Meatonomics Read online

  But if we are to eat, your inner carnivore may ask, don't we need this food production system—despite all its quirks? Sure, we have to eat, but not like this. Americans are rational, thoughtful consumers, and we want to behave in a rational manner. But the evidence shows that artificially low prices and aggressive government messaging encourage us to consume animal foods in unnaturally high quantities. As a nation, Americans consume more meat per person than anywhere else on the planet.14 Once, we might have celebrated our extreme consumption as evidence of good living. After all, when you hear the phrase eat, drink, and be merry, most people can't help but picture a few slabs of meat on the table. But today, it's one of the main reasons we have twice the obesity rate, twice the diabetes rate, and nearly three times the cancer rate as the rest of the world.15 American longevity, once among the world's highest, now ranks fiftieth. Simply put, our heavy consumption of foods high in saturated fat, cholesterol, and other substances linked primarily or uniquely to animal foods has helped make us one of the sickest developed nations on Earth.16

  The Price We Pay

  More than any other microeconomic system in the United States, meatonomics aggressively shifts the costs of producing its goods onto American taxpayers and consumers. The only word for these costs is staggering. The total expenses imposed on society—that is, production costs not paid by animal food producers—are at least $414 billion.17 These costs are not reflected in the prices Americans pay at the cash register. Rather, they are exacted in other ways, like higher taxes and health insurance premiums, and decreases in the value of homes and natural resources touched by factory farms.

  For every dollar in retail sales of meat, fish, eggs, or dairy, the animal food industry imposes $1.70 of external costs on society. If these external numbers were added to the grocery-store prices of animal foods, they would nearly triple the cost of these items. A gallon of milk would jump from $3.50 to $9, and a store-bought, two-pound package of pork ribs would run $32 instead of $12.18

  The American animal food industry is not alone. Most other industries distribute their profits to a relatively small group of stakeholders, and corporations commonly externalize costs in the course of generating those profits. But this industry is unique in the unparalleled scope of its destructive swath, the massive costs it imposes on society, and the total quantum of misery it dumps on consumers, taxpayers, workers, farmers, and animals. Consider the favorite pariah industry of many: US tobacco. Over five decades, tobacco companies were shown to have caused—and ultimately were forced to pay—$400 billion in health care costs. By comparison, as we'll see, the US animal food industry generates more than $600 billion in health care costs every two years and pays virtually none of them.19 Further, unlike animal agriculture, the tobacco industry causes little ecological harm, and it's taxed—not subsidized.

  Or take another sector we love to hate: Big Oil. Although the oil industry's environmental impact might rival that of animal agriculture, most petroleum products are heavily taxed—unlike animal products. Further, the $10 billion in yearly federal subsidies (including tax breaks) enjoyed by the oil industry is mere pocket change compared to the $38 billion heaped each year on the animal food industry. In the race to the absolute bottom, animal agriculture wins, hands down, as the US industry that imposes the highest economic costs on society across the board.

  How Did We Get Here?

  For many, this book may come as a surprise. Most of our beliefs about nutritional needs, consumption levels, and farming and lawmaking practices are based on traditions that have largely melted away—at a pace of change so slow and seductive, we're barely aware of it. As the comic strip's Calvin put it, “Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything's different.” Consider a few ways that the changing landscape of animal food production has both shaped the growth, and heralded the rise, of meatonomics.

  For starters, forget about that bucolic American Gothic picture of the gentleman farmer. Industrial farming operations have largely replaced small farms, and the “pasture spring” and “little calf . . . standing by the mother” that Robert Frost saw on his family farm a century ago are lost artifacts—relics of an obsolete way of life. In the decades since 1950, American farming has undergone a major transformation, and mom-and-pop farms are mostly gone—either acquired by large corporate operations or plowed under for new housing subdivisions. For instance, between 1954 and 2007, even as demand for dairy increased by 40 percent, the number of US dairy farms plummeted from 2.9 million to 65,000.20 We wouldn't know it from the peaceful, pastoral logos of the dairies and meat packers whose products we consume (who doesn't love a smiling cow on a package?), but today, 99 percent of the farm animals raised in the United States live in steel and concrete factories with no resemblance to a traditional farm.21

  Then there's the fact that meat and dairy keep getting cheaper. This development is driven partly by subsidies, partly by efficient methods of factory farming, and partly by the industry's practice of offloading its costs onto others. But the upshot is the inflation-adjusted retail prices of animal foods have dropped steadily in the past century. Since 1913, in inflation-adjusted dollars, eggs have gotten cheaper by 79 percent, butter by 57 percent, and bacon by 23 percent. Here's a jaw-dropping stat: the portion of our incomes that Americans spent on meat was 2.4 percent in 1990, yet despite higher consumption levels, only 1.7 percent in 2010.22 And of course, it's a basic rule of economics that declines in price lead to increases in demand.

  Thus, the last century has also seen a significant increase in animal food consumption and its ugly cousin, obesity. Annual per-capita meat consumption has nearly doubled in the United States over the last century to its current level of 200 pounds per person.23 Our meat and egg consumption levels are well above USDA recommendations, and this is one reason we're growing dangerously heavier. Two in three Americans are overweight and one in three is obese.24

  But it wasn't always like this. Fifty years ago, only one in eight Americans was obese.25 The national obesity figure increased by an average of about one-half percentage point per year for the past five decades, moving almost in lockstep with the rise of factory farming and the decline of animal foods' retail prices. Of course, higher consumption of meat and dairy is not the only reason for our nation's health issues—we also eat more sugary and processed foods than we used to—but as we'll see, volumes of research show that animal foods are a major contributing factor.

  Finally, the steady rise of meatonomics has followed a disturbing, yet rampant political change: corporate influence over lawmaking has risen dramatically in the last half century. Driven largely by the expense of television advertising, the cost to get elected to US office has increased tenfold (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in the last fifty years.26 This skyrocketing price tag has in turn dramatically boosted the amounts spent to influence lawmakers and the number of lobbyists peddling influence. (For a graphic example of how lobbying works at this level, check out the 2005 Golden Globe–nominated film Thank You for Smoking.) In the past three decades, as annual spending to influence Congress rose from $100 million to more than $3.5 billion (in inflation-adjusted dollars), lobbyists grew their ranks tenfold.27

  The animal food industry is just one of many special interests to capitalize on this massive change in spending and influence, but its efforts have been particularly successful. In the past few decades, the industry has convinced lawmakers to pass scores of state and federal laws that protect animal food production in a variety of ways. These include such disturbing examples as the emasculation of dozens of laws that once prohibited cruelty to farm animals and the passage of new prohibitions against food defamation, undercover investigations, food injury lawsuits, and phantom ecoterrorism.

  The Purpose of This Book

  For almost as long as they've been in use, factory farms have been synonymous with three kinds of problems: environmental, nutritional, and ethical. This book proposes a fourth category: economic. We'll see how factor
y farming offloads massive costs onto society and how its contrarian economics drive other problems like overconsumption. Low prices are certainly not the only reason people overindulge in animal products, nor can we blame economics exclusively for the many problems associated with animal food production and consumption. Clearly, a complex set of personal and social factors are at play in our food choices and in the consequences those choices have for us and the world around us. Psychology professor Melanie Joy has proposed the term carnism for the belief system that drives meat consumption. This entrenched system, Joy says, “is supported by every single institution in society, from medicine to education.”28 However, while this belief system is likely responsible for persuading Americans to consume animal foods in the first place, it is in large measure the price of these goods that determines how much meat and dairy people buy. Thus, I seek to show that economic forces play a much greater role in our consumption choices than we've previously thought.

  I also argue that while American consumption of animal foods is often perceived as demand driven—or spurred by consumer preferences and disposable income—it is actually heavily supply driven, or propelled by producer behavior. For instance, popular explanations for consumers' rising consumption of animal foods look at demand drivers like rising incomes and lifestyle changes.29 But it's not that simple. The latest research shows that changes in production methods, such as the shift from traditional farming methods to low-cost industrial practices—and the resulting declines in retail prices—deserve most of the credit for the increase in consumption.30 In other words, it is mainly producers, not consumers, who have spurred the massive increase in animal food consumption over the past century.

  Moreover, state and federal governments provide key assistance in this demand-boosting process by laying out subsidies and protectionist policies that let producers sidestep the vast majority of their own production costs. Consumers get it from every side—the USDA tells us to eat more, industry tries to convince us substances like saturated fat are good for us, and lawmakers impose liability on those who might investigate, criticize, or sue meat or dairy producers. As we'll see, collectively, these meatonomic forces routinely impair the ability of consumers to make healthy decisions about what and how much to eat. These forces also cause systematic failure in the American market for animal foods.

  Market failure is econo-speak for a market's inefficient allocation of goods and services which, if fixed, would yield better outcomes for all. In the following chapters, I present a three-part argument that illuminates in detail—and shows how to fix—the significant market failure caused by the economics of animal food production. First, I show that the federal government is at fault for fostering economic conditions that benefit no one except the animal food industry. With bureaucrats often turning a blind eye to how or what can be communicated to consumers, the industry engages in a sophisticated messaging campaign that is often misleading or confusing—and sometimes simply false. Regulators routinely strike out when it comes to exercising control over this and other industry activity, and through misguided legislation and policymaking, lawmakers actually encourage the industrial food complex to impose its production costs on us. When this kind of governmental negligence leads to market failure, as it does with meatonomics, the phenomenon becomes government failure.

  Second, I argue that because of this government failure, the microeconomic system that produces meat and dairy is characterized by heavy overconsumption, huge inefficiencies, and massive hidden costs. This broken system damages Americans' health, hurts the environment, treats animals cruelly, and causes other harms. Moreover, these problems generate significant, measurable, financial consequences. As former US Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) famously remarked, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.” $314 billion in health-care costs. $38 billion in subsidies.* $37 billion in environmental costs. $21 billion in cruelty costs. $4 billion in fishing-related costs. Collectively, these costs would almost triple the retail prices of animal foods if they weren't offloaded instead onto consumers and taxpayers.

  But the picture is not all doom and gloom. The book concludes with several suggestions to fix this broken market, restore our health, and heal the environment. On an individual level, we can each help by changing how we consume. On an institutional level, relatively simple policy changes can stimulate the economy, save 172,000 lives, eliminate $184 billion in external costs, incentivize Americans to make healthy eating choices, and cut carbon-equivalent emissions to a level not seen since 1950. This solution is practical and realistic, and because it's coupled with an income tax credit for all Americans, it's politically feasible.

  “Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness,” said the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. We once thought the Earth was both flat and the center of the universe. A few centuries ago, we thought it wise to add lead to wine. As recently as 1929, we believed a little cocaine in our Coca-Cola was good for us.

  This book asks us to challenge our assumptions about the production and consumption of animal foods—including their health effects, ethical issues, and economic impacts—and our government's role in the process. Do low prices always benefit consumers? Can we always trust peer-reviewed research? Do lawmakers and regulators really act in our best interest? Are factory farmers truly concerned for their animals' welfare? Do we actually know why we consume the foods we do at the levels we do? “Your assumptions are your windows on the world,” says Alan Alda. “Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”

  * While a subsidy is not technically a hidden, or externalized, cost, farm subsidies are included for measurement purposes because, like externalities, they impose costs on—but provide little actual benefit to—taxpayers.

  I

  INFLUENCING THE CONSUMER

  1

  The Brave New World of Government Marketing

  In his 1932 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a future in which humans exist solely to support the economy and are conditioned from birth to buy things. Government bureaucrats manipulate the sheep-like citizens with drugs and slogans to make them consume as much as possible. In Huxley's vision, 26th-century consumers learn that “ending is better than mending” and “the more stitches, the less riches”—that is, buying new things is better than fixing old ones. But for US consumers, this eerie futuristic fantasy—with government using marketing slogans and other undue influence to drive consumption—has arrived a few centuries early. This chapter explores government marketing as a feature of meatonomics and considers its consequences for consumers.

  Checkoff Programs: Unseen and Unknown, But Felt Everywhere

  In the Brave New World of the 21st century—where big box stores and mega markets dominate the landscape—our government uses innocuous-sounding “checkoff” programs to encourage us to buy more animal foods and other goods. The mechanism's name persists from a time when the assessments were voluntary and producers willing to opt in participated by simply checking a box. Nowadays, the programs are tax-like and mandatory, even though the benign checkoff moniker remains.

  The way they work is simple: Congress slaps a small assessment (less than 1 percent of wholesale price) on certain commodities, and the collected funds are used to pay for research and marketing programs that boost the goods' sales. So when animal food producers collect $1 per head of cattle, $0.40 per $100 of pork, or $0.15 per 100 pounds of dairy, they pass those funds on to national marketing organizations. The proceeds are allocated among state and regional industry organizations throughout the country. There aren't many Boston Tea Party–like protests when it comes to making the payments—probably because most consumers don't know about checkoffs and most producers think their trade groups put the money to good use. These trade groups don't equivocate much about what they do or why they exist. The Kentucky Cattlemen's Association, for example, keeps it simple, saying its business purpose is “Promotion of the b
eef industry.”1

  Although few Americans have heard of checkoff programs, we've all heard or seen the catchy, feel-good slogans they've generated:

  Beef. It's What's for Dinner.

  Milk. It Does a Body Good.

  Pork. The Other White Meat.

  Written, spoken, or sung—and flashed across every medium, including print, radio, TV, and the Internet—these statements have bombarded American consumers for decades. The echo of one particularly snappy jingle that went with a ubiquitous 1990s commercial—“The Incredible, Edible Egg”—still rattles in my brain. And while that phrase and many others predate social networking, they persist because their sticky messaging fits in perfectly with today's meme-saturated, web-dominated world. Like an ink stamp, these messages imprint themselves with authority on our subconscious and become part of our belief system. What's for dinner? Without even knowing why, many think, Beef.