Patio Pondering: When a Beef Girl Buys Pork
Last night was one of those Monday Daddy-Daughter calls. Granddaughter almost crawling, flat tires, a stuck tender truck, the usual chaos of a working farm wife and mother. In the middle of it all she asked a question that immediately caught my attention.
"Guess what I paid for a whole pork loin at Costco?"
Now that was not a question I expected from her.
I've written before about what a great deal whole pork loins are, occasionally taking a swing at pork promotional campaigns for leaving this opportunity on the table. But nothing makes the point better than what my daughter told me next.
She is, and always has been, a dyed-in-the-wool beef girl. Ever since showing her commercial heifer, May Rain, at the county fair, cattle had her heart. Not sheep. Not pigs. Cows. That carried into Collegiate Cattlemen, continues at CattleCon, and lives at the center of her professional life in beef marketing. Sam Elliott and all, beef really has been What's for Dinner at their house.
So when she asked that question, I knew something had shifted.
I threw out sixteen dollars.
"YES."
Eight pounds. $1.99 a pound. Chops, a roast, strips for tacos. Several meals from one purchase.
What stayed with me was not the price, though it was certainly a remarkable one. It was the perspective. My beef girl was not talking about pork as competition or substitution. She was talking about it exactly the way a consumer would: as value, flexibility, and another option for supper.
Even with her deep roots and enthusiastic loyalty to the beef industry, she could clearly see what that pork loin represented for a household trying to balance variety and budget.
It does make you wonder what might happen if families simply added one more pork meal now and then. Not replacing beef, but supplementing the dinner table with another choice.
Demand doesn't always shift because of sweeping strategies or industry campaigns. Sometimes it moves because someone standing behind a grocery cart notices a whole pork loin priced at $1.99 a pound.