For 40 years, Big Meat has openly colluded to rig prices

A long-overdue antitrust beatdown for Agri Stats.

9 min readOct 4, 2023

Two men in suits seated next to each other. The younger man is pointing at a brochure. The younger man’s head has been replaced with a whole roast chicken. The older man’s head has been replaced with a large beef roast. The brochure has been replaced with vintage meat ads. The background is a cropped section of of a high-magnification scan of a US $100 bill, colors faded and shifted.

Next weekend (October 7–8), I’m in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Noted socialist agitator Adam Smith once wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick…

For 40 years, Big Meat has openly colluded to rig prices

A long-overdue antitrust beatdown for Agri Stats.

Written by Cory Doctorow