On May 12 Heather Cox Richardson published this incisive essay, one of her "Letters from an American" series. She starts her essay with a short discussion of the involvement of members of the Trump administration in the planning of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and then moves into a report from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. The committee's name doesn't describe its full ambit, which is to look into anything related to the federal government's response to the pandemic, including waste and fraud. Professor Richardson then describes Tyson Foods pushing Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, and through him Vice President Pence and President Trump, to keep meatpacking workers on the job. As she reports, "Industry leaders wrote a proposed executive order for Trump to issue, declaring a meat shortage and invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that the plants continued to operate. Less than a week later, Trump issued a similar executive order."
Professor Richardson then ties the consolidation of meat production into the hands of a few gigantic businesses to the shortage of infant formula in the United States that resulted when one producer, Abbott, recalled its production from one factory after test samples were found to be contaminated, and describes the situation as the "larger problem of the consolidation of food production."
The "larger problem of the consolidation of food production" that Professor Richardson describes is significant, but it's only one facet of the very large problem of the consolidation of American and transnational industries in general, which started in the early years of the Reagan Administration. Having successfully broken up American Telephone & Telegraph on antitrust grounds, the Reagan Administration and its chief antitrust enforcer, William Baxter, declared victory and went home, leaving the rest of American industry to merge and consolidate as it wished on the modest condition of paying a small toll to the government pursuant to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976, but unfettered by Section 2 of the Sherman Act of 1890. Benign neglect remained the policy of the enforcers (the "enablers"?) until 1998 when the Clinton Administration sought to fracture Microsoft - a case that the government won at trial and then ignominiously settled in the second year of the Bush (43) administration.
Since then antitrust enforcement in the context of corporate mergers has ceased to play an important part in corporate America. By 2017 business professors Gustavo Grullon, Yelena Larkin, and Roni Michaely could write that market concentration as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (the one the Justice Department uses, when it's on the job) "has systematically increased in over 75% of U.S. industries, and the average increase in concentration levels has reached 90%" measured since about 2000. They also found that in real-dollar terms the average and median size of public corporations ("the largest players in the economy," they wrote) had tripled. As they demurely put it, "Profit margins and shareholders' wealth gains have increased in proportion to the increase in industry concentration... Increased profit margins are mainly driven by wider operating margins rather than higher operational efficiency."
Translation: as the big got bigger, they used their concentrated market power not to be more efficient, nor to innovate, but to charge higher prices and make more money. Food production is just one of the industries where the increase in concentration has brought new opportunities for the poor to subsidize the rich.