Authors: Maureen Ogle
Down on the farm, the distinction between sustainable and conventional livestock production was becoming equally blurry. In 2002, several animal rights activist groups, including the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), launched a campaign to end the use of gestation stalls, the narrow metal pens that hog farmers used to confine sows during and after pregnancy. Farmers had long isolated sows in order to protect them from harm (hogs, especially females, are both territorial and hierarchical; weak ones, especially females, don’t last long in a group); the stalls were only the latest version of that practice. Activists argued that the pens’ small size constituted cruelty to animals: the sows had little room to move and could not turn around while in them. The anti-stall crusade began innocuously enough with a letter-writing campaign: “The Easter holiday
celebrates the resurrection of the Prince of Peace,” read the text of the form letter that supporters sent to their local newspapers in the spring of 2002. “Yet some of us still observe this special occasion by serving ham, produced by abusing and killing a sentient, innocent, gentle creature, as the centerpiece of their holiday dinner.”
Those letters marked the opening foray of a sophisticated crusade. Over the next few years, animal rights activists released undercover videos shot at hog farms, marshaled scientific research that indicated that the stalls cost rather than saved money, and launched ballot initiatives aimed at banning the stalls. Livestock producers fought back, brandishing science that proved stalls protected sows, arguing that the expense of switching from stalls to large pens or pasture would bankrupt small farmers and leave more of the business in the hands of Big Ag, and painting their opponents as meddlers who didn’t understand animal psychology. “Nothing [is] more heartbreaking
than watching a timid sow cower in the corner, afraid to approach the feed and water until the dominant sow [leaves] the area,” one farmer wrote in a newspaper opinion piece. (The anti-stall coalition shrugged off such concerns and urged the livestock industry to breed less aggressive animals.)
The reformers had the upper hand. Over the next few years, voters in several states endorsed stall bans; major hog producers, including Smithfield (by then the world’s largest), agreed to phase out the stalls; and many of the nation’s largest food makers and retailers, from Costco and Safeway to Cheesecake Factory, Burger King, and McDonald’s, agreed to stop buying pork made from hogs raised by stall-using producers. Emboldened by these successes, the campaigners expanded their aim. In 2008, Californians approved an HSUS initiative that banned not just gestation stalls but conventional poultry cages (a typical cage has a footprint about the size of a sheet of notebook paper) and the single-animal pens used to confine sheep. Nor was this the only crusade that changed the meat Americans ate. In 2003, McDonald’s announced that it would no longer buy meat made from animals fed antibiotics also used by humans. The fast-food titan arrived at that decision after working with an anti-antibiotic coalition, but it’s likely that McDonald’s executives were also inspired by the success of one of its major investments. In 1999, McDonald’s had bought majority shares in Chipotle, a small fast-food chain dedicated to serving “food with integrity,” including organic and natural meats, and then watched integrity translate into success: 578 Chipotle outlets by 2006 and double-digit growth each year. (McDonald’s sold the last of its Chipotle stock in 2006.)
It’s not hard to understand why these crusades were so successful. As we’ve seen, by the early twenty-first century a substantial food reform infrastructure was in place, even at the USDA. But food reformers had also figured out how to exploit a fundamental fact about most Americans: they don’t live on farms and have never met a farmer. Where livestock producers saw an ignorant urban population, food reformers saw a populace that believed farms ought to be Elysian idylls like the one operated by Joel Salatin. That farms like Salatin’s could not begin to feed the nation, and that farms like his had been all but extinct for well over a half-century, was irrelevant. That disconnect between Americans and their food, between ideal and reality, had become the reformers’ most powerful weapon, one that allowed them to imagine a new future for meat in America.
Conclusion
I
F MEAT’S AMERICAN
history tells us anything, it is that we Americans generally get what we want. Meat three times a day? No problem. Meat precut, deboned, and ready to cook? There it is. Meat precooked, mixed with pasta, and ready to zap? We’ve got it. Organic, grass-fed, local pork and beef? All yours, as long as you don’t mind paying the price or taking the time to find it (a chain store will sell you organic, grass-fed meat, but if it’s local you’re after, you’re on your own).
But we Americans also possess an infinite sense of possibility. We believe that social and personal perfection are within our grasp, a conviction that has inspired a host of reform movements in our history. That sense of infinite possibility has changed, and will continue to change, the way we make meat.
It won’t be easy. We’re a complicated group, we Americans, and we struggle to reconcile our conflicting desires and passions. On one hand, many of us want meat, lots of it, and we don’t care how it’s made as long as it doesn’t cost much. On the other, some of us are determined to break the chains that bind livestock production and meatpacking to assembly-line processes. How to accomplish both—produce immense quantities of meat at an affordable price while relying on (relatively) inefficient methods of producing it—is not clear. Of course critics argue that “efficiency” is in the eye of the beholder, and that given the environmental costs of conventional livestock production, there’s nothing “efficient” about it. But others will argue that our ability to make affordable meat not just for ourselves but for the rest of the world is worth the price.
Therein lies our American dilemma: whose version of efficiency best serves the needs and wants of the majority? Are we prepared to turn our backs on the practicalities of conventional agriculture in order to make organic the new normal? And is it practical, if by “practical” we mean an agriculture model that allows most of us the luxury of pondering these issues rather than spending our days tending crops and livestock? Can we have the best of both worlds: a majority urban population and small-scale agriculture, too?
The debate over meat in America won’t end anytime soon, if only because as a nation, we have a hard time answering tough questions like these. Consider the “pink slime” uproar of 2012, which encapsulated the perplexities and conundrums of our desire to have it all. Early in that year, newshounds learned that the USDA was supplying school lunch programs with hamburger laced with Lean Finely Textured Beef—pink slime to its critics—a product that even many fast-food burger chains refused to use. A Texas food activist launched an online petition to demand that the department get pink slime out of school kitchens. The USDA agreed to let school districts make their own decisions about its use, and by early summer nearly every state education department had said no to LFTB. (The holdouts were Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota.)
The need that inspired the invention of LFTB—to utilize every last bit of a carcass—was not new; the dressed-beef men of the 1880s built their empires by extracting profit from carcasses. During the 1970s when inflation, rising fuel costs, and declining demand cut into meatpackers’ profits, they adopted LFTB’s predecessor: “mechanical deboning,” a technology that utilized bladed devices to scrape bits of meat from bone. Prodded by consumer advocates, the USDA banned that process because of fears that bone slivers would end up in the beef. In the early 1980s, entrepreneur Eldon Roth invented an alternative: he exchanged blades for centrifuges that freed scraps of fat and gristle and yielded mushy but bone-free, lean beef. Roth compacted these beef bits into blocks and sold those to meatpackers and food processors, most of whom mixed it with fattier beef to make the lean ground beef that consumers preferred. During the 1990s, and inspired by the 1993 Jack in the Box episode, Roth refined his process by subjecting the scraps to a brief blast of ammonia (a natural component of beef) that destroyed
E. coli
. Bottom line, LFTB helped meatpackers do what they’d always done: earn a profit while giving Americans meat at the price they would pay. Eldon Roth and his company, Beef Products Inc., were (and are) highly regarded in the meat industry, not just for Roth’s considerable inventive prowess and his product, but also for his rigorous attention to sanitation and food safety. Indeed, BPI’s stock-in-trade was a commitment to providing packers with a clean product, and Roth’s facilities were touted as among the most sanitary in the country.
There wasn’t, and isn’t, anything dangerous about LFTB—it’s beef. Nor, as some critics claimed, was LFTB “dog food.” Meatpackers had long sold meat scraps to pet food manufacturers, not because the scraps were unfit for human consumption, but because packers had no USDA- or FDA-approved way to salvage those otherwise edible bits. As soon as federal authorities gave the green light to Roth’s innovation, edible beef scraps that once went into pet food could be used for other purposes.
Eldon Roth’s process was simply a high-tech version of what frugal cooks have done since humans stood upright: it allowed processors to utilize every available morsel of protein and calories. Only a food-rich society like ours enjoys the luxury of dispensing with frugality. In the end, the view that Americans need not bother with cheap filler trumped the view that LFTB made meat affordable to consumers at every income level. Within weeks, Roth had shut down three of his four plants.
The din drowned out voices that asked important questions: Were taxpayers prepared to spend more on school lunch programs in order to cover the cost of more expensive meat products? Were parents prepared to give up their evenings so that they could attend school board meetings and demand that Big Food be evicted from school cafeterias? Were teachers and parents prepared to reduce classroom time devoted to math and reading so that kids could gain an appreciation of good food, preferably by planting and weeding schoolyard gardens? Were those who wanted an end to LFTB, and cattle feedlots, and antibiotics—and they tended to be one and the same—willing to turn off their laptops and iPads, move to the country, and put in the long days that “natural” farming demands? In short, and like so many other moments detailed in this book, the LFTB episode embodied the messy complexity that is not just meat in America, but Americans themselves.
Whatever we think of Wendell “Boss Hog” Murphy or Eldon Roth on one hand, and Michael Jacobson and Michael Pollan on the other, we are all responsible for what we have wrought. Decade upon decade, we’ve insisted on having it all—cheap food
and
odor-free air
and
quality meat
and
disposable incomes that enable us to buy cell phones. If the devastation wrought in the rains of North Carolina or the debacle over pink slime teaches us anything, it is that we won’t transform our meat culture by taming Big Food or replacing Big Ag with a locavore-centered, alternative food system, but by examining our sense of entitlement and the way it contributes to the high cost of cheap living.
Not long after Roth turned out the lights in his plants, another event took place, one that went largely unnoticed: in August 2012, the Community Food Security Coalition announced that it would shut down its operations at the end of the year. CFSC directors explained that the organization had sown its seeds so successfully that there was no longer enough grant money to go around for all the related, connected, and spinoff groups that wanted it. The CFSC would hand off the food-reform baton to others who had been inspired by its work. That’s a “clean out your desk” moment we can applaud. Organic foods are supermarket staples; alternative is the new normal; the premium we pay for grass-fed beef and organic pork is our act of commitment to a better world. We Americans, the masters of having it all, have had our desires—for convenience, for cachet, for doing good—satisfied once again.
As I wrote in the introduction to this book, I’m not buying it. I don’t believe we can have it all.
I leave you with a final point to consider: we reaped the benefits of the CFSC, and yes, LFTB, because factory farming freed so many of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and thus us, from the need to grow and process food; freed them, and us, to instead dream big, think deep, and yes, launch crusades. Pollan, Schlosser, and I can write books in large part because we don’t have to spend time planting seeds and pulling weeds. Factory farming’s biggest crop is intellectual capital. So, thanks, Big Ag—and the USDA and family and corporate farmers—for giving us the cheap food that has nourished an extraordinary abundance of creative energy. Now let’s do something with it. Let’s decide what kind of society we want—not what kind of farming, not what kind of meat, but what kind of society.
In the United States, deep change happens slowly. Our political machinery is less well oiled than it is unwieldy and cantankerous, but, like an old Farmall tractor, it will get the job done. Two things, however, are certain: We won’t move forward until we can talk to rather than at each other about the high price of cheap food. And we won’t starve while we try to decide how, if at all, to reinvent the American way of meat.
Acknowledgments
I’d planned to keep these thoughts brief—until I was so close to the end that its breath tickled my ear and I thought: Seven years is a serious chunk of life. The hell with brief. I want to honor the people who got me here.
On this book and my previous one, I worked with Andrea Schulz, editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is this book’s true hero, its head cheerleader, its guide, its brains, not least because she coached me so skillfully through the beer book that I had the confidence to attempt this project. If this work has any merit, it is because of her efforts. For its flaws, blame me.