Cheap (29 page)

Factory farming is efficient, but it is also showing signs of wear. Confined in what might be best compared to a filth-choked slum and stressed beyond reason, livestock are bait for every conceivable pathogen. We can attack them with antibiotics and other drugs, but the microbes are relentless and exact their toll. In 2000 the U.S. Department of Agriculture tracked disease on 895 hog farms, comparing farms with fewer than two thousand animals with those that had more than ten thousand. No one expected the larger farms to be healthier for the animals. Still, it was sobering to learn that when compared with smaller farms, the mega-producers had three times the incidence of mycoplasma pneumonia, six times the cases of swine influenza, and twenty-nine times the cases of a new flu strain. That young pigs tend to die under these circumstances is part of the calculus, mere collateral damage. The survivors live just long enough to stumble over the finish line—and onto our dinner plates.

Livestock doomed to this short, brutish existence exact revenge in subtle but potent ways not only through their flesh, but also through their waste. Traditional farmers fertilize their corn and alfalfa fields with manure from livestock in a closed loop system that benefits both plants and animals. But factory meat growers—the ones with hundreds of thousands of animals crammed into huge concrete-floored barns—produce far too much waste to be contained within this system.

It is quicker—and therefore cheaper—to fatten cattle on grain than on grass. Grain feeding greatly increases the capacity for E. coli and other microbes to survive in the colon of cattle, where it multiples and gets passed into manure. E. coli can survive up to ninety days in manure, making cattle feedlots fertile breeding grounds for infection. As many as one hundred thousand steers at a time fatten on a single lot, pouring out huge volumes of waste. Two feedlots outside Greeley, Colorado, together produce more excrement than the cities of Atlanta, Boston, Denver, and St. Louis combined. Trucking the stuff off is impractical. One alternative popular among big companies is to spray liquefied manure into the air and let it fall where it may, coating trees and anything else that happens to be in its path. Another is pumping the mess into lagoons. Both methods have distinct disadvantages.

Lagoons can leak during heavy rainstorms, contaminating wells, rivers, groundwater, and irrigation water. The lagoons also give off fumes of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, a cause of respiratory and neurological disorders. Manure lagoons also concentrate cadmium, copper, zinc, and other heavy metals that can leach into the soil and eventually get sucked back into crops—and into us. And there is the smell to consider. Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processer in the world (and among the largest beef and poultry producers), puts out 6 billion pounds of packaged pork a year. A visitor encountering one of the company’s manure lagoons described it this way: “I’ve probably smelled stronger odors in my life, but nothing so insidiously and instantaneously nauseating. It takes my mind a second or two to get through the odor’s first coat. The smell at its core has a frightening, uniquely enriched putridity, both deep-sweet and high-sour. I back away from it and walk back to the car but I remain sick—it’s a shivery, retchy kind of nausea—for a good five minutes. That’s apparently characteristic of industrial pig shit: It keeps making you sick for a good while after you’ve stopped smelling it.”

In July 2007, China blocked imports of U.S. factory-grown pork on the grounds of contamination. It is unclear whether these charges were valid or simply payback for U.S. rejection of Chinese processed foods. The United States had reason to be worried about Chinese products. That September, 180 Chinese food factories were shut down after inspectors found industrial chemicals being used in food processing. The closures were part of a nationwide crackdown that also exposed the use of formaldehyde, illegal dyes, and industrial chemicals in the processing of candy, pickles, crackers, and seafood. ”These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, a director at the General Administration of Quality Supervision, told a reporter. “Han’s admission was significant,” the report continued, “because the administration has said in the past that safety violations were the work of a few rogue operators, a claim which is likely part of a strategy to protect China’s billions of dollars of food exports.”

U.S. imports of Chinese agricultural and seafood products have quadrupled in the past decade. From July 2006 to June 2007, the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] rejected 1,901 Chinese shipments: dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical, frozen catfish treated with banned antibiotics, prunes tinted with chemical dyes unsafe for human consumption, mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides, scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria, and the ever popular farm-grown shrimp, this time preserved with nitrofurans, a class of antibiotic that has been linked to cancer. But it wouldn’t be fair to imply that the Chinese have cornered the market on tainted food. During the same period, the FDA rejected almost as many shipments from India (1,787) and Mexico (1,560).

AMERICANS
claim to put safety first, and one would assume that applies doubly in the case of food. But safety is not free, and we are not always willing to pick up the tab. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which is responsible for inspecting meat and poultry, inspects only 16 percent of all imports. The FDA, responsible for fruits, vegetables, and most other foods, inspects less than 1 percent of imports, down from 8 percent in 1992. Given this record it takes no leap of imagination to conclude that most tainted imports manage to elude inspection and find their way onto American menus. Blaming exporters for this problem is to shirk our own responsibility. Were we to demand fresher, safer food and be willing to absorb the cost of producing it, tainted imports would be a shrinking rather than a growing threat. The Chinese understand this. Speaking in 2007, Chinese officials begged U.S. importers to communicate standards “more clearly” and “look beyond their emphasis on low prices.”

As journalist Paul Roberts wrote in
The End of Food,
“Until late in the twentieth century, the modern food system was celebrated as a monument to humanity’s greatest triumph. We were producing more food—more grain, more meat, more fruits and vegetables—than ever before, more cheaply than ever before, and with a degree of variety, safety, quality and convenience that preceding generations would have found bewildering.” As prices declined, the sanctity of cheap food was rarely questioned until, over the last couple of decades, it became so cheap as to be both dangerous and irresistible.

At the close of the last century
overweight
overtook
malnutrition
as a health hazard in the developed world. Concern over the growing obesity pandemic incited a reconsideration of the falling price, with some going so far as to suggest that cheap food was an evil unto itself. Author Michael Pollan and the slow food movement encouraged eaters to “pay more for less and better” food. Still, when food prices began trending skyward, few thought it cause for celebration or, for that matter, contemplation. The U.S. numbers were frightening: The price of food eaten at home jumped 4.2 percent in 2007, and food eaten away from home—at restaurants, cafeterias, and the like—rose 3.6 percent. Complicating matters was that staples such as milk and eggs were the hardest hit. Milk went up 20 percent, eggs more than 29 percent. Projected food prices for 2008 were even higher. Voices were raised, and threats were made: How can we feed ourselves at these prices? The outcry tended to muffle the reality—that we Americans still spend just over 6 percent of our
disposable
income on food, about half of what the Japanese and French spend and a quarter of what the Chinese spend. Russians, Indians, and Indonesians spend much more. Still, we worry. We worry that there must be a catch, that we aren’t getting the deals we deserve. And our food system struggles to comply. The motto “value for money,” means not “the same for less” but “more for less.” The fully loaded foot-long sandwiches at Subway cost a dollar less than they did the year before. McDonald’s offered two Egg McMuffins for three-fourths of the price. The idea that Americans might actually curb their appetites was unthinkable.

Psychologist Adam Drewnowski, director of the Nutritional Sciences Program at the University of Washington School of Public and Community Health, knows why. Americans, he said, respond almost viscerally to the concept of food “value.” Price, Drewnowski said,
drives
taste, because left to their own devices, Americans tend to choose what is cheap and therefore develop a taste for cheap foods. Cheap food also delivers the “bang for the buck” we have been conditioned to expect.

“Laboratory scientists aren’t able to handle this concept. For them, talking about the price of food is taboo—but it’s extremely important,” he said. “Americans can eat pizza at about a thousand calories a dollar, or Oreo cookies at about 1,200 calories a dollar. M&Ms at about 3,000 calories per dollar are a huge bargain. Spinach is about 30 calories a dollar, not a bargain. And don’t even think about lettuce or cucumbers or tomatoes or, heaven forbid, strawberries. By comparison, these foods are a rip-off!”

Given that chow for humans is not yet synthesized by scientists in laboratories, even our cheapest food must be grown, harvested, and processed. In the United States, cheap translates into anything benefiting from agricultural subsidies, meaning grain and the farm animals that eat it. Cheap food is meant to make us happier and healthier, and years ago when food costs ate up half our income, this was undoubtedly true. But the past couple of decades have brought us to a turning point at which cheap food seems to diminish rather than enhance our health and—one might reasonably argue—our happiness. We know that mountains of processed grain and grain-fed livestock—the stuff of Subway subs and Egg McMuffins—is not terribly good for us. Still, that knowledge doesn’t stop us from seeking and consuming “great deals.” Meanwhile, scientists writing in the
New England Journal of Medicine
linked cheap food to a startling prediction: that the next generation of Americans will be the first in human history to die younger than their parents.

One might reasonably argue that it is not price but taste that shapes food preferences. But that argument begs the question. Taste preferences develop over time through exposure, and most of us have had scant opportunity to taste food in its natural state. Those fortunate enough to sample naturally grown pork know that it shares little in common with its factory-created cousin. Naturally grown pork is succulent, firm, sweet, and savory; it is meat one can imagine coming from a pig that once roamed freely, if not in a field of daisies, then at least in a field. Factory pigs are bred to be lean, so lean that producers sometimes inject their flesh with saline marinades to make it palatable. Stressful lives tend to make factory-grown pork acidic, bleaching it pale and breaking the tissue down to something flaccid, watery, and limp. The pork industry calls this meat “pale soft exudative,” or PSE. In advertising lingo it is called the “other white meat.” By any name it is the cheap unbranded stuff found in most supermarket meat coolers. It is what most of us have come to think of as pork.

Likewise, anyone who has eaten ocean or freshwater shrimp caught wild knows that it shares little in common with its factory-farmed step-cousins. Wild-caught shrimp has a firm texture and a bracing, briny taste brought on by clean living. There is no whiff of antibiotic or pesticide residue, and no trail of human misery behind it. Shrimp bred in crowded, polluted ponds is slippery, even slimy, with a flat muddy taste that tells us all we need to know about its past. Still, it is what most of us have come to think of as shrimp.

Toward the end of 2008 the world spun into a deep recession from which it seemed it would take years to escape. Wages and benefits were sinking, and job security a happy memory. A focus on deregulation and unfettered free markets had made unions and their protections almost a thing of the past, particularly in the private sector. Global markets, in which goods were produced far away from the eyes and sensibilities of those who purchased them, made it difficult or even impossible to enforce environmental precautions, worker protections, or health and safety regulations. Few of us knew where our food was being grown and processed. But this ignorance was not so much a matter of not knowing where to look as of our simply averting our eyes.

Farming is and always has been a difficult business fraught with hazard. Droughts, storms, bugs, and bad luck have plagued farmers for 10 million years. Even generations ago, few American farmers could survive just by working the land. Farmers then and now subsidized their farm earnings with side jobs in town. The difference is that years ago those side jobs were in packing plants or factories with good wages and benefits, while today they tend to be low-paying service jobs, bagging groceries or stocking the shelves of discount stores. Farmers can no more shore up their farms with these uncertain low-paying jobs than city dwellers can sustain their families with them. Farmers need and deserve our support. But the vast bulk of federal agricultural subsidies and taxpayer dollars go not to small fruit, vegetable, and dairy farmers who desperately need the help but to a relative handful of giant agribusiness operators pumping out vast quantities of grain, meat, and milk.