fernald. “COVID is a broader story about meat, because it came fundamentally, it sounds like, from a wet market where animals are trafficked. … The whole story of COVID is a story of human boundaries with the animal kingdom, extractive mentalities about animals, and short-term thinking about animals and the planet.” As the nation’s largest slaughterhouses and packing plants struggle and close, smaller slaughter and packing operations, on which independent butchers and small farmers depend, have been able to pick up some of the slack. “This has been just an absolute zoo,” says Christopher Young, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors, which represents about 1,500 facilities with fewer than 500 workers. “I’ve had some of my members describe it as the week before Christmas on steroids.” Young attributes the boom to customers cooking more at home, avoiding crowds at grocery stores, and anticipating possible industrial meat shortages based on news reports. Workers at small slaughter operations have stayed healthy compared to their counterparts at big plants. That’s by virtue of their size, says Debbie Farrara of Eagle Bridge Custom Meats, which slaughters for Gibson Family Farms. “I do believe it is ‘easier’ for us to make an attempt to keep our staff healthy and to social distance and still get our work done.” Her team of 20 is now spaced out more widely, and she’s also cut back on staff on some days, so that they can have less exposure to one another. “We’re small enough that with a bit of creativity and effort we can make this work,” says Farrara. “We are grateful that our team has stayed healthy thus far.” AP Photo/Paul Sancya A customer wearing gloves reaches for a package of pork These fewer COVID cases at small plants might be due to little more than simple math, says Mike Lorentz, owner of Lorentz Meats in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and co-owner of Vermont Packinghouse in North Springfield, Vermont. “These large plants in rural areas have to draw employees from a very large circle, and then they take that large draw, and they cram them into a small place. That feels like a formula to amplify a socially transmitted disease… it’s exponential.” But there is a cultural element that stems from size, too: Lorentz has established trust and community with his employees. It’s a family business. In terms of size, Lorentz is a “big little guy.” Still, “there’s such a chasm between little plants and big plants,” he says. “I used to joke that the first day of the year, by about noon, a big plant has done more than what we’ll do that entire year. Now I think we’ve caught up a little bit — we’d be two or three days into January now.” As a second-generation processor, Lorentz has watched consolidation shape his industry for decades. The total number of slaughtering plants in the country has gone down 70 percent since 1967, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There just aren’t many meat processing plants in the U.S. at all. Fewer than 6,500 federally inspected facilities, according to the USDA; just 617 slaughtering beef, and 612 slaughtering pork. In response to recent news reports about the industry, two senators, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Josh Hawley of Missouri, have reportedly asked the Fair Trade Commission to investigate the practices of Smithfield, Cargill, JBS, and Tyson. Putting aside the potential effects of consolidation on animal welfare and environmental health, there’s a major human toll. Initially, higher wages lured workers from small to big meat plants, but pay eventually slumped. According to a USDA study, declining unionization coincided with changes in worker demographics as more immigrants entered the meat labor force. Conditions worsened in response, historian Roger Horowitz writes in his book Negro and White, Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90. “Almost a century after Upton Sinclair’s pioneering expose of meatpacking, packinghouse workers in the United States have tragically returned to the jungle,” Horowitz writes. When we sit down to eat, are we partaking of a sacrament, or participating in a desecration? By contrast, Lorentz Meats is guided by a quote from the agrarian writer Wendell Berry. It’s inscribed on the walls, and Lorentz recites it from memory like a mantra. “We cannot live harmlessly at our own expense; we depend on other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.” “I grew up in a family that processed meat,” Lorentz recalls. “My brother was the one that was in charge of the kill floor until 1997, when we bought my mom and dad out, and I worked on the kill floor, and I knew what it meant... Something is going to die to keep moving us forward, and once you start to realize that, you start doing that in a thoughtful way, and it changes the way you look at things.” Slaughter on the whole has become a much more humane business, says Lorentz, even among the industry’s largest players. For that, he credits the industry-changing work of professor Temple Grandin, whose techniques have been adopted as USDA best practices. But there’s still work to be done on the farm and the factory floor. “Now the question is, ‘How do we treat the people?’ Are we giving them benefits, satisfying work?” Are our “essential” workers protected as such? For Americans, our consolidated, industrial processing system has made it easy to consume meat without much thought. Cheap and plentiful, it becomes less a choice or privilege and more a right and convenience. But can it really be? With so much of our daily lives in question and our food system straining into visibility, we can’t help but ask ourselves: When we sit down to eat, are we partaking of a sacrament, or participating in a desecration? Thinking back to the plant in Waterloo, Iowa, Sheriff Thompson says he’s not just angry at Tyson — he’s ashamed of himself. “I walked out of that plant as an elected official feeling like I’d let [those workers] down, too. So many of them are immigrants; they’re easy to take advantage of. These are hardworking people who do their shift and go home, and we never engage them… I didn’t protect them the way maybe we should have.” Last Thursday, the Waterloo Tyson plant reopened after more than two weeks idle. Face masks and shields will be required, among other safety measures, and all workers will be tested for COVID-19 before returning to the job, Tyson executives said. To see that they actually do return, the company is distributing a $500 “thank you” bonus to workers in early May. It’s conditional upon their attendance. Caleb Pershan is an NYC-based reporter and former editor of Eater SF. Disclosure: Eater has a video series, Prime Time, hosted by Ben Turley and Brent Young of the Meat Hook. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2ySgLIZ

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