We Used to Fight Inflation With Boycotts
In 1973, hundreds of thousands of women took to the street to protest dramatic increases in the cost of meat. Grocery prices are growing at a much faster rate than they were 50 years ago. Why don’t we do the same?
Demonstrators marching in protest of the high price of meat in San Fransisco, California, on March 29, 1973. (Getty Images)
It was a revolution of peanut butter sandwiches.
Hundreds of thousands of American women — mostly suburban, middle-class mothers who did not work outside the home — boycotted the meat industry from April 1 to April 8, 1973. They refused to buy beef, pork, and lamb, setting the table instead with “onion quiche, vegetable chow mein with cashews and lots of cheese and eggs,” according to the New York Times. They held rallies and passed out meatless menus with what the paper called “genteel militance.” The protests made national news, earned a political cartoon on the cover of Time magazine, and left meat magnates fuming.
That year, meat prices were about as bad as they are now. In March 1972, ground beef cost sixty-nine cents per pound, or the equivalent of $5.03 in November 2024. (In November 2024, ground beef cost $5.63 per pound.) As one shopper told the Times: “I’m not buying. I’m just looking at the prices and laughing.”
Prices soared so high that canned ham heists were popping up on the interstates. Latter-day cowboys plucked up unbranded, free-grazing cattle, selling them for as much as $500 a head, according to the Times. One hundred pheasants, intended for shooting practice, were stolen from a trap and field club in Pennsylvania. Inventories were low, and opportunism was high.
The causes of the price surge were, as they are now, variable. Some attributed it to a blighted Soviet grain harvest, which sent them to buy up $1.2 billion worth of US grain that otherwise would have served as livestock feed at home. Some attributed it to Richard Nixon’s generous spending on farmers during his reelection campaign the previous year. And some pointed to that messy web of inflation causes and effects, which included the slowdown of the Vietnam War and an unusually low unemployment rate.
A week before the boycott began, Nixon set the ceiling on meat prices as they rose 8 percent over the course of March 1973. But most consumers felt that this wasn’t enough. The prices were already prohibitively high.
The boycott began with Barbara Shuttleworth, “a young housewife and clubwoman” in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. She painted herself as a timid housewife and hesitated to take responsibility for the nationwide movement. She had seen a political cartoon depicting the high price of meat (the punchline: imagine if you had to buy steak on layaway!) and found that “the more I laughed, the more I wanted to cry.” She called upon the Connecticut Federation of Women’s Clubs to boycott meat for a week, and, naturally, they agreed.
Within weeks, women across the country were committed to boycotting the high price of meat. They had political prowess, and they had a knack for acronyms: There was SCRIMP (Save Cash, Reduce Immediately Meat Prices) in Boston; STOP (Stop These Outrageous Prices) in New Jersey; and WASP (Women Against Soaring Prices) in Delaware.
They also knew how to deploy political stunts: they transported a steak in an armored truck to the doors of the White House, calling it a “precious commodity.” When Ronald Reagan said that meat shortages were due to God’s will — “and I’m not in favor of boycotting Him” — they left a yard-long baloney, weighing about ten pounds, on the then California governor’s lawn.
The farmers and industrialists of the meat industry scorned the protesters. “The farmer is being singled out to fight inflation and take the whole loss,” said one Iowan farmer. Some threatened to take their products off the market altogether, sending meat prices soaring higher. But farmers weren’t altogether suffering — the year before, their incomes had risen by 19 percent to $19.2 billion, according to Time, in part due to Nixon’s spending.
But Nixon himself had tacitly endorsed the boycott, helping to widen its reach. Though he did not tell the people of America to stop buying meat, he brought it up in a handful of public appearances, saying that prices might go down with “the help of the housewife.”
Yet the boycott didn’t have the effect that either Nixon or the organizers hoped for. There was a small, but noticeable, decrease in prices in the weeks following, but not nearly enough to counter the surge that had taken place.
And then, just six months later in October, the oil embargo began. The cost of petroleum rose from $2.90 a barrel to $11.65 within three months, dwarfing the increases in grocery prices. With the rise of petroleum, the financial burden was felt everywhere: if goods are expensive to transport, then they become expensive to buy. Though there were a handful of boycotts in the years following — of sugar and milk in 1974, and coffee in 1976 — the recession stamped the tradition out for good.
Grocery Price Increases
The conditions of the boycott were not so different from what consumers face today. Buying groceries has certainly gotten much, much more expensive over the last five years, especially for low-wage workers. Between 2019 and 2023, grocery prices rose 26 percent, while the earnings of low-wage workers grew only 13.2 percent. In response, Americans are cutting costs: buying frozen meat in bulk, opting for generic, lower-quality alternatives, and buying less food than they need.
Of all groceries, meat is among the costliest. Ground beef was $3.86 per pound in December 2019, and it cost $5.60 per pound in December 2024 — a 45 percent price increase overall. Though high interest rates are part of the reason for rising prices, they are far from the whole story. There is also climate change–induced drought, which has led to high grain prices, and the dramatic downsizing of cattle inventory. Meat producers are also being investigated by the United States Department of Agriculture for artificially raising prices under the cover of inflation.
Many Americans would call this rise in prices “inflation,” and it is — kind of. Inflation describes the rate of increase of all prices, not just a specific category like groceries or petroleum. It’s a concept often contorted for political purposes, frequently used to justify cuts in government spending. When inflation is mentioned, it comes with baggage and received notions about how to address it. In the aftermath of 1973, it meant rate hikes and austerity.
But, ultimately, there is a simple truth behind these popular invocations of rampant inflation: everything really does cost way, way more than Americans can afford, and that change happened very fast. Nowhere is that change felt more viscerally than at the grocery store. According to an Associated Press poll of over 120,000 voters, about seven in ten said they were “very concerned” about the cost of food and groceries.
The 2024 presidential candidates knew this. One of Kamala Harris’s few detailed policy plans was a ban on price-gouging groceries — the corporate practice of artificially raising prices, more than they would rise due to inflation alone. Donald Trump, on the other hand, blamed Joe Biden for the rise, saying: “Look, they got them up, I’d like to bring them down.”
Biden couldn’t stop the rise of inflation during his presidency, and he didn’t succeed at making himself known as the anti-inflation candidate. Going hungry — or, at least, hungrier — is a political problem that can only be solved one way: making groceries cost less.
So what do Americans do when they can’t afford their groceries? They budget, they save, they fret, and they vote. And, up until fifty years ago, they would boycott.
American Meat Boycotts
The 1973 meat boycott was the last of its kind — but it was certainly not the first. For the preceding seventy years, consumer boycotts were embedded in the American idea of how to resist costs and demonstrate political will.
The first American meat boycott of the twentieth century began with a slap in the face. On May 11, 1902, twenty-thousand Jewish women of the Lower East Side in New York City descended on their local butcher shops after kosher meat went from twelve cents to eighteen cents a pound. They smashed shop windows and lit the meat on fire — and one policeman had “an unpleasant moist piece of liver slapped in his face,” according to the New York Herald.
The Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902 heralded the beginning of at least five meat boycotts in North America before 1973. Each of these boycotts were organized by women, beginning with the 1902 boycott, which began with the not-so-genteel militancy of the Jewish women of the Lower East Side.
In the last fifty years, boycotts have tended to take a different form — not as consumer protests against inflated prices, but as demonstrations of solidarity and disruptions for political causes.
There is, most famously in our time, the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, which calls for restrictions on consumption that supports Israel’s economy and its occupation of Palestine. And there is widespread abstention from meat in the form of vegetarianism and veganism — a meat boycott by another name, which finds its cause in animal rights, objections to meat production’s climate consequence, or straightforward dietary preferences.
But there hasn’t been an overt meat boycott since 1973. It could be the political mood: boycotts, strikes, and mass protests were in the air in the early ’70s. It could be that the defeats of organized labor reverberated in the broader zeitgeist, including the will of consumers to get organized. Or it could be that the rhetoric of anti-inflation has been co-opted by a certain conservatism, a problem best solved by government belt-tightening, not by a mass movement.
Grocery price increases in the United States are gradually starting to slow. But the next time they climb — as they always do, in the boom-and-bust cycle of capital — consider the boycott.