by Jay Rayner
I also got to grips with the desperately dysfunctional nature of the American relationship with its food. We know it has one of the most industrialized, sugar- and fat-sodden food production systems in the world. Films like Food Inc have done much to shine light into dark, musty corners. We know the US is the fattest country in the developed world, with nearly 35 per cent of the population classified as obese. We have seen pictures of vast bottoms, restrained within tents of denim, bellies still overflowing like so much expanding bread dough. I feel small there and I am not. I feel my appetites are normal there, and they are not. Everything in America is big, including dinner.
Terrible, terrible things are done in the name of food. One summer a couple of years ago I took my family for a holiday on Cape Cod, the thick spit of land that sticks out deep into the Atlantic from the Massachusetts coast and which, therefore, should have a booming shellfish culture. Indeed it has. Not far from the house we were renting was a big slat-board café – more a canteen – advertising clams. I love clams. I love sucking the soft, sweet meat from the shell, and the hit of sea and salt you get as you run your tongue around the inside. I was looking forward to a big bucket of clams, smiling up at me, just waiting to be prised and pulled from their sticking place.
No such luck. This café didn’t do shells. Taking things out of shells required effort, and who wanted that? They pulled the clam meat out for you, dredged it in batter, and then dumped the whole lot in the deep-fat fryer. Tons of the stuff. You could have anything you liked there, as long as it had first been for a swim in boiling oil. Perhaps I care a little too much about my dinner. Perhaps I’m an obsessive, but I found it all a hideous disappointment.
Many Americans think so too. It is a massively polarized food culture; one which is constantly at war with itself. Whatever the virtues or otherwise of organic food, it speaks volumes that sales are – though still relatively small – much higher in the US than they have ever been in the UK, at 4 per cent as against 1.5 per cent. It feels like a repulsed reaction to something deeply unappetizing. Food scandal after food scandal has broken across the country: E. Coli outbreaks in spinach production; aquifer contamination around giant hog plants; school boards ruling that pizza can be counted as one of a child’s five fruit or vegetable portions a day on account of the tomato sauce; the growing outrage around the use of a beef-based additive commonly – and appetizingly – known as ‘pink slime’, made with the ground-down connective tissue and scraps that can’t be sold as prime cuts, which have been used by big-name fast-food and manufacturing companies.
And those are only the headline grabbers from the past few years. The announcement in early 2011 by the superstar TV chef Paula Dean that she had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, the form of the disease most intimately related to lifestyle, appeared to mark something of a watershed. Dean had made herself famous by promoting a shameless brand of fat- and sugar-smeared cookery – chocolate-covered, deep-fried cheesecake, a quiche made with a pound of bacon, a bread and butter pudding made with Krispy Kreme doughnuts – which sounded like the sort of things even late-career Elvis would shy away from on health grounds. She justified these dishes by describing them as an expression of the hospitality of the American South. If that was so, then she was literally killing herself with kindness, and others too. ‘I am who I am,’ she said when the news broke, fessing up that she was also now taking a serious wedge of cash to promote the diabetes treatment Victoza. ‘It is,’ she said, ‘the American way.’ Cue endless pages of soul-searching in the comment pages of the American press.
The result of all this is, on the one side, a slab of the population feasting on junk, and on the other, a huge group of people attempting to challenge what is happening by retreating to a world of farmers’ markets, advocacy and protest.
And, of course, there’s a special kind of emotion-drenched, sugary, feel-my-soul, know-my-pain language which for a granite-hearted and suspicious Englishman can be a little too much to take. It feels as if they think you can combat the worst excesses of the industrial food machine by emoting, by feeling, by adoring. Forget flowery menu language: this is the vocabulary of the Hallmark greetings card. Everything will be OK, it seems, if we all just have a group hug and think about our feelings.
Oh God.
‘If you cook this dish with love,’ I was once told by a chef from Florida, ‘it will work every time.’
‘I genuinely think you can taste the love in this dish,’ another American chef once said to me.
Each time I was told something like this I would flinch, as if a red-hot poker had been waved near my face.
In 2009 I worked as a judge on the US food reality TV show Top Chef Masters, in which a group of big-name chefs competed in a set of cookery challenges to win $100,000 for charity and bragging rights to the title. At the end of each episode the judging panel would have to interview the chefs on camera about the dishes they had cooked for us in response to the challenge they had been posed. The shoots went on for hours.
One night, about halfway into the series, one of the chefs made the mistake of telling me that the dish they had prepared had been ‘made with love’. I’d had enough. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If I want a blowjob I’ll call my wife. From you I want technique and good taste.’ My fellow judges, all highly regarded American food writers, stared down the table at me, slack-jawed.
For some reason, my terribly witty line didn’t make the final cut.
This, of course, is not the whole story. For lying beneath this thick, fatty layer of wobbly emotion is another story about food in America, because in any critique of the modern global food system the US always looms large. It is, as ever, portrayed as a place of hard business and hard numbers. It is home to the huge agricultural biotech combines like Monsanto and DuPont that dominate the seed business. It is home to agricultural services companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the grain purchasers, processors and refiners who manage the food supply chain. And it’s home to the commodity traders who are so often fingered as the true villains of the piece for ramping up prices of the world’s food – for leading billions to the very edge of starvation – in pursuit of a quick buck.
In some quarters even just questioning the conventional wisdom on the evils of all this is considered heresy. It’s buying into their PR, they say. It’s allowing them to shove a foot back in the door of public opinion. Give them an inch and they’ll take every damn acre they can get their hands on. Then again, the game is changing. We have an awful lot of people to feed. The political, social and economic stability of our world depends upon our ability to do so. Which means questions need to be asked. The hard questions. Like: is the American-dominated industrial food complex really all bad? Or, to put it another way, might it actually be a part of the solution?
Perched at the very top of the 184-metre-high Chicago Board of Trade Building is an aluminium sculpture of Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, by the artist John H. Storrs. She is the crowning point of the limestone building, completed in 1930, and stands with a sheaf of wheat in her left hand and a bag of corn in her right, staring far down the shadowed canyon of LaSalle Avenue in the Windy City’s downtown. Or at least she would be staring if she had any eyes. Or indeed any face at all. When it was finished it was the tallest building in the city, a title it would hold until 1965. Legend has it that, as a result, the artist concluded there was no point going to all the effort of getting the face right. Nobody would ever be able to see it, so he left her blank.
As a metaphor for the anonymous and blind brutality of the modern financial system, in which the lives of millions are blighted by the capricious decisions of a tiny number, you can’t get much better. Thanks to one lazy artist who couldn’t be fagged to go the extra mile, we have Ceres the faceless goddess of big business, atop a building completely disconnected from the very things it is selling. It is all just so many numbers now. It’s all about electronic data whizzing in millions of megabytes along glowing fibre optics o
r through the charged ether. It’s about tiny slivers of margin in a gargantuan market where corn is the same as wheat is the same as ten-year gilts. It’s all just money.
Except when you get inside the Chicago Board of Trade it simply doesn’t feel like that. My guide, a trader with twenty-five years’ experience called Jim Iuorio, leads me up a succession of escalators and through a set of security checkpoints to the trading floor and it’s all I can do to stop myself rocking back on my heels as we enter. I had expected something that looked like a call centre: desks, banks of computers, phones, dead-eyed keyboard jockeys strapped to their consoles, like mariners against hurricane winds, but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a vast, cavernous space on the scale of a major basketball stadium. Around the sides in tiers, so that the occupants can view the action down on the floor, are indeed stacks of desks and computers, but nobody is strapped in anywhere. People are moving in all directions. Above them, running all the way around the walls, are screens six to ten feet high, firing out the latest commodity prices in digits the colour of fresh, arterial blood. And then there are the famed Chicago ‘pits’, large octagonal gouges in the floor with stepped sides, so the dealers can get a good view of one another as they bawl and caterwaul their orders. They are wearing distinctive striped and patterned jackets of various hues, and many are wearing headsets which link them to their colleagues up in the stands. They have tablet computers held flat in front of them via straps around their necks and they are shouting. And waving their hands. And shouting some more. It’s like a premiership football game in which members of the fifty-strong heaving, swaying crowd are also the competitors.
True ‘open outcry’ trading like this is very rare these days. Other markets – both the London and New York Stock Exchanges, their Toronto equivalent, the Borsa Italiana in Milan and many more besides – have abandoned it. ‘But it makes a kind of sense here,’ Jim tells me as we make our way across to the corn futures pit. I ask him to explain a corn future.
‘OK. So you’re a farmer and you have 100 bushels of corn you want to harvest in three months …’
‘You still talk in bushels?’
‘We still talk in bushels. Currently there are 166 bushels to an acre, roughly. And a single contract is 5,000 bushels.’
A late-middle-aged woman, her peroxide blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, jaw clenched, turns and chips in. ‘And 5,000 bushels is the amount to fill a whole train container. That’s why a contract is called a train.’ She fires these words out the side of her mouth like bullets. These people talk in italics, like every syllable deserves emphasis.
‘So every contract is called a train,’ Jim says, like it’s a call and response in some Southern Baptist church. ‘Here’s the thing you gotta understand. Chicago is like this because of what happened here. It’s not just that the city is surrounded by all the farms. It’s that the railroads came here. So that’s why we trade commodities.’
Chicago is the riverhead. It’s the gathering place. It’s the hub.
‘So you’re the farmer and you have 100 bushels and you set a price with a trader of ten per bushel.’
‘Ten dollars?’
‘Ten of whatever. It’s a simple example. If when we get to harvest the price of corn goes to eleven, you the farmer didn’t do so well, but the trader did OK. But he can go on. He can make a deal with someone else to sell that futures contract if the price goes to, say, 11.5. That way he’s locked in his profit. You can also do it in reverse to limit losses. And then you can put together packages of puts and calls, of bets against losses and for profit, a whole bunch of options. And that’s what’s happening here.’ I’m not sure I entirely understand, but I nod anyway. I can see that this is a loud and physical business.
‘Open outcry is better for this,’ Jim says, ‘so you can talk to the guys and work out what sort of prices you should be offering.’ Here, in the Chicago pits, information is everything.
Jim introduces me to a huge man called Scott Shellady, wearing a black and white jacket in a Friesian cow print that strains at the buttons across his vast belly.
‘How come the Friesian thing?’ I ask him.
Jim says, ‘What’s a Friesian?’
I point at the jacket. ‘A breed of cow. I may know nothing about options and futures but I recognize a cow pattern when I see one.’
Scott laughs and his huge shoulders heave, one big, fleshy Mexican wave. ‘My family originally came from the Netherlands, where they were dairy farmers. So I wear this. There’s a benefit in here to being visible and large.’
‘True, true,’ says Jim, who is short and wiry. ‘I used to wear these six-inch stack heels so people could see me.’
‘And I wear the Friesian cow jacket.’
‘That’s the thing about Scott,’ Jim says. ‘His family still own a farm.’
I’m stunned. A food commodities trader, on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, who actually knows something about farming?
‘Yes indeed,’ he says. ‘I’ve been in a barn freezing my nuts off at 2 a.m. helping a cow to be born. There’s probably only about four of us guys like that here.’
Jim asks Scott how the corn harvest is looking. ‘It was OK until three weeks ago.’
Then what happened?
‘Drought happened. We’ve had drought for the past three weeks.’
Interesting, I say, because as I was arriving it had just started raining.
Scott points up at the screens on the wall above our heads. ‘Which is why the bushel price has dropped by eighteen cents this morning. Rain could mean a bigger harvest. A bigger supply means a lower price.’ Corn futures prices are marked by the letter C followed by an alphabetical letter for the month: July is represented by N, September by U, December by Z. There are many things to learn here on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. We can see under CN – corn delivered in July – that the price this morning has dropped from $6.08 to $5.914. I am surprised that what’s happening here amid all these computers is so desperately responsive to the weather outside.
‘Ninety per cent of it is about the weather,’ Scott says. At present they are expecting thirteen billion bushels of corn to be harvested in the US in 2012, which is worth around $78 billion. ‘But that $78 billion is nothing compared to the business being done on the financial markets in general. It’s tiny. And here’s the thing you have to understand. More corn is traded right here every day than will be grown in America this year.’
Jim nods. ‘Because it keeps changing hands.’ He tells me they also trade livestock here. He shows me a graph for beef prices which is heading inexorably upwards. Beef is more expensive than it’s ever been. I want to know why that is. Are the commodity traders here to blame for ramping up the price?
‘No,’ Scott says. ‘Supply and demand. There’s a shortage. You remember the food price spike of 2008? Soya beans, corn, all grains go through the roof?’ I say I remember it well. I say it’s one of the reasons I’m here, on this journey. ‘Well, cattle farmers in 2008, because feed is so expensive they can’t afford to feed their animals any more, they cut their losses and send the animals to slaughter, including their breeding herds.’
No more baby cows?
‘No more baby cows. There weren’t enough animals to replenish the herd. Hence, four years on, we have a shortage.’
Why, I ask, have food commodities seemingly become so popular? Years ago you never heard of people making big bucks out of corn or wheat or soya beans. But now it’s the big thing.
‘There’s nowhere else to go,’ Scott says. Equities – shares in quoted companies – have been tanking for years. Likewise, interest rates have been hovering around zero. Making money in both of those is very, very tricky. So everybody has been piling into the tangible assets: minerals, like gold, and foodstuffs, like wheat, soya beans and corn. And so we get to the nub of it. From what they’re saying corn stops being corn – something to be eaten – and becomes merely a thing with a numerical value. Doesn’t that
mean the great charge against speculators like this, that they are falsely inflating prices, is bang on?
‘No,’ says Scott. ‘Because this is the thing. By driving prices up speculators can inspire farmers to plant more crops.’
I have heard this argument before. In 2008, while making a documentary for Channel 4 about the food price spike, I met an intense, beady-eyed commodities speculator called Hugh Hendry, in the west London offices of his firm Eclectica Asset Management. He stood before a map of Africa, jabbing his finger at the European continent, barking, ‘We can feed these people. We. Can. Feed. Them.’ Increasing the cost of food made it easier, he said. It was a curious argument.
Clearly, to get to grips with this, I needed other sources of information. I needed to follow the commodity trail back from the trading floor to the farm gate. I needed to get away from the madness and brawl of the Chicago Board of Trade and go meet a farmer.