by Maureen Ogle
The desire for a more food-secure America inspired grass-roots projects as well as federal legislation that linked farmers directly to local consumers. In 1976, Congress passed the Farmer-to-Consumer Direct Marketing Act, which authorized $1.5 million for projects that would forge connections “between the urban consumer and the small farmer.” To name one example, New Yorkers used some of the money to establish greenmarkets where area farmers could (and still do) sell their produce to city residents who otherwise relied on foods grown and manufactured elsewhere. The most influential and long-lived of these 1970s projects unfolded in Hartford, Connecticut. That city was as food insecure as most, dependent as it was on supplies transported long distances. But Hartford’s poorest neighborhoods were particularly insecure. As was true in other big cities, grocery chains had deserted Hartford’s inner city, forcing impoverished urbanites to pay higher-than-average prices for whatever food they could find at convenience stores. Using federal funds, Hartford officials commissioned the Public Resource Center, another Naderist nonprofit, to develop a food security strategy based on urban gardens, food clubs, cooperatives, and farmers’ markets stocked with locally grown produce. Hartford was not alone, and in 1979, the Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies published a nearly three-hundred-page compendium that described dozens of food security projects and organizations around the country. Although some, like the Hartford endeavor, focused on low-income neighborhoods, what linked all the ventures was their emphasis on fostering community self-reliance. No one expected towns and cities to become 100 percent food self-sufficient; that was both impossible and unnecessary. But they could become more self-reliant so that in case of an extended emergency, they need not wait for trains or trucks to bring food.
Once the crisis-riddled seventies ended, enthusiasm for self-reliant communities and local food production might have gone the way of lower thermostat settings, but food security advocates got an unexpected boost in the 1980s thanks to the election of Ronald Reagan as president. As part of the Reagan agenda to reduce government, Congress slashed $12 billion from federal food stamp and child nutrition programs; almost overnight, demands for food overwhelmed taxpayer-funded and private relief organizations. In 1982, for example, the number of Cleveland residents seeking food assistance rose more than 100 percent. In Denver, food distribution to the needy doubled during that year, and over a hundred food banks scrambled to keep pace. A national network of emergency operations—two hundred food banks, twenty-three thousand food pantries, more than three thousand soup kitchens—struggled to keep up with demand, and Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young pronounced hunger the “most prevalent and most insidious” problem in American cities.
That long moment of anguish taught a valuable lesson to food activists, nutritionists, and policymakers: managing hunger on an emergency-to-emergency basis was exhausting, often futile, and at best a bandage rather than a cure. By the end of the decade, anti-hunger activists had reframed the problem of urban hunger as one of community food insecurity. The distinction was more than semantic. As two analysts with the Urban Institute explained, individuals suffered hunger, but communities experienced food insecurity. Rather than treat hunger as a short-term, person-by-person emergency, it made more sense to reframe it as a community problem. That shift in focus necessitated a change in strategy: rather than race from one food emergency to the next, activists turned their energy to building long-term, stable food supplies with projects like the one in Hartford with its mixture of gardens, food clubs, and farmers’ markets.
Thus was born the coalition forged by alt-agriculturalists and food security advocates. Each had something the other wanted: small, independent farmers needed outlets for their crops; food security activists needed stable sources of local food. Merging their agendas wasn’t easy. Over the years, significant “tension” had developed between the alt-agriculturalists and anti-hunger activists, one observer said, a situation she blamed on agribusiness-generated “myths” that sustainable foods were priced out of reach of the urban poor. That tension had “prevented a dialogue between” the two groups, and when both trooped to Capitol Hill in 1990 to engage in negotiations over that year’s farm bill, they were, in the words of one participant, “like two trains passing in the night.” By the mid-1990s, however, the trains were on the same track and had added more passengers by wooing another group that initially rejected pleas to join the new alliance: environmentalists had long supported sustainable agriculture but couldn’t see how food security benefited their eco-agenda. CFSC members reminded them of a point food security proponents had raised back in the 1970s: the distance that foodstuffs traveled from farm to plate, some 1,400 miles on average. Food systems based on local products, usually grown by ecologically minded farmers, were more sustainable and thus more environmentally sound.
But there was more to the new alliance’s agenda than supporting farmers and feeding the urban poor. These activists adhered to a grand American tradition: like crusaders for other causes in earlier generations—think Prohibition and Abolition as well as the religious awakenings of the early nineteenth century—those engaged in building an alternative food system hoped to reform and renew the nation’s soul. In their minds, food was a lens through which Americans would learn to view town and country as parts of a whole and themselves as citizens of a unified environmental, economic, and social community. Three scholars—and university faculty played key roles in building the new coalition—outlined this mission in a 1996 essay. Because Americans relied on food that came “from a global everywhere” and thus from “nowhere . . . in particular,” they wrote, most had no idea “how and by whom what they consume is produced, processed, and transported.” Americans were disconnected “from each other and from the land” and consequently “less responsible to each other and to the land.” “Where do we go from here? How can we come home again?” The way home, they contended, lay in “withdrawing from” the global and national food economy and building an alternative food system rooted in regional and local food sheds that linked town and country, city dweller and farmer. Only then would Americans “reassemble” their “fragmented identities, reestablish community, and become native not only to a place but to each other.” All of that sounds hopelessly utopian. But that was precisely the point of placing food at the center of this project. Food linked everyone, regardless of class, geography, race, or income. Making food production and delivery more visible—whether through urban gardens, family farms, or farmers’ markets—would encourage Americans to shoulder greater responsibility for their air, water, soil, and neighbors. Legislation could go only so far in addressing environmental degradation and economic injustice, but both could be alleviated, and spiritual awakening nurtured, one farmer, one garden, one market, and one meal at a time.
This utopian project reaped real-world rewards. In 1995 and 1996, the alliance persuaded the House and Senate to add a “Community Food Projects” agenda to the farm bill, a victory that expanded the USDA resources committed to alternative food and farming. New Internet-based technology and the World Wide Web fertilized the food security crusade by enabling organizers to communicate quickly and to attract new adherents. A public demonstration of the alliance’s clout came in 1997 when the NOSB finally proposed a set of organic standards and the USDA prepared to accept them. By that time, many people involved in agriculture had become enamored of biotechnology, and the proposed standards would have allowed organic foodstuffs to include or be raised with genetically modified organisms and permitted the use of irradiation and fertilizers manufactured from sewage sludge. The food security alliance urged supporters to submit comments, the method by which the USDA gathered input from the public. Well over a quarter-million people and organizations did just that, bombarding the department with objections to what opponents dubbed the “Big Three” (presumably because they believed those three items were the brainchildren of Big Ag and Big Food). The USDA backed down, dumped the proposed standards, and told the NOSB t
o try again.
The food security coalition transformed the nation’s culinary landscape. From 1990 on, sales of organic foods rose about 20 percent a year, and by the early twenty-first century, Americans were spending $8 billion a year on “alternative” foods, buying about half of it in conventional retail outlets such as health food stores and chain supermarkets; 73 percent of all of the latter carried organic foods of some kind, even if only frozen pizza. The translation of utopian ideal into practical reality inadvertently obscured the alliance’s original missions of fostering social justice and food security. Two sociologists who studied the movement (and participated in it as well) reported that farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture projects, and country food stands had proliferated “like robins in spring”; farmers’ markets increased by more than 60 percent in the late 1990s alone. Customers for them, alas, had not. Alternative food systems, it appeared, required as much marketing and public relations as Mel Coleman’s natural beef. Thus began the “buy local” campaign that captured the attention of the middle class. That tactic originated in 1999 when a Massachusetts group, Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, launched a sophisticated public relations drive aimed at wooing shoppers. Stickers, pamphlets, and advertisements urged area residents to be “Local Heroes” and buy food from local farmers. Other communities and organizations quickly latched on to the idea. (Presumably no one anticipated the heated debate over “local miles” that erupted several years later.)
A cycle developed: the more chic that alternative foods became—and the role that status and cachet played in fueling the growth of this niche cannot be denied—the higher the premiums those foods commanded (and not always because demand outstripped supplies), the more likely farmers were to switch to organic production in order to nab those premiums, and the less interested they were in serving the needs of poor urbanites. The fetishization of alternative foods—celebrity chefs and farmers, menus detailing the ecologically correct origins of every ingredient in a dish, farmers’ market as hipster carnival—lured more consumers eager to spend food dollars in order to experience the niche. Surely no one was surprised when in 2006, Wal-Mart announced plans to expand its offerings of organic foods.
Alternative livestock and meat production, however, lagged behind that of alt-staples like arugula and organic boxed macaroni and cheese; in 2000, meats constituted just 3 percent of the organic sector. Part of the problem was logistical: every year more farmers shifted more land into organic production, but most of that was devoted to raising vegetables and fruits. Relatively few people were interested in growing organic corn for livestock feed or in devoting acres to grazing rather than crop production, especially because meats made up such a small piece of the organic pie. The smaller the sector, of course, the less inclined farmers were to raise feed. That was the first Catch-22. Another was that so few farmers, and especially livestock producers, controlled their agricultural destinies. Broiler growers, to name the obvious example, were contractors. But by the turn of the century, the number of independent cattle feeders had dwindled, and contract hog farming had gained traction among small farmers struggling to make ends meet. Put another way, there weren’t that many livestock producers left to go organic. That explains why, statistically, a large proportion of the people producing organic meats came to the industry with no prior farming experience.
But many otherwise interested farmers held back, waiting for the USDA to establish standards for organic livestock and meat production. The rules that the USDA finally issued in 2002 were straightforward (or as much so as possible when bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists are involved). Farmers and retailers could market beef, pork, and poultry as organic if the meats came from animals raised without growth-inducing hormones or antibiotics and fed diets of organically grown, all-vegetable feedstuffs manufactured in an organic-certified mill. Farmers were required to provide livestock with access to the outdoors, although confinement was allowed under limited conditions and only for brief periods. (One of those conditions, however, constituted a significant loophole: producers could confine their livestock if they believed that leaving them on pasture posed “a risk to soil or water quality.”) Finally, the livestock had to be slaughtered and processed in an organic-certified facility.
Those seemingly simple guidelines were littered with bureaucratic land mines. Consider the case of Peaceful Pastures in Tennessee, whose owners raised and marketed organic poultry. Tennessee law mandated that all poultry slaughter take place in a USDA-inspected facility. There were plenty of such operations around, but they were set up to handle conventional poultry. The couple couldn’t find a USDA-supervised slaughterhouse that would provide “custom-kill” services and adhere to organic standards. The pair considered building a small processing facility on their farm—until they read the fine print in the rules. “I’d have to build an office for the inspector,” said Peaceful Pastures owner Jenny Drake, complete with a separate phone line. The couple would have to pave their parking lot and install handicapped-accessible bathrooms. “We have to meet the same physical standards as a Tyson’s, and we just can’t do it,” she sighed. “[I’m] so right-wing I make Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal,” she added, but as far as she was concerned, big business and what she termed the “rich agribusiness lobby” were making her life miserable. Virginia farmer Joel Salatin agreed. He raised organic hogs, chickens, and cattle, and he, too, tried to build an on-farm slaughter facility. USDA officials directed him to the guidelines, a detailed list of necessities that infuriated Salatin, who saw no need to build employee bathrooms. “I told them we were 50 feet away from two houses with bathrooms, and besides, we’re a family operation: We don’t have employees. It didn’t matter to them,” he complained. “Then they said we had to have twelve changing-lockers for employees—even if we didn’t have employees.” Salatin denounced the obstacles as “bureaucracy in action,” a bureaucracy with but one purpose: to “protect big agribusiness from rural independent competition.” USDA employees were sympathetic, to a point. The official who dealt with the Tennessee couple understood that these rules would likely prevent someone who wanted to slaughter and sell a few hundred chickens a year from earning any profit. But, he asked, “do we want to let people slaughter meat in the backyard and sell it on the sidewalk?” Doing so, he feared, could introduce tainted meats into the nation’s food supply. That argument carried zero weight with those trying to change the nation’s hearts, minds, and diets. One only needed to consult a daily newspaper to know that whatever else they might be, conventional foodstuffs, and especially meat, were hardly safe.
Given these obstacles, it’s a miracle anyone bothered to produce and market organic meats, and many people decided not to do so. A Massachusetts man who’d built up a clientele for his meat at a local farmers’ market wanted the organic designation, but to get it, he complained, he’d have to “hire someone to do the paperwork, pay twice the price for organic feed, and find a certified slaughterhouse that would take a small amount of animals.” His customers were already paying up to $5 a pound for his ground beef. The cost of obtaining and maintaining organic certification would “price [him] out of the ball game.” He decided that because he dealt with his clientele face-to-face, it made more sense simply to explain to buyers that his products were organic.
But as the previous example indicates, and as the Coleman family had known for years, many shoppers were prepared to pay top dollar for alternative meats. Those shoppers’ ranks increased in the early twenty-first century thanks to widely broadcast recalls of tainted meats, outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and new concerns about antibiotic resistance. So red tape notwithstanding, organic meat production attracted conventional cattle and hog farmers looking for something, anything, to boost the still-sagging sales of beef and pork. That was particularly true of cattle growers, many of whom pinned their hopes on the high end of the market. After all, exotica enthusiasts had snapped up certified Angus steaks, or highly marb
led, flavorful cuts from Wagyu or Kobe cattle, or pricey “lite” beef from livestock bred for lean rather than fat.
In the early years of the new century, the winner of the carnivorous exotica contest was grass-fed beef. The idea was not new; since the 1940s, the trade journal Stockman Grass Farmer had catered to the interests of a small but dedicated group of ranchers who specialized in finishing cattle on grass. Grass-fed beef had enjoyed a brief moment of glory in the 1970s as some feeders, including Ken Monfort, bought range cattle and sent them directly to slaughter rather than finish them on high-priced grain. The beef went to grocery stores labeled as “grass-fed” and carrying a lower price tag than grain-fed beef. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some ranchers and farmers reversed that equation and promoted grass-fed as a premium product, one that was (allegedly) healthier than grain-fed beef. Conventional cattle ranchers Wendy and Jon Taggert, Texans who’d long sold their livestock to commercial cattle feeders, began keeping back part of their herd, finishing it on grass, and marketing it directly to consumers under the name New Image Grass Beef. Jon explained that they wanted “a little bit bigger piece of the pie” to stay on their own plates. Beef “is a very healthy product,” Wendy Taggert told a reporter by way of elaboration. “We’re just making it healthier.”
The popularity of grass-fed beef reflected how far the alternative food movement had traveled, but it also laid bare the fracture lines emerging among alternative food producers. In early 2002, some Northern California ranchers banded together to sell grass-fed beef to high-end area restaurants. A reporter who covered the story noted that the group found plenty of takers for their product—which cost about twice as much as conventional beef—because of grass-fed’s “political and culinary appeal” to upscale buyers. But demand for grass-fed escalated markedly that year after a writer named Michael Pollan published a New York Times Magazine article in which he argued that conventional beef production was bad for both cattle and people. Marshaling the same argument that sustainable agriculture advocates had been making for nearly thirty years, Pollan told readers that there was nothing cheap or healthy about meat, not if one “add[ed] in the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on.”