In Meat We Trust (14 page)

What was good for the little Willies of America proved a disaster for the meat industry. In 1926, the New York City school board banned frankfurters from lunchrooms on the grounds that the food was “unsuited”
to students’ nutritional needs. The board’s lunch director explained that sausage was so “heavy” that when children ate it, they “neglected to eat green stuff” and milk. “This is an open attack
on the frankfurter,” fumed a writer for a butchers’ trade newspaper. The lowly frank was one of the meat industry’s “best foods” because it provided “the most nutriment for the money.” The decision “puts us back ten years,
at least,” sighed one manufacturer. Children were told by teachers that frankfurters were “unwholesome,” they carried that message home, and their mothers banished sausages from “the home table.” The United States Department of Agriculture sided with the sausage. Frankfurters are “wholesome, appetizing
and economical,” said a department spokesman. When served on bread and with a drink, “they provide lunches that are hard to beat when time is a factor and the pangs of hunger are to be fully satisfied.” (The packers, by the way, insisted on the term
frankfurter
as a more palatable alternative to a moniker they loathed: “hot dog.”)

The meat industry responded as special interests do when threatened: by launching a campaign to counter what it termed “propaganda.” The Meat Institute, a packers’ trade organization, and the American National Livestock Association mounted a pro-meat publicity campaign, sending lecturers hither and yon, placing pro-meat articles in newspapers and magazines, and bombarding teachers with instructional material. Industry representatives commandeered microphones at the nation’s newest media outlets, radio stations, to tout meat’s virtues. During “Meat for Health” week, the industry’s publicity arm cranked out 3 million pieces of literature, including pamphlets and advertisements and posters for windows and meat wagons, and sponsored informational programs at butcher shops and grocery stores. The Milwaukee Meat Council, made up of packers and retailers, hired an actor to portray a caveman, presumably because such a figure epitomized brute strength and good health. He strolled up and down one of the city’s busiest streets, carrying a cavemanlike club and wearing a “shabby mane and beard,
bear skin, [and] sandals” as well as a sandwich-board sign that read “
I EAT MEAT
.”

But the industry’s most important efforts unfolded behind the scenes. In the first half of the 1920s, meat makers urged officials at the USDA to promote and protect not just meat, but the entire meat production system. The department obliged, contributing statistics for use on promotional posters, thus giving the “eat meat” campaign an official stamp of approval. The packers’ Meat Institute persuaded eighteen of the nation’s agricultural experiment stations, which were attached to land grant colleges and universities, to fund meat research coordinated by the institute and the USDA. In this way, explained the institute, “the nation’s best brains
and equipment [could] be utilized to the full in bringing light to bear on the problems to be studied.” The meat men also put their money where their mouths were, funding university fellowships to support meat-based research.

These efforts forged a permanent alliance between the meat industry and the land grant establishment, a relationship that would become increasingly important—and problematic—in the years to come. But those links between and among the USDA, schools, farmers, and meat processors also provided the underpinnings of a long-term project that fundamentally altered the way livestock was bred, raised, and fed. Factory farming, as it was called, was intended to support livestock producers and other farmers and satisfy Americans’ demand for low-cost food, especially meat.

4

Factories, Farmers, and Chickens

I
N THE MID
-1930s, Jesse Jewell, a businessman living in Gainesville, Georgia, was forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: thanks to a series of catastrophes, both natural and man-made, his family’s seed-and-feed company was, as he put it, “shot.”
Unless he could find another way to sell what he had to offer—seed stock, livestock feed, fertilizer, basic farm tools—the business would go under and he, like so many other residents of north-central Georgia, would be bankrupt and unemployed. That prospect did not appeal to the ambitious, entrepreneurial Jewell, and he soon latched on to his new approach to profit: he bought a load of live chicks on credit and loaned those, plus bags of feed, to unemployed and mostly destitute local farmers, who raised the chickens to market weight (anywhere from two to four pounds). Jewell then hauled the birds to Atlanta and other regional urban markets, sometimes live and stashed in wooden crates, sometimes slaughtered and packed in ice. When he had sold the birds, he paid the farmers their share of the profit (after deducting payment for chickens and feed).

The rest was profitable history: over the next three decades, Jewell expanded that unassuming start into a broiler-making empire. (The term
broiler
referred to a bird’s size. Broilers ranged from two to two and a half pounds, fryers weighed about three pounds, and roasters were anything larger.) He contracted with hundreds of “growers,” as they were called, who agreed to feed thousands of chickens at a time in factorylike conditions. The growers employed automated watering and feeding equipment and used carefully calibrated “inputs” that included commercially manufactured mixtures of feed and antibiotics. Jewell integrated those chicken-growing operations into his larger corporate structure, which included processing plants where his employees slaughtered and packaged the chickens, mills where he manufactured the chickens’ feed, and hatcheries where other Jewell employees cranked out the basic raw materials: chicks and eggs. He diversified beyond the basic bird into ready-made convenience foods such as frozen fried chicken and chicken potpies. By the time he sold J. D. Jewell, Inc., in the early 1960s, both he and the company were worth millions. Along the way, chicken had been transformed from an expensive, seasonal luxury into a dietary staple, and integrated, “industrial” livestock and meat production had migrated from the chicken house to the hog pen and cattle barn.

Factorylike livestock production extended the food infrastructure pioneered decades earlier by the dressed-beef men. Armour, Swift, and other meatpackers had designed slaughterhouses that emulated factories and incorporated those into complex, nationwide distribution systems. Jesse Jewell and others carried the factory model to the farm and built integrated corporations that connected farm to slaughterhouse to food processor to retailer. Two motives inspired the project of taking the factory to the farm: a desire to keep food costs for consumers low and a need to ensure that farmers enjoyed an adequate standard of living. Both were inextricably linked to the emergence of a consumer economy in the early twentieth century. Because the subject of factorylike livestock production will dominate much of the rest of this book, it’s important to understand the context in which it took shape.

A consumer economy thrives on the making, selling, and buying of nonessentials—think cars and cosmetics, shoes designed for style rather than function, iPads and televisions. That economy, so familiar to us today, was preceded by and built upon the “producer” economy that dominated the nineteenth century, when Americans built factories where they manufactured goods that furthered industrial development: rail ties and sewer pipes, machine tools and steam engines. By the end of the nineteenth century, that foundational structure was in place and they shifted their attention to manufacturing consumer goods—clothing, cosmetics, radios, and cars. Americans bought such goods prior to the twentieth century, of course, and they continued to invest in and manufacture producer goods after consumers gained supremacy. But in the twentieth century, the economy revolved around making and getting (relatively) unnecessary “stuff.”

The health of a consumer economy depends on disposable incomes that allow people to spend money on nonessentials. One way to ensure that consumers consume is with credit, which became widely available in the 1920s. General Motors, for example, created the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) to provide low-interest loans so that Americans could purchase cars. But another crucial factor in sustaining a consumer economy is ready access to low-cost food. The less money Americans must spend on food, the more they can spend on video games, books, and cell phones. When food is abundant and supplies are greater than demand, consumers enjoy low prices, but food producers—farmers—earn little profit. If the reverse is true and demand outstrips supply, food prices rise. Farmers profit, but consumers howl. Thus the fundamental contradiction of a consumer economy: the paradox of plenty (or, as farmers call it, the pain of plenty). Urbanites demand that farmers produce an abundance of foodstuffs. But if farmers comply, they earn little profit and so either can’t or won’t produce more. And so the consumer economy has grown hand in hand with one of the great balancing acts of American politics: the need to guarantee cheap food on one hand and income parity for farmers on the other, a need that spawned the programs and policies known collectively as “farm subsidies.” This balancing act was and still is complicated by the fact that most Americans live in cities and don’t produce their own food.

Americans experienced their first significant encounter with the paradox of plenty during an agricultural crisis sparked by World War I and its aftermath, an episode that served as the seedbed for factory farming. The outbreak of war ratcheted up demand for American agricultural products, whether wheat or meat. President Woodrow Wilson, his food administrator, Herbert Hoover, and USDA officials urged farmers to produce, produce, produce; to feed not just Americans but the warring nations of Europe, too. Farmers obliged, increasing their output by the fastest means possible: they bought more land so they could plant more acres or feed more livestock. Most could not afford to pay cash, so they took out mortgages and then borrowed more money to pay for barns and silos, for additional draft animals (tractors had not yet become common), for feed, fuel, and tools. As food czar, Hoover encouraged farmers in that decision, arguing that Germany had “sucked the food
and animals from all those masses of people she has dominated and left [them] starving.” Even when the conflict ended, he said, Europeans would need twice as many imported fats and proteins as they had during the war.

Hoover was wrong. When the fighting stopped, military officials and foreign countries alike canceled contracts for everything from cotton to corn. Desperate to find buyers for what they had produced, farmers dumped crops and livestock on the market, and the ensuing glut caused prices to collapse. The price farmers received for corn fell 78 percent, and returns on both beef and wheat dropped by more than half. Demand vanished, but farmers’ debts did not. They could not sell their output at prices high enough to pay their bills, so they responded in what seemed, to them, a logical manner: they increased their output, hoping that volume would pay off their debts. But because every farmer did the same thing, agricultural products glutted the market and prices plunged again.

As the crisis deepened, many farmers slid into bankruptcy and threatened the vitality of the banks that had loaned them money. Economists, agricultural experts, sympathetic politicians, and leaders of farmers’ organizations warned that fewer farmers would mean less food and even higher food prices. They argued that if urbanites were entitled to cheap food, farmers were entitled to an adequate return for their labor and an income that would allow them to maintain economic parity with city folks. The moment prompted some advocates, including farmers, implement manufacturers and seed dealers, and agricultural economists to propose a radical solution: they urged lawmakers to detach agriculture from the free market and use federal legislation to support crop prices and farmer income; to subsidize agriculture so that farmers could enjoy the same standard of living as city people. Many Americans were (and still are) horrified by the idea and railed against the plan of using taxpayer dollars to circumvent marketplace mechanisms, arguing that therein lay the path to socialism, communism, or worse. But supporters pointed out that in war-ravaged Europe, high food prices had already sparked social unrest and contributed to the spread of fascism and communism. If American food prices soared, the same thing could happen in the United States. Government “interference” in agriculture, they argued, would save the republic. In the 1920s, that argument was not enough to carry the day. Urbanites, who made up a majority of the population, wanted nothing to do with the burdens of subsidies. Twice in that decade, Congress passed parity legislation, and twice President Calvin Coolidge vetoed it. As we’ll see, the Great Depression demolished resistance to subsidies, but in the 1920s, many farm advocates touted a different plan for ensuring farmers’ profits and maintaining low food prices: factorylike farming.

The idea was neither new nor unusual. As early as the 1890s, Wilbur Atwater, at the time one of the nation’s best-known nutritionists and head of a federal nutrition program, maintained that applying factory methods to farming was both logical and inevitable. He pointed out that historically, as human societies shifted from agricultural to urban, demand for manufactured goods increased. Inventors had responded by devising tools and machines designed to produce goods on a large scale at a low price. Atwater argued that modern urban societies required “a cheap and abundant food-supply,”
and so it was time for Americans to “manufacture” basic foodstuffs—corn, wheat, beef, and pork—by applying to agriculture the “principle which has proved itself true . . . in the factory.” His choice of model was not surprising. The factory lay at the heart of the American economy. Mass-produced goods were inexpensive goods, far less costly than those made by hand by artisans. Thanks to factory production, most Americans owned more than one shirt or skirt and multiple pieces of furniture. The factory had made America great. Why not extend its combination of automation and organization to the farm? If manufacturers could build high-speed assembly lines to manufacture huge quantities of low-priced goods, farmers could do the same.