Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (45 page)

thus far protected about 40,000 acres:
Interview with Lynne Sherrod, executive director, Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust.

vanishing at the rate of about 90,000 acres a year:
Cited in “Loss of Agricultural Land Figures for Colorado,” Memorandum by David Carlson, resource analyst, Colorado Department of Agriculture, January 8, 1998.

146
The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers:
The statistic comes from Florence Williams, “Farmed Out,”
New Republic
, August 16, 1999.

147
“To fail several generations of relatives”:
Osha Gray Davidson,
Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), p. 95.

Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
(1906; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1981) unfortunately remains the essential starting point for an understanding of America’s meatpacking industry today. Nearly a century after the book’s publication, many of the descriptive passages still ring true. Sinclair’s prescription for reform, however — his call for a centralized, socialized, highly industrialized agriculture — shows how even the best of intentions can lead to disaster. For a contemporary view of nineteenth-century meatpacking, I relied mainly on Yeager,
Competition and Regulation
and Skaggs,
Prime Cut
. For the struggle to improve working conditions in Chicago’s Packingtown, see
Unionizing the Jungles: Labor and Community in the Twentieth Century Meatpacking Industry
, edited by Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997). One of the essays in the book, “The Swift Difference,” by Paul Street, gives a strong sense of the corporate paternalism and decent working conditions that were later eliminated by the “IBP revolution.” For an account of that revolution’s leadership, see Jonathan Kwitny,
Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); James Cook and Jane Carmichael, “The Mob’s Legitimate Connections,”
Forbes
, November 24, 1980; and James Cook, “Those Simple, Barefoot Boys from Iowa Beef,”
Forbes
, June 22, 1981. Also see the inadvertently revealing corporate history by Jane E. Limprecht,
ConAgra Who
?
$15 Billion and Growing
(Omaha: ConAgra, 1989). Jeremy Rifkin’s
Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture
(New York: Penguin, 1993) is a provocative diatribe against “the industrialization of beef.” Kathleen Meister’s response to Rifkin, “The Beef Controversy,”
American Council on Science and Health Special Reports
, August 31, 1993, is less convincing, but makes a number of good points. Osha Gray Davidson’s
Broken Heartland
does a fine job of explaining the root causes and social implications of the rising poverty in America’s meatpacking towns. Carol Andreas’s
Meatpackers and Beef Barons: Company Town in a Global Economy
(Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994) examines the recent transformation of Greeley. I am grateful to Ms. Andreas for discussing her work at length with me.

In Greeley, many former and current Monfort employees — some at the managerial level — shared their perspective on changes at the company after its sale to ConAgra; at their request, I have not included their names. I am grateful to Javier and Ruben Ramirez for the many hours they spent with me discussing the labor histories of Greeley and Chicago. For a straightforward analysis of structural changes in the cattle business, see James M. MacDonald and Michael Ollinger, “U.S. Meat Slaughter Consolidating Rapidly,”
USDA Food Review
, May 1, 1997. The best book on today’s meatpacking industry is
Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), edited by Donald D. Stull, Michael J. Broadway, and David Griffith. The essays by Lourdes Gouveia, Donald D. Stull, Mark Grey, and Steve Bjerklie were especially useful to me. I am indebted to Ms. Gouveia, a professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska–Omaha, whose work on the recent changes in Lexington, Nebraska, is exemplary and who helped me contact people there. Her essay “Global Strategies and Local Linkages: The Case of the U.S. Meatpacking Industry” is well worth reading, as is the rest of the book in which it appears:
From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food
, edited by Alessandro Bonanno, Lawrence Busch, William H. Friedland, Lourdes Gouveia, and Enzo Mingione (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). For a government report that belatedly confirms many of the findings made by Stull, Grey, Davidson, Gouveia, and others, see “Community Development: Changes in Nebraska’s and Iowa’s Counties With Large Meatpacking Plant Workforces,”
Report to Congressional Requesters
, United States General Accounting Office, February 1998. Milo Muungard, the executive director of Nebraska’s Appleseed Center, gave me useful material on the social and environmental effects of a migrant industrial workforce. Greg Lauby, an attorney whose family has lived in Lexington, Nebraska, for generations, graciously shared his knowledge of the town’s history, its residents, its recent changes — and the reasons for its smell. I am particularly grateful to the many IBP workers who invited me into their homes and told me their stories.

Page

150
earns more money every year from livestock products:
1997
Census of Agriculture
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce), p. 36.

150
the largest private employer in Weld County:
Indeed, a recent study by two Colorado State University economists found that ConAgra’s facilities are “practically synonymous with Greeley and Weld County.” Andrew Seidl and Stephan Weiler, “The Estimated Value of ConAgra Packing Plants in Weld County, CO,”
Agricultural and Resource Policy Report
, Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, Fort Collins, February 2000, p. 3.

A typical steer will consume:
Interview with Mike Callicrate, Kansas feedlot operator.

deposits about fifty pounds of manure:
The figure was determined by researchers at Colorado State University. Cited in Mark Obmascik, “As Greeley Ponders Tax, Cows Keep On Doing Their Thing,”
Denver Post
, July 29, 1995.

produce more excrement than the cities:
According to O. W. Charles, of the Extension Poultry Science Department of the University of Georgia, one head of cattle generates the same amount of waste as 16.4 people. Cited in Eric R. Haapapuro, Neal D. Barnard, and Michele Simon, “Animal Waste Used as Livestock Feed: Dangers to Human Health,”
Preventive Medicine
, September/October 1997. Using that ratio, the roughly 200,000 cattle in Monfort’s two Weld County feedlots produce an amount of waste equivalent to that of about 3.2 million people. The combined populations of Denver (about 500,000), Boston (about 550,000), Atlanta (about 400,000), and St. Louis (about 375,00) produce much less execrement than Greeley’s cattle.

it was a utopian community:
My account of early Greeley is based on Mike Peters, “Meeker Killed on Western Slope,”
Greeley Tribune
, 1998; Mike Peters, “Controversy over Cattle Ranches Leads to ‘The Fence,’”
Greeley Tribune
, 1998; and Carl Ubbelohde, Maxine Benson, Duane A. Smith,
A Colorado History
(Boulder, Colo.: Pruett Publishing Company, 1995), pp. 123–32.

151
started his business in the 1930s with eighteen head:
See Curt Olsen, “Monforts: Changing the Way the World Is Fed,”
National Cattlemen
, August 1997.

a place on President Nixon’s “enemies list”:
See “Beef Baron,”
Rocky Mountain News Sunday Magazine
, May 3, 1987.

“If I can ever be of help”:
Quoted in Andreas,
Meatpackers and Beef Barons
, p. 37.

152
“the greatest aggregation”:
Sinclair,
Jungle
, p. 40.

“cogs in the great packing machine”:
Ibid., p. 78.

“conditions that are entirely unnecessary”:
Quoted in Yeager,
Competition and Regulation
, p. 200.

153
“I aimed for the public’s heart”:
Quoted in Skaggs,
Prime Cut
, p. 118.

paid the industry’s highest wages:
See Stromquist and Bergman,
Unionizing the Jungles
, pp. 25–33.

154
“We’ve tried to take the skill out”:
Quoted in Stull et al.,
Any Way You Cut It
, p. 19.

as though it were waging war:
Holman is quoted in Christopher Drew, “A Chain of Setbacks for Meat Workers,”
Chicago Tribune
, October 25, 1988.

close ties with La Cosa Nostra:
Steinman was a central figure in New York City’s meat business, dominated at the time by the Lucchese and Gambino crime families. See Kwitny,
Vicious Circles
, pp. 252–53.

155
a five-cent “commission”:
The arrangement, technically, was a fifty-cent commission for every hundred pounds. Ibid., p. 301.

155
“knew virtually nothing about the meat business”:
Quoted ibid., p. 375.

investigations by
Forbes
and the
Wall Street Journal: Jonathan Kwitny, the
Journal
reporter, and James Cook and Jane Carmichael, writing for
Forbes
, drew somewhat different conclusions about the meaning of the IBP case. Kwitny was outraged, arguing that it was as though “the Mafia had moved into… the oil industry, bringing Exxon to its knees.” Cook and Carmichael were more detached and pragmatic. “The ordeal of Iowa Beef Processors shows as clearly as anything can,” they wrote, “how legitimate business can become linked with organized crime, to their mutual benefit.” Kwitny,
Vicious Circles
, p. 252; Cook and Carmichael, “Mob’s Legitimate Connections.”

wages that were sometimes more than 50 percent lower:
While Swift and Armour were paying $17 to $18 an hour, IBP was paying just $8. See Winston Williams, “An Upheaval in Meatpacking,”
New York Times,
June 20, 1983. See also Cook, “Those Simple, Barefoot Boys.”

once employed 40,000 people:
According to Erin Troya of the Chicago Historical Society, Packingtown employed about 40,000 workers at its peak during the 1920s. The current estimate of 2,000 comes from Ruben Ramirez. Dot McGrier, at the U.S. Census Bureau, says that Chicago now has a total of 6,000 meatpacking workers, but most of them are employed in the Watermarket area on the western edge of the city.

157
a sweetheart deal with the National Maritime Union:
See Bill Saporito, “Unions Fight the Corporate Sell-Off,”
Fortune
, July 11, 1983; Jim Morris, “Easy Prey: Harsh work for Immigrants,”
Houston Chronicle
, June 26, 1995; Andreas,
Meatpackers and Beef Barons
, p. 68.

158
wages that had been cut by 40 percent:
Andreas,
Meatpackers and Beef Barons
, p. 98.

“if the industry was going to be concentrated”:
Quoted ibid., p. 76.

the largest foodservice supplier:
Interview with Karen Savinski, director of corporate communications, ConAgra.

159
annual revenues of about $500 million:
Cited in Limprecht,
ConAgra Who?
, p. 98.

the market value of its stock:
Ibid., p. 7.

“Harper told each general manager”:
Quoted ibid., p. 12.

“Patience, my ass”:
Ibid., p. 120.

45,256 truckloads:
See Tom Hughes, “Alabama Growers’ Court Settlement Not Chicken Feed,”
Montgomery Advertiser
, October 7, 1992. See also Richard Gibson, “ConAgra Settles Case of Cheating By Bird Weighers,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 9, 1992.

ConAgra agreed to pay $13.6 million:
Cited in Richard Gibson, “ConAgra, Hormel Pay a Pretty Penny in an Ugly Catfish Price-Fixing Case,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 29, 1995.

ConAgra paid $8.3 million in fines:
See
“ConAgra Pays
$8.3 Million in Penalties for Fraud Scheme,”
Federal Department and Agency Documents
, March 19, 1997. See also Scott Kilman, “ConAgra to Pay $8.3 Million to Settle Fraud Charges in Grain-Handling Case,”
Wall Street Journal
, March 20, 1997.

160
more than five thousand different people were employed:
Cited in “Here’s the Beef: Underreporting of Injuries, OSHA’s Policy of Exempting Companies from Programmed
Inspections Based on Injury Records, and Unsafe Conditions in the Meatpacking Industry,”
Forty-Second Report by the Committee on Government and Operations
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), p. 12.