Meatonomics Read online

  What about the assertion that abusive and unsafe conditions in factory farms are merely a “tragic anomaly”? Nathan Runkle was a teenager when he founded Mercy for Animals (MFA), but with twenty undercover factory farm investigations under his belt in a decade, the battle-tested muckraker is now a veteran in his late twenties. I asked Runkle about the industry assertion that abusive conditions are anomalous. “Every investigation we have conducted has unearthed heart-wrenching cruelty to animals,” said Runkle, and “every single MFA undercover investigation, without exception, has been conducted at a facility selected completely at random.”

  Four of MFA's investigations led to civil or criminal proceedings against animal abusers. Further, a number of the investigations uncovered conditions that are unhealthy for people. In an email to me, Runkle wrote:

  While our investigators are inside these factory farms and slaughterhouses, they often uncover practices that raise serious human health and food safety concerns. On factory farms, for example, it's common to find dead hens left to rot and decompose in cages with birds still laying eggs for human consumption. During our investigation at a poultry slaughterhouse, we found that many sick and injured birds—some with cantaloupe-sized tumors—were being snapped onto the slaughterhouse line for human consumption. In New York's largest dairy factory farm, we found that cows with pus-oozing wounds and infections—many also caked with manure—were still being hooked up for milking.59

  Anomalies? Animal slaughter takes place in secret, carefully guarded, and locked-down facilities where the public is denied access, in many cases under threat of heightened prosecution pursuant to ag-gag or ecoterrorism laws. Even when inspectors are present, their access to the killing floor is often restricted, and it's generally impossible for them to meaningfully observe the slaughter of three hundred or more animals per hour.60 Further, it's implausible to think that an overwhelmed slaughterhouse worker required to kill thousands of animals daily would concern himself with the concept of welfare while on the killing floor.

  In December 2010, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced a number of measures designed to improve the enforcement of humane slaughter under HMSA.61 Animal protection groups lauded the USDA's adoption of these measures, but so far, there is little evidence that the measures are having any effect. Accordingly, until evidence emerges to the contrary, we must continue to view HMSA as we do other federal and state laws that concern farm animals: as a toothless, largely irrelevant measure of limited scope and poor enforcement that provides little protection for the 30 million US farm animals slaughtered each day. Such laws do, however, protect the animal food industry's sales, and that explains why the industry pushes for them.

  Rethinking Corporate Benevolence

  When animal food producers spend millions to influence lawmakers on laws they claim will help society, like food safety, it's important to read between the lines. In the real world, corporations exist solely for the benefit of their shareholders. Thus, by law, corporations act only to increase their own profitability, not to help society. Railroad tycoon William Vanderbilt expressed this principle with candor when he responded to a reporter's question about whether his railroad kept a particular line open to benefit the public. “The public be damned,” said Vanderbilt. “I don't take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody's good but our own, because we are not. When we make a move, we do it because it is in our interest to do so, and not because we expect to do somebody else good. . . . Railroads are not run on sentiment, but on business principles and to pay.”62

  Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich argues in his book Supercapitalism that Americans should not be misled by corporate messages implying that private firms act for the public good. Reich warns:

  Beware of any claim by corporate executives that their company is doing something to advance the “public good” or to fulfill the firm's “social responsibility.” Companies are not interested in the public good. It is not their responsibility to be good. They may do good things to improve their brand image, so as to increase sales and profits. They may do profitable things that may happen to have socially beneficial side effects. But they will not do good things because they are considered to be good.63

  So it goes with ag-gag laws, ecoterrorism laws, cheeseburger laws, food disparagement laws, and anticruelty exemptions. They generally run contrary to consumers' interests in food safety, corporate accountability, the free flow of information, and the humane treatment of animals. At bottom, these many lawmaking efforts merely promote what Thomas Jefferson called “the selfish spirit of commerce.”

  Food for Thought

  Animal food producers have used their massive economic and political clout to pass scores of state and federal laws protecting their business and boosting their profits. Over the past several decades, a spate of legislation has emasculated anticruelty laws and made it harder to investigate, criticize, or sue factory farm operators.

  The animal food industry doesn't pass laws for public welfare, but for its own good. Despite industry protestations about making food safe and protecting it from terrorists, legislation supported by animal food producers routinely hurts consumers and animals.

  As a result of the recent wave of legislation friendly to animal agribusiness, the 10 billion farm animals raised yearly in the United States have virtually no protection from cruelty or neglect. Further, it's impossible in nearly half the country to sue animal food producers for obesity or related diseases, and many states now provide heightened civil or criminal liability for those who criticize animal foods or investigate factory farms.

  4

  Regulatory Conflict and Consumer Confusion

  It's triple the size of a normal salmon but, according to supporters, tastes the same. Dubbed “AquAdvantage Salmon” by its creator and “Frankenfish” or “Salmonster” by critics, the animal in question is a gene-spliced Atlantic salmon whose family tree includes growth DNA from a king (or Chinook) salmon and antifreeze genes from an ocean pout. The resulting invention, which is both patented and trademarked, grows year-round and reaches slaughter size almost twice as fast as normal salmon. If the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) green-lights this biological contrivance as expected, the fish will become the first genetically engineered (GE) animal food approved for human consumption in the United States.

  This controversial, fabricated fish has been under consideration at the FDA for almost twenty years. When the agency said in 2010 that it expected to approve the fish for Americans to eat, public outcry was so fierce—including opposition from thirty-nine US senators and representatives—that officials decided to table the issue while reviewing a new environmental assessment. Yet the FDA's latest assessment (issued in late 2012) reached the same conclusion, and as of this writing, it seems likely the transgenic fish will get the final go-ahead.

  The AquAdvantage Salmon story provides an interesting look at how the FDA must serve two demanding masters: industry and the public. In this chapter, I explore the nature of animal food producers' influence on the FDA and the USDA—the two federal agencies that regulate the safety and labeling of animal foods—and what this influence means for consumers. Alarmingly, as we'll see over and over again in meatonomics, even where regulatory functions as critical as these are concerned, heavy industry involvement means that regulation is mainly about the money.

  Who's in Charge?

  The FDA and the USDA split their food safety and labeling oversight duties in odd and complex ways. For example, the FDA is responsible for seafood, the USDA for meat and poultry. However, the FDA is also responsible for products containing 3 percent or less meat, which means, for example, that the USDA handles sausage while the FDA handles sausage pizza.

  Eggs have their own unique rules. The FDA oversees the safety of whole eggs, while the USDA oversees both the safety of processed eggs and the packaging and labeling of whole eggs. This bizarre division of labor can create oversight gaps when, for example, eggs m
eet packaging and labeling requirements but are contaminated with salmonella. In 2010, this particular set of circumstances led to the recall of 380 million eggs—enough chicken embryos to stretch halfway around the planet. In the finger-pointing that ensued, each agency claimed it had done exactly what its regulatory mandate demanded. All these warped rules are like having umpires at a baseball game who rule on certain players but not others. It can make the game a little hard to follow.

  Labeling GE Foods

  AquaBounty Technologies insists its product is “biologically and chemically indistinguishable from the Atlantic salmon,” but not everyone feels that way.1 In an online poll by the Wall Street Journal, only one-third of respondents said they would knowingly eat GE salmon.2 While some argue such consumer attitudes are irrational and superstitious, others believe it's right to beware of GE foods. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine, for example, recommends a moratorium on all GE foods, citing studies that show they pose “serious health risks, including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging . . . and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system.”3

  The biotech food industry says a GE food is no different from, say, an apple perfected over generations and bred to favor traits like sweetness and crispness. Yet there are significant differences, both in engineering process and in potential effects on human health, between stitching genes together to create a GE food and developing a food through non-transgenic methods like grafting, pollination, or selective breeding. GE foods can combine the genes of two completely unrelated organisms, like a fish and a vegetable (yielding, for example, frost-proof tomatoes). By comparison, non-transgenic methods like grafting and pollination only work if the two combined organisms share a common evolutionary origin. The result is that while non-transgenic foods are generally thought safe for human consumption, the jury is still out on GE foods. Some clinical studies suggest that GE foods are safe.4 Others suggest they are not.5 In his book (recently turned movie) Genetic Roulette, Jeffrey Smith explores dozens of human diseases, including childhood food allergies, that may have their roots in eating GE foods.6

  It may take years of further testing on human guinea pigs—that is, consumers—to learn whether GE foods are innocuous or harmful. In the meantime, if people could just distinguish between natural and lab-built salmon, they could make an informed decision about which one to buy. But here's where the story starts to get, well, fishy. If AquaBounty's GE salmon hits your local market, it probably won't be labeled differently compared to natural salmon. That's because unlike European Union nations and dozens of other countries, the United States does not require that GE foods like transgenic salmon bear any special labeling. The last time the issue came up officially, the FDA said it was:

  not aware of any data or other information that would form a basis for concluding that the fact that a food or its ingredients was produced using bioengineering is a material fact that must be disclosed under [legal requirements that food labeling not be misleading]. FDA is therefore reaffirming its decision to not require special labeling of all bioengineered foods.7

  By the way, to put this issue into perspective, two-thirds of all food items in American grocery stores contain unlabeled GE ingredients.8

  In the spring of 2012, a coalition of consumer groups called Just Label It submitted a petition signed by 1.1 million Americans to the FDA calling for the agency to require labeling of all GE foods. “This petition has nothing to do with whether or not genetically modified foods are dangerous,” said Andrew Kimbrell, an attorney for the Center for Food Safety, one of the groups leading the campaign. “We don't label dangerous foods, we take them off the shelves. This petition is about the citizens' right to know what they are eating and whether or not these foods represent a novel change.”9 In light of the FDA's express guidance on the issue, it is not surprising that the agency has, as of this writing, thus far declined to act on the petition. In fact, in a show of shaky math skills, the agency outraged many of the petition's supporters and telegraphed its likely position on the issue by counting the petition's 1 million-plus signatures as only a single comment—that is, as just one of 394 letters and other documents containing public feedback that it received on the issue.10

  AquaBounty's stock shot up 600 percent in 2010 when the FDA said it was leaning toward approving the unlabeled GE salmon. For such corporations, preserving the labeling status quo is an important part of the sales equation. That's because given the high level of consumer concern over GE foods shown in polls, such items are likely to sell better when a minimum of attention is drawn to them. And that's why Monsanto, DuPont, PepsiCo, and other corporations that profit from the continued ability to sell unlabeled GE products spent an estimated $45 million in 2012 to defeat a GE-labeling initiative in California.

  The FDA's lack of responsiveness on GE labeling results from a phenomenon which the late Nobel Prize–winning economist George Stigler described as “regulatory capture.” Stigler said that in order to restrict competition, industry typically seeks and acquires government regulation “designed and operated primarily for its benefit.”11 Once an industry exerts control over a regulatory agency, the agency is “captured.” Stigler's theory has been observed repeatedly in US government agencies that are in some measure controlled by the industries they regulate: the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and many others—including, not surprisingly, both the FDA and the USDA. As we'll see through a number of examples, these agencies have been captured by the animal food producers and animal drug makers they purport to regulate. And as a result, when the interests of industry collide with those of consumers, regulatory watchdogs have trouble choosing a master.

  With regulatory capture common in so many industries, some may wonder what makes the animal food industry worthy of particular attention. The answer lies in the enormous and disproportionate harmful economic impacts that this sector imposes on society. As we'll see in the book's second half, the meat and dairy industries are among the most heavily subsidized sectors in the United States, beating even the well-supported oil industry by a factor of four. The animal food industry also generates by far the highest level of externalized costs of any industry, imposing almost $2 in expenses on American taxpayers and consumers for every $1 of product sold at retail.

  Hiding the Growth Hormone

  One illustrative and long-running controversy pitting consumers against industry lies in the FDA's policy on the genetically engineered hormone recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), known generally as bovine growth hormone. When administered to lactating cows, this hormone pumps up milk production by 10 percent or more. The FDA approved the use of rBST in 1993, finding that dosing a cow with rBST resulted in “no significant difference” in the cow's milk as compared to the milk of an undosed cow.12 And because of this purported similarity between dosed and undosed milk, the agency declines to require any special labeling on rBST-treated milk.

  But aside from the FDA and the Monsanto Company, which makes the rBST product Posilac, few informed observers actually believe that rBST milk is the same as regular milk. In 2010, a US Court of Appeals disagreed conclusively with the FDA's view on the subject, holding that “a compositional difference does exist between milk from untreated cows and . . . milk from cows treated with rBST.”13 Among other differences, the court cited research linking rBST to insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), a carcinogen, and studies showing higher counts of somatic cells (pus cells which arise from bacterial infection) in rBST-treated milk.14 In fact, because of the research showing its negative effects on human health, animal health, and milk quality, rBST is banned in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and most of Europe. Yet under the FDA's guidance and oversight, in the United States you're likely not only to consume rBST in your milk, cheese, and ice cream, but to do so unknowingly.

  Food Safety, the FDA Way

  It
's not that the FDA doesn't often want to do the right thing. It's just that the agency is regularly blocked and bullied by industry forces. Consider the agency's forty-year struggle to take action concerning three antibiotics whose use to make farm animals grow faster is highly controversial—penicillin, chlortetracycline, and oxytetracycline. In the mid-1950s, the FDA approved this holy trinity of drugs for farm animals at subtherapeutic levels—that is, at doses below the level required to treat illness. Such low doses are intended solely for growth promotion. Since the fifties, the drugs have been routinely given to farm animals to promote growth: penicillin for poultry and pigs, and chlortetracycline and oxytetracycline for poultry, pigs, cattle, and sheep. After approving the drugs, however, the agency grew concerned that their long-term use might pose a health risk.15 In 1972, a task force convened by the FDA found that subtherapeutic application of animal antibiotics promotes antibiotic-resistant bacteria found on meat products and with increasing prevalence, in humans (see chapter 6).16 Federal law requires that if the FDA finds an animal drug is unsafe, the agency must begin proceedings to withdraw approval of the drug.17 In 1977, following years of study that included significant industry input, the FDA issued notices finding that the subtherapeutic use of penicillin, chlortetracycline, and oxytetracycline in farm animals was “not shown to be safe.”18 The notices purported to start the statutory process to withdraw FDA approval of use of the three drugs in this fashion.