Food Controversies

Katy Keiffer

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780238043
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

It's been 111 years since the publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's groundbreaking book on the cattle industry. Though improvements in animal welfare have been made since then, the industry has evolved to include issues Sinclair could never have foreseen. In What's the Matter with Meat, Katy Keiffer leads readers though a crash course on how this powerful multinational business has been able to generate such a bountiful supply of absurdly cheap animal proteins.
           
What's the Matter with Meat? explores  everything from labor issues to genetic manipulation to animal welfare to environmental degradation, illustrating just how the industrial model for meat production conjures up huge quantities of cheap meat even as it shifts  many of the real costs onto the taxpayer. She describes practices few of us know about, such as land grabs in which predator companies acquire property in foreign countries for meat production, often driving out local farmers. She shows how industry consolidation entrenches cost-effective but harmful practices, creating monopolies that force competitors out of business, drive down labor costs, erode workers' rights, and exert extraordinary power over nearby communities.
           
Keiffer demonstrates with irrefutable force that the current model for meat production—adopted worldwide—is simply not sustainable and will soon exhaust the planet's resources. A hard-hitting critique of the meat industry and its harmful effects, this book shows us just how important it is to care about where our food comes from, to support alternative production systems, and to stop those practices that are ruining our planet in the service of the burger and the nugget.
 

1

THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIALIZED MEAT PRODUCTION

For most of history meat has been the food humans are most grateful for. In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, author Richard Wrangham shows that when we learned to cook meat, we began the transition from ape to man. Small wonder the meat industry has become the world power it is now. And make no mistake, it is a world power. Raising meat as we now do has changed the face of agriculture, pushing us into a new model of ‘monocropping’ great swathes of land in order to produce food not for people, but for animals. As we will see later in the book, growing these crops and aggregating animals as we do has resulted in never before seen effects on land, water and air. Others argue that eating as much meat as is now consumed has had negative effects on public health. In short, a host of significant problems, ancillary to the business of growing livestock on an industrial scale, are having impacts that no one could have foreseen a hundred years ago when the industry started to ramp up.

Global consumption patterns have gone through enormous changes in just the last five decades. Export trade, improved agricultural methods for growing animal feed, changes in popular culture and other factors have contributed to these massive shifts in the social fabric as it relates to food. What really galvanized the industry was the implementation of the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, the much-maligned CAFO. CAFOS have made possible the steady supply of cheap meat that so many of us take for granted.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations are factories, not farms. Farmers and ranchers may supply CAFOS with young animals, but then the animals are aggregated in paddocks or, in the cases of pork and poultry, into large warehouses. Carefully mixed food and water are dispensed. That food is typically a mix of grains, oilseeds and cereals combined with hay, or other fodder, and topped off with a cocktail of chemicals formulated to encourage growth and prevent disease. CAFOS are enormously efficient, a trait businessmen and farmers alike can appreciate. Many of the operations are mechanized, keeping labour costs down. Feed is mixed in big silos and then distributed by lorry to conveyor belts in paddocks or feeding stations. The amount the animals eat is carefully calibrated to their growth patterns and they grow quickly, which means that less food and water is required to achieve slaughter weight. Fewer humans have to take care of them – there is no herding, no predators to worry about, no concern about animals wandering off, or being stolen or injured. Compared to traditional farming, who wouldn’t adopt this model to produce meat?

We can all thank the United States of America, the land of innovation, for the invention of the CAFO. Contrary to common belief, CAFOS got their start in the poultry industry in the 1930s. Most people think of cattle, squeezed into tiny paddocks, when they think of a CAFO, but in fact it was poultry producers who paved the way. Chickens were once considered a seasonal food. They were raised for eggs, and most rural families had a few birds. The current ubiquitous popularity of chicken on the dinner table is a relatively new phenomenon. Seventy-five years ago chicken was a Sunday supper treat. In the USA it was a Fourth of July, fried chicken celebration. But once vitamins were discovered and, more importantly, could be synthesized into edible form, that pattern changed. People realized that if they fed their chickens vitamin D they could be housed indoors all year round and would continue to lay eggs. This meant an ever-ready supply of fryers and broilers. A few really smart people, like Jesse Jewell (1902–1975), who started as a Georgia feed, seed and fertilizer supplier, worked out that they could put hundreds of chickens at a time indoors to increase profit. Once Jewell had the supply, he set about creating demand by driving his chickens around, pre-slaughtered, packed on ice, and selling them into city butcher shops and restaurants. Around the same time, John Tyson was raising and selling his birds. A few years later, he would start selling chicks to guys like Jesse Jewell, and then grinding the feed to go with them. It would be the beginning of an empire that now stretches around the world.

In the USA the Jewell and Tyson models grew in popularity, particularly when more and more young people left the family farm and went to the city to find work, or went to war. Agriculture changed tremendously during and after the Second World War thanks to labour shortages and the irresistible lure of manufacturing, where people could make serious money working in steel or assembling cars. America was building highways, construction was booming and jobs were plentiful. Post-war Europe underwent its own building boom, repairing and replacing all that had been destroyed during six years of war. Manufacturing took off and people all over the world left the land and went to urban areas to participate in the new era of prosperity.

According to the Denver Post, it was Warren Monfort, a rancher from Greeley, Colorado, who developed the idea of a ‘feedlot’ in 1930. Before that, most cattle were bought off the range in the autumn and transported to Chicago, Kansas City and other points on the railway to be slaughtered, processed and further distributed. Monfort recognized that if he fed his cattle on grain and forage in the winter months when grass was unavailable, he could produce a steady supply of fresh beef all year round. Soon he was providing the same service for other ranches. When his son Kenneth took over the business in the early 1950s, he further revolutionized the industry by building his own processing plant, eliminating the need for the costly and debilitating transportation of live cattle to city centres. It was this all-in-one concept of feeding and then processing animals on the same location that changed the face of the cattle business. In 1987 the company was sold for U.S.$300 million to industrial giant ConAgra.

While CAFOS were ramping up in the cattle sector, the 1970s and ’80s saw pig production follow the consolidation model of poultry, moving from several hundred thousand smaller farmers to roughly 68,000 in 2015, according to the National Pork Producers Council. At the same time, production increased substantially, and while many farms are still family-owned with fewer than 5,000 pigs per farm, the farmers are not independent. Instead, they are contracted to large companies such as JBS or WH Group (the former Smithfield).

In fact, in the USA more than 75 per cent of all the pigs processed are owned by JBS USA, WH Group, Hormel or Tyson. Just four companies own the bulk of the chicken business: Tyson, Perdue, Pilgrims Pride (now owned by JBS) and Sanderson. Eighty per cent of all U.S. cattle are owned by Cargill, Tyson, JBS USA and National Beef Packing.¹

These companies employ farmers/contractors to grow the animals in their initial stage, such as egg/chick, calf/cow or breeding/farrowing pigs. Once they are hatched or reach the requisite size, they are moved on to operations that specialize in the next stage of their grow-out. Only cattle have a life that remotely resembles what the average person thinks of as a farm animal’s existence. A cow goes from the cow/calf operation to a stocker/feeder who brings them up to the ideal weight on pasture before they are sent to a feedlot for fattening on grain, typically for no more than a few months. Pigs and poultry might move from pen to pen, but they will not see the light of day, or smell fresh air. Eventually they all arrive at the processing house.

Company control extends to every facet of production. Much of the animals’ feed, soy and corn, is grown by other contract farmers also employed by the company. The company, or ‘integrator’ as they are called, owns the milling and storage facilities as well as the slaughterhouses. This is called vertical integration. And so the era of cheap meat, at the centre of every plate and at virtually every meal, came into being.

Of course, not every country has pursued this model with the same enthusiasm as the USA, but certainly Brazil, China and even Australia are increasingly accepting the CAFO construct. Western Europe remains fairly traditional, with many smaller farms rather than the mega-agribusinesses and contract farmers that have come to dominate much of livestock production elsewhere. Perhaps because, until recently, Europeans did not aspire to major export livestock production, the CAFO remains fairly uncommon there. Nevertheless, pork and poultry are increasingly trending toward industrial production in the UK, while in Denmark and the Netherlands, the two countries that produce the bulk of Western Europe’s pork supply, concentrated feeding models have definitely been adopted, though with considerable modifications to the scale of the American style.

Poultry is the fastest-growing sector in the livestock industry throughout the European Union. Top producers are Poland, France, the UK, Germany and Spain.² Though the European model remains more in line with traditional agriculture, allowing for family farms for example, big integrators such as Vion, Moy Park and others are well established in the EU and growing. They are contracting increasingly with farmers who are looking to expand, and who are finding it more difficult to remain independent when it comes to slaughter and processing. It is likely that the trend will continue thanks to the economies of scale made possible by vertical integration.

CAFOS could be considered a tremendous improvement over traditional animal agriculture. Putting large numbers of animals in relatively small spaces reduces the requirement for large landholdings. Producers require much less labour to keep the animals healthy. Enclosures make the tracking and control of animals easier; medications can be readily administered; if an animal is unwell, in theory, it should be easier to quarantine. Plus producers know how much food their animals are consuming. In short, it’s pure genius from the point of view of profitability. Less land and less labour adds up to higher margins. Unfortunately, there is much more to this rosy picture of increased profits than the industry would have consumers know.

CAFOS can only work if the animals are really healthy. Not surprisingly, animals get sick, just as humans do. Their diseases are often highly contagious, so in a small space a disease will spread like wildfire. The sanitation in the intensive CAFO model is quite difficult to maintain, so hygiene suffers. Animals are dirty, sometimes very dirty. In worst-case scenarios, they are almost literally covered in faeces. And while that is not the norm, it is often a real challenge to maintain clean animals given the number of creatures in each space and the frequency with which they eliminate.

In order to preserve herd health, producers discovered that it was a good idea to feed all the animals a low dose of antibiotics on a daily basis to cut down on the incidence of disease. Alexander Fleming, who invented the first antibiotic in 1928, warned in the 1940s that overuse could easily breed new pathogens. The meat industry (as well as the medical community) ignored that warning. Feeding low-dose antibiotics kept herds healthy and profits high. Then another major discovery was made related to the use of the low-dose antibiotics. Animals grew faster! It was a miracle! Animals could come to market weight and be ready to ship way ahead of schedule. Cattle grew up in eighteen months instead of three years, pigs in ten months instead of eighteen to twenty, and chickens in seven weeks instead of 26! Think of how much money a producer saves in feed, water and labour when the animal can be harvested so far ahead of the normal growing period.

To this day it is not exactly known why antibiotics confer this extra bonus, but the thinking is that because the animal’s immune system is not constantly working to ward off disease, the body can put all that disease-fighting energy into growth. The meat industry worldwide has grown to depend ever more heavily on the use of antibiotics as a crucial part of its strategy to grow animals at accelerated speed despite the less than ideal conditions in CAFOS. Certainly other factors go into this rapid growth, most notably nutrition, but antibiotics have made a significant contribution. This translates into unheard-of profits and explains why farmers and ranchers in the United States, Latin America and China have resisted growing calls to ban the use of low-dose antibiotics in livestock production.

Despite the fact that antibiotic-resistant pathogens began making their appearance as early as the 1950s, not many were willing to listen. By the 1970s, alarm bells were being sounded about growing resistance to common antibiotics, led by Dr Stuart Levy from Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts, president of the International Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics. Though the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attempted to step in, the powerful lobbying influence of the industry managed to block any changes to production styles. The National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, or NARMS, in the USA has categorically stated that the use of antibiotics in food-producing animals

contributes to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in food-producing animals. These resistant bacteria can contaminate the foods that come from those animals, and persons who consume these foods can develop antibiotic-resistant infections.³

Only now, since 2012, has the FDA published a series of ‘guidances’ for the U.S. meat industry to ratchet down use of antibiotics important to human medicine in livestock feed for the purpose of ‘growth promotion’. By 2017 the use of antibiotics in livestock production in the USA will be controlled by veterinarians rather than farmers and ranchers. How compliance will be monitored and enforced is a question that has not yet been fully answered.

Western Europe, which has adopted many of the U.S. methods of livestock production, though by no means at the same scale, has been far more circumspect in its use of these drugs. While antibiotics remain in use there, the quantities involved are not even close to what is pumped into U.S. livestock. Some countries are more advanced in their phase-out of the routine use of antibiotics, with northern Europe being the leader, while countries in the southern and eastern sectors seem less interested.

The Danes were the first to recognize that multi-drug-resistant pathogens were already a problem within their animal populations, and increasingly a threat to humans. In 1999 the Danish government imposed a ban on using antibiotics as growth promoters, and tightened controls so that only a veterinarian can write a prescription for the drugs. At first they lost a lot of pigs (clearly delighting the Americans, who pointed to this initial mortality as proof that withdrawing those antibiotics would have disastrous consequences for the health of the animals), but the Danes soon learned to manage their pigs more successfully, with improved vaccines and probiotics, as well as better hygiene. The Danish Experiment, as it came to be known, proved that depriving herds of low-dose antibiotics does not in fact result in the losses feared by other pork-produc...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIALIZED MEAT PRODUCTION
• 2 THE BUSINESS OF GENETICS
• 3 LIVESTOCK AND DISEASE
• 4 ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS
• 5 ANIMAL WELFARE
• 6 WAGES, WORKERS AND SAFETY ISSUES
• 7 CONCENTRATION AND CONSOLIDATION IN THE INDUSTRY
• 8 FOOD FRAUD
• 9 TRADE DEALS AND LAND GRABS
• 10 ASIA AND THE INDUSTRIALIZED MODEL OF MEAT PRODUCTION
• CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX