What’s Really Going On with These Food-Facility Fires?
We made it to Friday! First, with two small planes crashing into or near food-processing plants, and reports of fires at various food-processing plants and facilities, it’s fair to wonder if something sinister is going on, but the evidence is pointing in one clear direction; I would sincerely love it if unnamed “senior U.S. officials” would just shut up about how we’re helping the Ukrainians kill lots of Russian soldiers; and if you think filling up your tank with regular gasoline is painful these days, don’t look at the price of diesel — and I don’t mean Vin.
What’s Really Going on With Food-Processing-Plant Fires
In a typical year, how many planes crash into food-processing plants?
You’d figure the answer would be “zero,” and in a bad year, maybe get all the way up to “one.” This year, we’re up to two so far — or more specifically, one crash into a plant, one crash about 300 yards from one.
April 14:
A plane crashed into an Idaho potato and food processing plant, killing the pilot, police said. It hit Gem State Processing in Heyburn in East Idaho at about 8:35 a.m. on Wednesday, city police said. The pilot was the only person in the plane and died during the crash, police said. None of the employees at the processing plant were injured.
April 22:
Covington [Georgia] firefighters responded to a plane crash that killed two people Thursday at the General Mills food processing plant. The small plane crashed apparently after taking off from the runway of the Covington Municipal Airport. Six tractor-trailers were damaged as a result of the crash. Both occupants of the plane died. However, the local officials were grateful that the plane did not strike the plant building, which could have resulted in greater loss of life.
Two plane crashes near food-processing plants in eight days is indeed a weird coincidence, and some folks on the Internet — and Tucker Carlson — started noticing other news reports about other fires at other food-processing plants:
February 5: A “massive fire swept through Wisconsin River Meats in Mauston on Thursday, destroying part of the facility.”
February 22: “The Shearer’s Foods plant in Hermiston, Oregon caught fire after a propane boiler exploded.”
March 17: “A structure fire at the Walmart Distribution Center in Plainfield, Indiana broke out about noon on Wednesday. About 1,000 employees were inside but none were injured, officials say. One firefighter suffered minor injuries.”
March 22: “A fire that broke out at a Nestle Hot Pockets plant in Jonesboro, Arkansas on March 16 had the facility still closed as of March 21.”
March 25: “Officials believe a deep-frying machine is behind the fire that destroyed a potato processing facility in Belfast.”
April 13: “Firefighters from several departments in Maine helped battle a massive fire that destroyed a butcher shop and meat market in Center Conway, New Hampshire.”
April 30: A soybean-processing tank caught fire at the Perdue Farms plant in Chesapeake, Va.
So, what’s going on? Is this a nefarious conspiracy of arsonists, terrorists, or foreign agents? At this point, there’s no evidence of that and no reason to think it is the case.
For starters, not all the fires or crashes did significant damage. In the Chesapeake soybean-facility fire, a plant manager said that the fire will have little to no impact on their operations. In the Georgia crash, the plane didn’t hit the building, no employees were harmed, and General Mills spokesperson Mollie Wulff said, “The plant did not experience any disruptions and it remains fully operational.” The pilot in that crash was identified as a student pilot, and the other person was a flight instructor — with no signs of terrorism and no signs of ties to a hostile foreign government.
Second, none of the fires so far have been declared cases of arson. If we had confirmed or likely cases of arson at food-processing facilities from coast to coast, then yes, this would indeed be suspicious. (I know, I know, the Cigarette-Smoking Man showed up and covered it up.) But in any given year, there are a half-million fires reported to local fire departments, and about 5,300 of them are in “manufacturing or processing” facilities. That comes out to about 440 per month, and if there are fires in 440 manufacturing or processing facilities a month from coast to coast, we would expect at least a handful each month to be at food-processing facilities. In fact, the list above stretches the definition of food-processing facilities, because the Walmart Distribution Center also stored clothes and cardboard, and the New Hampshire fire happened at a butcher shop.
Third, if you were a terrorist or foreign agent attempting to choke off the American food-distribution network . . . would you start with an obscure potato-chip maker in Oregon? Then move on to the source of Hot Pockets in Arkansas? Then move on to a soybean-processing tank in Virginia? Are these the right targets if you’re trying to cripple America?
If you were a nefarious terrorist group or hostile foreign power and you had not merely one suicide pilot, but two of them — and in the case of the Georgia crash, someone willing to ride along as a passenger — would you really aim for a potato-processing plant in southern Idaho and then the Georgia plant where they make Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Does this terrorist group just hate carbohydrates or something? Does Dr. Atkins have an alibi?
If you hated America and had the ability to crash two planes into separate targets . . . wouldn’t you pick something a little more high-profile? The last guys did!
How is this plan to attack and disrupt the U.S. food-supply chain going to work, anyway? As of 2017, the U.S. had 36,486 food- and beverage-processing establishments. Is the plan to pick them off, one by one, every two weeks or so?
What we’re likely experiencing is the “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon,” a.k.a. “frequency illusion” — when you hear a term and then feel like you’re suddenly seeing it everywhere. In reality, whatever you’re observing is occurring at the same frequency, it’s just that you didn’t notice it or ignored it before.
Because of the empty shelves earlier this year, people are paying much closer attention to supply chains these days. During the pandemic, many of us experienced sudden disruptions to our usually steady supplies of many varieties of food, as some meatpacking plants briefly shut down because of Covid outbreaks, and potato growers found it harder to get their spuds to consumers. (There was also that hacker attack on a major beef supplier in early 2021.) Then in January, tens of millions of Americans caught the Omicron variant at the same time, leading to disruptions to shipments of all kinds of products, and thus empty shelves and product shortages across the country. And those supply-chain problems still haven’t been worked out.
Lots of Americans have become much more aware of all the steps between the creation of a particular good and when they purchase it, and just how many things can go wrong in between. (And just about everything can go wrong: The Felicity Ace, a cargo ship full of Porsches, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis, caught fire and sank to the bottom of the ocean in early March.) It is not surprising that something genuinely unusual — like two small planes crashing in or near two food-processing facilities in a short span of time — would catch people’s eyes and get them to start looking for a pattern.
But so far, with no evidence of foul play, this appears to be just another random set of fires in a country that has a lot more fires at industrial sites than we previously thought. The world has a genuine food-supply crisis, as discussed yesterday, and that is likely going to increase prices on certain foods here in America. But the higher food prices we are seeing are thankfully not occurring because of small plane crashes or fires across the country.
