by Maureen Ogle
Pollan’s essay was enough to convince Alice Waters, by then a “foodie” celebrity, to serve grass-fed beef in her restaurant rather than the grain-finished meat she’d been buying from Niman Ranch. Bill Niman, that company’s cofounder, was aghast. He’d been raising organic cattle for years, finishing them on (organic) grains before slaughter, and he resented the notion that his beef was unhealthy or ecologically incorrect. Niman dispatched an e-mail to Pollan. “As you know,” he told the writer, “the story is very complicated and the lay public considers all feedlot cattle the same. This is absolutely not true.” The belief that grass-fed beef or other free-range meats could replace conventional stuff was also unrealistic, Niman told a reporter. “People want to imagine a beautiful vision of a chicken out there eating earwigs and cows roaming free around the pasture,” he said. But that vision could not “feed millions of people every day.” That was particularly true of grass-fed beef, he explained, which was as seasonal as “a peach or a tomato. Eat it in May or June ’cause that is when it is peaking.”
Niman’s arguments carried little weight with those eager to claim a share of the exotica niche or to change the world. Inspired by Pollan’s article, the Chefs Collaborative, a collection of what one reporter described as “prominent” chefs, restaurateurs, and food activists, launched a campaign to persuade restaurant owners to switch to grass-fed beef. The project raised a few eyebrows. An executive with a small chain of upscale steakhouses found it “ironic” that the collaborative claimed to have been inspired by the “standard of excellence” found in European meats, and yet every day Europeans poured into his restaurants searching for quality beef of a sort they could not find at home. A founder of the Center for Consumer Freedom, a watchdog group opposed to what it described as “nanny culture,” denounced the collaborative as “a haughty organization with an elitist point of view” and a “let them eat cake” attitude. “We are an elitist organization,” said collaborative member Eric Schlosser, “but change has to start someplace, and people who have better access to information and spending power can be the start of all sorts of changes.” Schlosser, who had recently published Fast Food Nation, a Jungle-like exposé of the fast-food industry in general and fast-food meat in particular, argued that many historically significant movements, including Abolition and women’s suffrage, had been “led by educated, middle- and upper-income people,” and he believed that the crusade for a more sustainable food system was another such movement.
Change was on the way, although perhaps not the kind Schlosser intended. Several months later, two alt-meat pioneers, Coleman and Niman Ranch, were snapped up by investment groups. Niman Ranch lost its independence first. In the thirty-odd years since Bill Niman and Orville Schell had founded their venture, the company had never earned a profit. That had not stopped Niman from pursuing a strategy of aggressive growth after Schell left in the late 1990s. (“I consciously deferred profitability [in order] to expand the brand,” he explained.) He added organic pork to his array of products, a move that required him to contract with a small army of hog producers, and expanded his market from Northern California to the entire United States. His ambitions outstripped his funds, and in late summer 2002, Chicago-based Natural Food Holdings committed two of its executives and a fistful of cash to the task of saving Niman; in exchange, Natural commandeered four of the seven seats on the Niman board of directors. The new investors sold the original feedlot, choosing instead to send cattle to conventional feeders for finishing and shipping the livestock long distances to slaughter. Those decisions generated profits but infuriated Bill Niman. When the investors acquired the company outright in 2009, Niman resigned, publicly berating the new owners for betraying his mission.
The Coleman family also cashed out in 2002. Mel Coleman Jr., company president since the death of his father earlier in the year, sold to Petaluma Holdings, an investment consortium that owned Petaluma Poultry, one of the country’s largest processors of organic poultry, as well as Swift & Company. (Swift was the new name of what had been ConAgra Beef, the Greeley outfit that once belonged to the Monforts.) The new owners planned to position their portfolio of natural and organic meats in chain stores like Costco and Safeway. Over the next few years, they merged with what had been Natural Food Holdings and then with a third investment firm, KDSB Holdings. In 2006, this new entity incorporated Coleman Natural Foods as the parent company for its many alternative meat brands and companies, which by then included Rocky the Range Chicken, Rocky Jr., and Rosie the Organic Chicken.
These moves were not surprising—at least not to those with a nose for business. The organic food sector made up just 4 percent of all American food sales, but it was growing at the rate of about 20 percent a year. Sales of organic meats, however, were ratcheting upward at a rate of 50 percent a year. While that number needs to be seen in perspective—the $600 million that consumers spent on organic meat was a mere jot of the $158 billion that Americans spent on all beef, pork, and poultry—signs pointed toward continued growth. Tyson and other mainstream meat makers were launching lines of natural meats (presumably banking on the fact that few consumers understood the difference between natural and organic labels). Retail behemoth Wal-Mart had announced plans to expand its organic food offerings, a decision that translated into pressure on packers and food processors to come up with the goods. Then there was the 2006 publication of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which became an immediate bestseller and remained one for several years. The book’s centerpiece and most indelible image was Pollan’s portrayal of conventional livestock production: thousands of cattle crammed into feedlots and standing shin-deep in manure, their bodies riddled with bacteria and damaged by a diet of corn. From an investor’s point of view, that grim scenario translated into the hottest ticket to profit since the microwave oven: organic alternatives to conventional beef, pork, and poultry. It’s not surprising that investment groups like Natural Holdings and Petaluma Poultry were on the prowl for sources of alternative meat.
Not that “alternative” meats were all that alternative. By the time Pollan’s book appeared, half of all organic food purchases were made in conventional grocery stores, including Costco and other big-box retailers, and every major grocery chain boasted its own private-label brands of organic goods, including meat. Of the other 50 percent of organic food sales, most were made at natural food stores, primarily Whole Foods and similar chains. The demand from those grocery outlets spawned a new industry of middlemen: organic “handlers,” as they were called, scoured the countryside grabbing up, and often contracting in advance for, organic carrots, apples, and chickens, anything alternative that could be processed and packaged for sale to giant retailers. In the race to supply the new alt-powerhouses—Safeway, Kroger, and Costco—farmers’ markets and other local farmer-to-consumer outlets ran a distant third. Shoppers still flocked to the Saturday-morning farmer-food carnivals, but the prices they paid there inched up because farmers who once struggled to find outlets for their carrots and broilers held the upper hand. Why bother with a farmers’ market when organic handlers crowded the farmhouse door, begging for supplies that were scarce relative to demand? Eyed from the retail end, the new food utopia, it appeared, looked much like the old mainstream. Was alternative the new normal?
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-sta
ll 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
IF 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.