Oh, good grief. Check out this statement in a piece about grass-fed beef in today's New York Times:

Today all cattle are typically raised on grass in the early months of their lives. But in the 1950s, cattle raisers hoping to cut costs and improve efficiency of beef production began to ship the animals to feed lots, where they could be fattened more quickly on inexpensive and high-calorie grains.

Sort of true. Kind of. IF we change "1950s" to, oh, I dunno, 1820s? 1780s? How about 1720s? (The use of "feed lots" dates at least to the 1840s, if not earlier. Feeding corn for fattening, however, goes back at least a century earlier.) And, more to the point, if we delete the word "Today" and instead note that Americans have "started" beef on grass since, oh, the 1820s. (The first great utilization of the prairies and plains was grazing cattle on its grasses.) In fact, as these two sentences read they a) don't make much sense (since we don't know at what point the "cattle raisers" allegedly began shipping the animals to feed lots; and b) is riddled with inaccuracies. Flip snarkiness aside, a minimum acquaintance with facts would have been useful, especially since the piece is about a  fundamental --- and contentious --- subject: food. As a result, what we got with this bit is yet another hunk of misinformation with which to cloud the debate about food. Just sayin'.

The good folks at Book Oven are among those trying to figure out what "writing" and "books" mean in the twenty-first century. (The link takes you to the site's home page; once there, you can check out their blog, twitter link, etc.)

Among their other projects, they've created a site called Bite-Size Edits, where control freaks like me can throw caution to the wind and let you, the reader, help write/edit our books.

(Yes, I am a control freak. The very idea of turning my text loose, unedited, unfinished, unpolished is unnerving. But what's life for but to learn and grow?) So you are hereby invited to join the process.

It works like this: I post some text at the Bite-Size site. The site software spits it back out in small chunks (bytes/bites. Get it?) and you have at it. So go! Have fun! Here's the link

There's really not much new under the sun, as evidenced by this article. (Warning: If you're squeamish, you may want to take a pass.)

Nineteenth-century Americans routinely sold, bought, and ate "bob veal." Many people regarded it as a delicacy; others were horrified at the idea. In either case, outrage over the notion of "bob veal" surfaced with yawn-inducing regularity. As it has, apparently, right in the here and now of the twenty-first century.

And it's not just bob veal that got Americans cranked up. Every so often, someone would launch a crusade about slaughterhouse cruelty, about its impact on animals and humans. Etc.

Remember the uproar in early 2008 about "inhumane" practices at a California slaughterhouse? (I commented on it at the time. You can read that here and here.) As I noted then, there's nothing new there. Dig around in nineteenth century newspapers, you'll find hundreds of examples of that same story.

It all comes down to choices: If you want meat, well, there's a price to pay. And there's no way to produce affordable meat without, well, skinning a few calves. (Yes, for those who are wondering, I do eat meat.)

Tip o' the mug to Chris Raines for pointing me toward this story. He blogs here. Follow him on Twitter, too: @ITweetMeat.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

For your reading pleasure, remnants from the cutting-room floor from an essay I just wrote for All About Beer magazine, titled "What Revolution?" In it, I argue that craft brewing is just one part of the marvel that is the American beer industry. It will likely never become mainstream, but it's as much a part of who we are as the Establishment brewers. For more background to this three-parter, see this entry.

__________________

More to the point, contracting is now standard practice in American business. Consider Amazon.com, which at first glance appears to have nothing to do with brewing --- craft, contract, or otherwise. Amazon is an internet-based company; customers engage with it online rather than in the “bricks-and-mortar” world. Its survival and success depend on reliability: users expect error-free digital transactions; site crashes drive them away.

So Amazon must own and operate enough equipment capacity to handle its largest potential demand load. As with many retailers, that peak demand arrives during, and is limited to, the three days or four days after Thanksgiving, when shoppers descend on the site to buy holiday gifts.

The rest of the year, however, most of Amazon’s processing capacity sits idle, awaiting the next holiday rush. From Amazon’s point of view, unused capacity is unprofitable. What to do? Rent it out to small businesses.

Say Funky Vermont Brewing Company wants to sell t-shirts, caps, and mugs at its website. The brewery is small; the owners can’t afford to invest in the necessary hardware or software. So they rent both from Amazon.

The beer geek who visits the brewery’s website in search of t-shirts and caps doesn’t know, or care, how or where her order is being processed; she only cares that her credit card number is safe and that her mugs and caps arrive on time and in one piece.

Everyone benefits: Amazon uses its otherwise idle capacity; the brewer offers an online shopping experience without investing in costly infrastructure; and the consumer scores the t-shirts and caps that function as walking advertisements for the brewery.

So, too, with contract brewing. Jim Koch made smart choices about where and how to spend his money. But those decisions were less those of a revolutionary than of a brilliant entrepreneur working within an existing framework and focusing on the end  --- high quality beer --- rather than the means.

Yes, Koch, and those who followed his lead (and contract brewers are now legion) tinkered with the details: his lager contained only four ingredients, and his advertising focused on beer rather than babes in bikinis. But he operated within the confines of the Established Order. Instead of ramming the gates, Koch strolled through them and mingled with the enemy.

[Still, many hoped for more, including] Fred Eckhardt, the craft beer advocate who began writing for All About Beer in the early 1980s . . . . In a 1995 essay titled “The Revolution Is Coming” (twenty years in, the revolution was apparently still en route), he complained that the “beast” of Corporate Beer still wandered the land.

“Let me count the lengths they have gone to ruin our beer”: “fruit-flavored, soda-pop-like malt liquor,” “lite beer,” low alcohol beer, “dry beer, light dry beer, ice beer, light ice beer, and color-free beer.”  “But cheers, folks,” he added, “change is a-comin’. The grand Taste Revolution will be here soon . . . .”  (*1)

He did not realize that the Taste Revolution had arrived. Novelty was, and is, the New Normal. The media in general and the internet in particular twisted time and space into a gyrating whirligig that transformed beer “styles” and consumer “audiences” into fragmented niches, and created an infinity of paths between seller and buyer.

Big Brewing enjoys even more outlets for its Big Advertising Bucks, but small brewers, once stymied by mainstream media’s brick walls, now use the internet to advertise their beers, send e-newsletters, and offer visitors virtual brewery tours. Fans of “real” beer congregate at Jonathan Surratt’s marvelous beer-based rss feed, and at websites like beeradvocate.com or basicbrewing.com, and, of course, the one hosted by All About Beer. [Revolution? Does it matter? The beer --- whichever one you want --- is everywhere you want to be.]

_______________

Source: Fred Eckhardt “The Revolution Is Coming,” All About Beer 16, no. 2 (May 1995): 36, 45.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

For your reading pleasure, remnants from the cutting-room floor from an essay I just wrote for All About Beer magazine, titled "What Revolution?" In it, I argue that craft brewing is just one part of the marvel that is the American beer industry. It will likely never become mainstream, but it's as much a part of who we are as the Establishment brewers. For more background to this three-parter, see this entry.

__________________

Jackson pinned his hopes for craft brewing’s survival on the Great American Beer Festival (GABF). It was there, he believed, where brewers and consumers met face-to-face, that craft brewing could turn the tide against Big Brewing.

"There is no greater celebration of American beer,” he said --- and no better way to introduce the public to the enormous “variety” of beers that was becoming the hallmark of American brewing.

Variety,” he wrote, “is its own most potent advertisement.” (*1)

If that were true, craft beer, rather than MillerCoorsAnheuserInBev, would dominate today’s market, but Jackson’s other point is worth noting. He argued that the festival’s reputation had grown beyond the Denver area because the “national media” had taken note of the event’s the annual list of prize winners.

The GABF, wrote Jackson, was successful in large part because of its focus on competition and awards. No surprise there. We Americans thrive on competition. We’re the people who turned yoga into a competitive sport. We revel in prizes and medals and ribbons. An entire session of the GABF is devoted to handing out hundreds of awards. Take those away, and what’s left are hordes of (mostly drunk) men and women who love the convenience of one-stop shopping and drinking.

In short, the Great American Beer Festival, which celebrates innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, competition, success, and failure (as measured by awards), is a microcosm of American culture.

Let’s stick with the GABF for a moment. The festival’s focus on awards inadvertently sparked craft brewing’s first major internal conflict: The battle over contract brewing. The episode is worth a closer look because it, too, offers insight into the ways in which craft brewing reflects the contradictions and complexity of American culture.

The conflict over contracting began in 1985 when Jim Koch showed up at the festival. Koch, who had recently launched Sam Adams beer, walked away with a prize that year and the next. His fellow beermakers were not happy. Why? Because Koch did not own or operate his own brewhouse. Instead, he rented brewing equipment (“contracted”) from a small regional brewery.

Koch’s decision to contract stemmed from his understanding of the financial equation before him: He himself had no training as a brewer. He started with limited funds, certainly not enough to buy or build a brewhouse. He knew that successful brewing depended in large part on expertise and quality equipment. So he rented, rather than purchased, the talent and the brew vats, and spent his few dollars on quality ingredients and marketing.

His fellow craft brewers wanted none of it. Contract brewers, fumed one “real” brewer, were just “marketing people” “more interested in making a buck than in actually brewing quality beer.” The whole thing was “dishonest.” (*2) “If I were running [the GABF],” complained the late Bert Grant of Yakima Brewing,

I wouldn’t allow any contract brewers in the thing. You wouldn’t know Sam Adams from Iron City [a Pittsburgh brewing company] except for a little caramel malt.” (*3)

The critics spoke too soon. A few years later, craft brewing was populated by dozens of contract brewers (including the one who had accused contractors of being dishonest).

_________________

Sources: *1. Michael Jackson, “Jackson’s Journal: Beers of America Stand Up and Be Counted,” All About Beer 9, no. 1 (April 1988): 14.

*2: Suzanne Alexander, “Is  A Beer Local If It’s Produced Not So Locally?,” Wall Street Journal, July 21, 1989, B1.

*3: Cottone, Vince, “Beer & Loathing in Denver: The Great American Beer Festival 1986,” American Brewer (Summer 1967): 17.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three

For your reading pleasure, remnants from the cutting-room floor from an essay I just wrote for All About Beer magazine, titled "What Revolution?" In it, I argue that craft brewing is just one part of the marvel that is the American beer industry. It will likely never become mainstream, but it's as much a part of who we are as the Establishment brewers. For more background to this three-parter, see this entry.

______________________

[The inhabitants of the] house of American brewing . . . range from giant foreign-owned corporations to chain restaurants that use beer as a marketing niche; from thriving family-owned businesses to hanging-by-a-thread brewpubs that exist only because the owner, a happy homebrewer, wanted to make more beer than he or she could drink alone.

The five or six percent of beer drinkers who keep Ken Grossman, Greg Koch, and Vinnie Cilurzo in business are but a fragment of a sprawling, anything-not-bolted-down beer culture that is today, as it was in 1979, as much about “America” as it is about beer.

The late Michael Jackson unintentionally affirmed this view in an essay he wrote for AAB nine years after the magazine’s launch and a decade into the “real beer revolution.” Jackson observed that most Americans could only name three, maybe four, beers.

There’s Bud . . . (longish pause) . . . there’s Miller Lite . . . (even longer pause) . . . Do they still make Schlitz? (*1)

The problem, he argued, was that the bottomless “pocketbooks” of the Big Six (at that time A-B, Miller, Stroh, Heileman, Coors, and Pabst) enabled them to “dominate the advertising scene” and thereby obscure consumers’ awareness of brewing’s lager-, porter-, and ale-stuffed nooks and crannies. This “public ignorance” posed an “acute problem” for craft brewing.

“No small brewery is itself an island,” he reminded readers. “None can succeed for long unless the . . . idea of small breweries is understood and appreciated by the consumer.”

He was wrong. Thirty years in, most Americans don’t know about or drink craft beer, and yet craft brewing is alive and well. That’s because in America, ingenuity and creativity will always find an audience. Today’s Big Two dominate beer sales and advertising, but they have not stopped craft brewing’s forward momentum.

Nor, despite Jackson’s assertion, do we Americans crave “small” or “local,” unless, of course, the “small” and “local” is everywhere we want to be. Beer geeks cheer at the news that Groovy Craft Brewing of California is expanding production --- and shipping its beer three thousand miles to the other side of the country. In America, the virtues of small and local are in the eyes of the beholder.

________

Source: Michael Jackson, “Jackson’s Journal: Beers of America Stand Up and Be Counted,” All About Beer 9, no. 1 (April 1988): 14.

Hey, the Great American Beer Festival starts tomorrow. My beer buddies are arriving in Denver even as I type this. They are; I'm not. But how 'bout I mark the occasion anyway?

Last January, Daniel Bradford, the publisher of All About Beer magazine, asked me to write an essay for the magazine's 30th anniversary issue. He wanted me to look back at the past thirty years of American beer and writing something "controversial," as he put it. Something that would get people talking.

Frankly, I wasn't sure I had new or novel to say, but I thought about it. Realized that, yes, I did want to say something. So I agreed, and cranked out my 4,000 words.

Daniel was taken aback; it was a bit . . . too, ummm, out in left field.

So he decided run it with a companion essay by AAB's editor, Julie Johnson. In order to fit both essays into the allotted pages, I sliced my essay by half.

Which means --- you guessed it --- outtakes! So I'm going to post a chunk of what got deleted, running it in three parts (it's long). Just in time for the start of the fun in Denver.

Oh: almost forgot. The magazine is now on sale, at newstands. (Sorry, it's not online, so if you want to read the whole thing, you'll have to, ya know, plunk down some dough.) So, next up at the blog: three easy pieces.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

I’m not. I’m a historian who has chosen to write about a complicated, contentious issue. (Again, I was more or less oblivious to this “food fight” until I was well into the project.) I don’t know where the “story” will go.

Why? Because I’m still researching its contents and, like any historian, I let the facts guide me toward clarity and understanding. But I doubt it will be a “story” one that either side wants to hear. It’ll be too complex. It won’t toe the party line. It won’t conform to the mythology that is the underpinning of both sides’ arguments.

Hey, that’s the nature of real life: it’s complicated and it almost never fits into the either/or, black/white scenario that we’d like it to. That’s also the curse, and the blessing, of the historian’s work.

All this leads to an obvious question: When I’m finished with the book, will I have an opinion about the “food fight”?

Answer: Certainly. By then I’ll know something about the issues, ideas, and events that led to this moment in American history, and I’ll have enough facts to make an informed judgment about this debate and to take a stance on it.

Put another way, I’ll be a more educated, informed citizen. With luck, you’ll read my book and you, too, will have enough information to make your own judgment. And you, too, will be a more informed citizen. At least that’s my hope.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

On one side are committed, passionate grassroots activists, many of whom are focused on what they regard as a "food crisis," for which they propose various solutions.  (*1)

On the other side are people who produce the food. They're hindered in part by their own diversity: There is no single “farm” voice, no single “producer” voice, and as a result it’s hard for food producers to present a coherent defense of the attack on it. (*2)

On one side is a vehement offense ("modern farming is evil and so is corporate food"), on the other a disorganized, bewildered defense ("we're feeding the people of the world! how can we be evil?"), all of it spiced with hefty doses of glib, ignorant chatter that insult one side or the other. (*3)

Lost, and nearly invisible, in the middle are the hundreds of thousands of people --- chemists, biologists, agronomists, economists, etc. --- who have been studying issues of sustainability, global food production, and the like for decades. (I get the distinct impression that many of the antagonists on both sides are blissfully unaware of the history of the "sustainability" issue.)

These are people working in public and private institutions, working with farmers and food manufacturers alike. (Much of their research, it should be noted, is, in this country, taxpayer-funded.) Unfortunately, much of what they have to say is lost amidst the noise.

Result? The public discussion over the modern food system has become so politicized, and its participants so polarized, that people who learn that I'm writing a book about the history of meat assume that I must be "working" for one side or the other. That I intend to either defend big corporations, or write a diatribe against “factory meat.”

Not true. My “agenda” is simple: to explore what it means to be an American. “Meat” is simply a vehicle for doing so.

That’s it. That’s the beginning, the middle, and the end of my agenda. I’m not out to “get” one side or the other. I’m not assuming that one side is right and the other side is wrong.

I’m only  interested in exploring the long view of the big picture. I’m trying to figure out “what happened” and why in hopes of furthering my understanding of who we are as a people and a nation. It’s what I did with my other three books. It’s what I do. It's what other historians do.

Sadly, some people don’t believe that. To this day, many “beer geeks” believe that one of the “corporate brewers” paid me to write the beer book. That’s not true, but since I didn’t toe the “party line” on the subject of beer (Big Beer is evil. Small Beer is saintly), it follows that I MUST be in the pay of the corporations.

Next: Where the historian and the debate finally meet

 ________________

*1: The phrase “food crisis” is itself interesting. It’s a loaded term --- akin to “pro choice” and “pro life” --- that is used to commandeer and define the terms of the debate.

*2: You’re thinking, “Wait! The “food establishment” is big corporations. Surely they can defend themselves.” Easier said than done. Big food corporations, for example, simply ignore the assault as not worth their time, leaving the troops on the ground --- farmers --- to defend themselves. Or, more typically, they aim toward more "ecologically correct" foods by mining all that research being carried out in universities and other laboratories.

*3: For a prime example, see this essay by Nicholas Kristof in a recent issue of the New York Times. It's been awhile since I've read anything quite so inane. No surprise, the many of the nation's hardworking farmers took offense.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

This three-part rumination is prompted by a comment from Tim Beauchamp, who blogs at Open Fermenter and who I follow on Twitter. (He provides excellent Twitter content, by the way. None of this “I’m at the grocery store now” crap from him!) For some reason, today he complimented me in a tweet and ended with:

She may be the Upton Sinclair Jr. of today. (*2)

I was touched by his sweet words in the rest of his tweet (modesty prevents me from including those), but --- I gotta say something about the “Upton Sinclair” business. (Tim, this is NOT an attack on you. No way, no how.) He inadvertently hit a nerve. And proved a point that I’ve been wanting to comment on:

That the current “food fight” has become so heated, so contentious that people assume that because I’m writing about meat, I must have an agenda.

So, Tim, thanks for prompting me to get busy writing a blog series that I’d been putting off. (The next beer’s on me.)

I’ve mentioned before, I’m writing a history of meat in modern America (c. 1870-1990). I spend most of my days digging through primary materials, hunting for information, trying to figure out “what happened” and then writing about what I learn.

But as part of my research, I’m also learning as much as I can about current agricultural issues, our existing food system, government food policies, and the like. That’s been an eye-opener. I had no idea how politicized these topics were.

Sure, I knew there were recurrent debates over, for example, farm subsidies. Over food tariffs and export quotes. Yes, I knew about the conflict unfolding here in the midwest over land use: Should large feedlots be allowed to exist? What kinds of controls ought to regulate their wastes? How can we reconcile the rights of homeowners with farmers?

I was, however, more-or-less oblivious to the other food fight: The one between the nation’s food producers --- farmers and manufacturers --- and the people who want to dismantle the existing food production system and replace it with one that is more “sustainable” (preferably more “organic”). (*3)

Next: My "agenda" __________

*1: No pun intended. Honest.

*2: Upton Sinclair was a committed socialist whose intent with The Jungle was the reveal the misery of factory working conditions. As he himself said (and I'm paraphrasing), he aimed for the nation's heart and accidentally hit its stomach.

*3: More accurately: I wasn't completely oblivious to the issues or the debate, but I sure didn't know how, um, heated it had become.

Frank Rich has a terrific essay in today's Times op-ed section. (Well, okay, he writes for that section most Sundays, and most of the time his essay's are terrific).

The short version, if you don't want to read the whole thing, is this: Forget Woodstock. If you want to find an era of social and cultural upheaval, and one that, in many ways, mirrors our own season/era of discontent/uncertainty, look at the early 1960s, the same era explored in the AMC series "Mad Men." (The third season of which debuts tonight.) (*1) I

agree. "Mad Men" is fascinating on many levels, but what's most interesting is seeing an era of immense turbulence play out in the confines of a Madison Avenue ad agency. As Rich points out, we know what's about to happen to these men and women; we know bra burning, war demonstrations, and the Stonewall riots lie just ahead.

But these characters are, of course, completely unaware of that.

Which was precisely what I found so fascinating about the film "Far From Heaven." When the film came out in 2002, reviewers mostly focused on the film's "authenticity" and the costumes, and the way the film's "look" mirrored that of the technicolor glossies of the 1950s.

As far as I was concerned, they completely missed the point of a brilliant film (which, as a result, didn't get the attention it deservered). This was a film about how eras of profound social and cultural are born. If I remember correctly, the film is set in 1958. I

won't bore you with the synopsis (you can read that for yourself), but the plot revolves around the characters' struggles' with racial, sexual, and personal issues. In the course of the film, they they make decisions about how to resolve those issues. They opt for change rather than misery because the change makes more moral sense than the status quo.

Put another way, the tensions they're experiencing seem to them to be the result of moral values that no longer seem to make sense. Or, as Yeats put it "The center cannot hold." They have NO idea that in another decade, their small decisions will produce events like Stonewall and Woodstock. Bra burnings and the march on Washington.

That's how change begins: Ordinary people of the kind portrayed in the film make small, seemingly insignificant, decisions about how to live their lives. Then others, unconnected to them and living in other places, do the same. And as thousands and then millions of people make the same kinds of choices, well --- from decisions and choices come change: Stonewall. Selma. Woodstock War protests.

So . . . my words of wisdom on a Sunday afternoon. And now? Back to work.

______________

*1: I got hooked on "Mad Men" after a friend told me about it. I bought the first season on dvd, but managed to get my act together to record the second season when AMC re-aired it this past spring. So I"m caught up and plan to record the third season as it happens. That's the plan anyway.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a series of blog entries about Daniel Goleman's new book Ecological Intelligence.  

One of his main points, and the jumping-off place for my reflections on it, was his argument that it's possible to create product barcodes that tell consumers the true "ecological" cost of any given product. Only that, he argues, will prod consumers to begin thinking and acting green on the scale necessary to change the trajectory of climate change and ecological decline.

Apparently Wal-Mart agrees. The company announced that it will begin requiring all of its suppliers to include a full ecological history/cost analysis for all of its products, and in a form that consumers can use while they're standing in the store deciding what to buy.

The full report is in today's Wall Street Journal, but it's a subscription-only report, so I found this abbreviated version from another online sources here and here.

As Thomas Friedman point out in The World Is Flat, Wal-Mart isn't a store so much as it is a goods-delivery system, the largest one in the world. If it's prepared to demand that suppliers provide point-of-sale information on ecological costs/benefits/pricing, then we've taken one giant step toward the kind of "consumer revolution" that Goleman suggests is necessary.

Hey! I finally worked (an admittedly oblique) reference to the moon landing (fortieth anniversary coming right up) into my blog.

Part One

Now here we are in 2009, and people who are [justifiably] discontented with the nation’s food supply system want to return to "local" food production.  But that desire may, indeed, likely will, produce conflicts, big ones, and over more than just urban hen houses.

Consider the variant of that conflict that has been playing out for years in the midwest.  In the mid-twentieth century, meat packing moved out of the "stockyard cities," like Chicago, and into more isolated rural packing factories. Iowa, where I live, for example, is dotted with these packing plants, as are other midwestern states.

The rationale for these isolated packing facilities is that they are near or adjacent to the huge feedlots that provide the livestock for the plant. The proximity of the one to the other, and the relatively low cost of rural land are two factors that allow packers to produce meat with a low retail price --- ground beef, for example, that costs about two dollars a pound at the store.

But as home ownership rates have soared, especially since the 1980s, developers have converted more "farmland" to housing developments. Many of those developments sit just a few miles from giant feedlots, large packing houses, or, most often, both.

Result? Conflict: Homeowners want their 2500-square-foot houses, but when the wind is right, they’re reminded that just a few miles away stands a massive hog feedlot or beef packing plant. They demand that the meat operations move --- although no one can agree on just where those ought to go.

No surprise, of course, homeowners who complain about the proximity of these facilities are also the first to complain when the price of meat rises. They don’t seem to understand that those giant, rural operations, plus taxpayers’ agricultural subsidies, are what allow us to enjoy low-priced filets and bacon.

So --- the idea of "local food" is great, and I think many Americans would agree that the nation’s food system needs some, uh, readjustment. But if history is any judge, getting from here to there won’t be easy.

But hey! It’ll be fascinating to watch and take part in. You can tell your grandchildren: "I was there during the great food wars of the early 21st century."

In any case, there are many, many blogs, websites, and twitter users who are busy debating the logistics, ethics, and business of a "new" food system. If you're interested, seek them out and join the discussion.

Yet another newspaper article today about the growing conflicts over "urban" animals -- in this case, in Salem, Oregon, where some residents want to keep hens, and other residents don’t want the animals around. We’re going to see more conflicts like theses as the "local food" activists gather steam, focus, and energy. (*1)

Many Americans are trying to "take back" their food and the nation’s food system. Some demand better state and federal food regulations. But others are engaged in grassroots efforts by supporting farmers’ markets and by producing their own food at home.

So what’s all this got to do with the price of eggs? History, that’s what.

As I’ve noted here before, I’m writing a history of meat in America (see more here). The first two chapters of that book look at the debate over "urban meat" in the late 19th century. That debate centered on Americans' unhappiness with their "local" food systems: they didn't like them, and wanted them gone.

The short version is this: Urban growth accelerated significantly in the mid-nineenth century. As cities grew, so Americans’ ideas about how to manage those cities changed, most especially ideas about how to manage urban sanitation.

No surprise, urbanites began building centralized sewer and water systems, to name one example. But they also began to question the value of "local" food production, especially meat processing. If we could go back to a typical American city in, say, 1870, we’d find dozens of slaughterhouses.

Dozens. And they weren’t on the outskirts: they sat next to houses, churches, stores, and schools.

And yes, with all the odor, waste, and, well, filth, you might imagine, as well as the constant parade of animals through city streets. (The livestock usually arrived by rail, and then handlers herded them through the streets to various slaughterhouses and butcher shops.)

Americans decided that this centuries-old system of meat production was outdated, unsafe, and unsuited the needs of a modern, progressive people.

Over the next fifteen years, they debated, considered, and experimented with alternatives (the first two chapters of my book will examine that process.)

By the late 1880s, most cities had banned those local slaughterhouses (as well as things like backyard hen houses), and a new meat processing system had emerged: A handful of operators slaughtered and processed livestock at giant "packing" houses located in just a few cities -- most notably Chicago, but also in St. Louis, Omaha, Kansas City, and Fort Worth.

Americans applauded this change: The new system was healthier and safer, and so were the nation’s cities. Next: The twentieth-century battle over meat processing.

____________

*1: Don't take my word for it. There are a zillion blogs out there. But also check out the intense food-related activity on Twitter.  (Indeed, anyone who still thinks Twitter is for narcissists and teen-agers only needs to spend a few minutes just reading the food posts on Twitter. There’s a movement out there!) Use the Twitter search box and  type in, for example, #profood.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three

Part Four --- Part Five --- Part Six

Creating the kind of “radical transparency” necessary to change consumer behavior, which will, in turn, change manufacturer behavior, will require enormous amounts of data, and data compiled in an honest fashion, and, most important, date that can be made available to consumers.

Goleman notes that a company called GoodGuide, Inc. has made a good start. The people at GoodGuide have compiled the Life Cycle Assessment data for, for example, the ingredients for a host of products, especially things like soap, shampoo, etc., rating them based on their “green” qualities.

The bottom line is this: If consumers have access to honest data and, most important, at the moment of purchase, they will be more likely to make active decisions about how “green” they want their consumption to be. As they do, manufacturers (like Parliament in the 18th century) will be forced to make changes in their products.

More manufacturers will, we can all hope, consider using “cradle to cradle” manufacturing methods and materials, instead of relying, as they do now, on “cradle to grave” manufacturing methods and materials.

Goleman calls this a “virtuous cycle”: When information about a product changes consumers’ brand preferences, the resulting market shift in turn will lead companies to offer more of the [green] improvements shoppers want. Buyers with easy access to accurate ecological information will “chang[e] their behavior,” and that in turn will prompt “sellers to change their business practices.”

Again, I’m simplifying Goleman’s argument, which he backs up with plenty of data and information of his own.

But his basic argument is compelling: What matters is not just information itself, but on-the-spot access to that information. The more easily consumers get information, the more likely they will be to act on it in ecologically positive ways.

Put another way --- and now you see where I’m going with all of this --- contrary to that reviewer at Amazon, it’s possible for consumer behavior to launch and sustain revolution. And history has provided us with a powerful example, in fact the most important example in human history, of how that can be done.

See? I told you this would all hang together in the end!

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three

Part Four --- Part Five --- Part Six

If they stopped buying, powerful people in England would feel the pain. And feel it fast.

That’s what happened. First the colonists organized “non-importation” movements, and then, when that was not enough to make Parliament heed them, they organized “non-consumption” movements.

As Breen put it in the introduction to his book, North American colonists “made goods speak to power in ways” that their rulers and leaders back in England had not anticipated. British North American colonists used their material culture --- their "stuff" --- to foment revolution. They understood that non-consumption was more powerful than guns, or, for that matter, words.

So, back to Goleman’s book. (I know. You were wondering if I was ever going to get to the point.) I think you can see now why I was a bit, um, amused by the Amazon criticism of Goleman’s book. Clearly, consumption and consumerism and consumer values can be powerful tools in fomenting change.

First, Goleman examines the Life Cycle Assessment --- how engineers, scientists, and researchers figure out what the true ecological cost of a good is, from inception to creation to consumption: What’s the ecological cost of the materials to make it? What’s the ecological cost of the vehicles used to transport those materials? Etc.

Goleman points out that at present, many goods are marketed with “greenwashing”: the manufacturers either mask the true ecological cost of the good, or they exaggerate it in an effort to woo consumers who want to go green. He argues that what’s needed in the marketplace is “radical transparency.” By that he means some method of labeling or otherwise providing full information about the “life cycle” of goods.

Most important, however, he argues that the information needs to be provided at the point of purchase itself. You can determine the true ecological cost of that apple from New Zealand while you’re still standing in the grocery store.

Next: Using information and goods to create revolution.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three

Part Four --- Part Five --- Part Six

Colonial exports, such as grain and timber, enabled them to buy and enjoy a huge array of consumer goods, nearly all of which were imported from England. (Even if the British didn’t actually manufacture the goods, Parliament made damn sure that the goods went through a British port before being shipped on to North America.)

Colonists wanted those goods. They enjoyed those goods. Having access to those goods made them feel like full citizens of a huge empire.

We think of our colonial ancestors as wanna-be Americans from the get-go. But almost until the last moment (ie, up until about 1760 or 1765), British colonists prided themselves on being British. On being part of the most powerful empire in the world. On being able to wear the same clothing and eat from the same kinds of plates as people back in England.

Moreover, they understood that the raw materials they exported to England helped make England great (again, basic but crucial materials like timber, ore, grain) The cycle of trade connected colonists to the mother country, and the colonists were, in turn, particularly aggressive in acquiring consumer goods.

Put another way, the colonists saw themselves as full partners in the imperial economy and the British nation. The operative word here is “partners.” Colonists assumed and expected to be treated as full citizens, with all the rights and responsibilities as any other citizen of the empire.

But starting in the 1760s, Parliament began imposing rules, regulations, and, yes, taxes on the colonists without their consent. Why Parliament did so isn’t important here.

What does matter is this: the colonists were angry (insulted, is more like it) and decided to resist. They could have used violence, but they opted to use something else: the marketplace itself.

Next time: Consumers, revolution, and going green

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three

Part Four --- Part Five --- Part Six

The argument about consumer goods and the American revolution has been shaped and researched by many scholars over the past twenty or so years.

But the historian most responsible for it is T. H. Breen. He articulated his argument first in a series of scholarly articles and then in his brilliant book The Marketplace of Revolution. His book is long, exceptionally well researched, and complex, but here’s the short version: (I’m simplifying his complex argument not because I think you’re stupid, but because I’m trying to be brief.)

The period from about 1600 to the 1800s marked what historians call a “consumer revolution.” (For more on this “revolution,” see, for example, the wikipedia article and this essay by Cary Carson, one of the most important scholars in the field.)

For the first time in history, large masses of people were able to afford (and could legally acquire) what we now think of as the basics of life: Chairs, tables, perhaps glass for a few windows. Porcelain dishes. More than one change of clothes. Leather shoes with pewter buckles. Meat every day. Tea and coffee. Sugar. Refined flour.

People living in the British empire, including the North American colonists, were particularly active participants in this social and cultural change. Indeed, the creation of the British empire rested in large part on the exchange of goods and raw materials.

This exchange functioned as the basic mechanism of British imperial development: England acquired property --- colonies --- all over the world, seeking ones that would provide enormous quantities of raw materials.

India, for example, provided tea and cotton. Asian colonies provided spices and silk. The West Indies provided sugar (and then molasses from which North Americans made rum). Africa provided slaves (which the British mostly traded to other countries). The North American colonies provide grain, timber, ore, and fish. (Yes, fish. Fishing was always one of the largest industries in British North America. The fish were caught, dried, and shipped to England or other colonies.)

The colonies provided these raw materials for manufacturers back in England, and then those same colonists, especially the ones in North America, bought and used the goods the manufacturers produced.

Next time: How consumer goods led to revolution

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Part Four --- Part Five --- Part Six

As important, they need to believe that they can trust one another even if they are separated by great distance and don’t know each other personally.

That’s because revolutions are group efforts: Resistance only pays off when large numbers of people are involved, but those individuals need to be able to work together, and they can only do that if they share some other commonality.

That was difficult in North America because for most of the colonial period, Virginians thoughts of themselves as Virginians, and people in Vermont thought of themselves as Vermonters.  They didn’t think of themselves as “Americans.”

Their other identity was as citizens of the British empire, but that meant that most people looked toward England for commonality, rather than in or toward North America.

Well, you say, they shared an aversion to taxes and oppression. Yes, they did  -- eventually. But only after they’d begun to contemplate revolution. At that point, they began to talk about taxes and oppression as a way to express what had already become a shared goal.

In other words, their political beliefs --- their ideology --- became a justification, not a cause. Moreover, theories about taxation and rhetoric about oppression were most useful to people like Thomas Jefferson. He was wealthy and exceptionally well-educated, and read political philosophy, and, as important, discussed it with people like John Adams, who was also wealthy and exceptionally well-educated.

But the vast majority of colonists were neither wealthy nor particularly well-educated. So political theory wasn’t going to get far with them.

Instead, that vast majority needed some other way to speak to the need for change at the outset. They needed to have some kind of shared language or shared material culture. And the way the colonial rebels “spoke” to one another was through consumer goods; or, more accurately, the decision to stop using consumer goods. (Today, we’d call that a boycott, but the term “boycott” only entered the English language more than a century later.)

Next time: Historians’ analysis of consumer action and the American revolution.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three

Part Four --- Part Five --- Part Six

Among other things, he examines the ways in which consumer behavior can function as the catalyst for substantive, indeed, profound, ecological change.

One part of his argument is this: Thanks to the powers of digitization, it’s possible to track the “ecological life cycle” of any good --- ham, shoes, mascara, flooring, etc. --- and to inform consumers of that good’s life cycle, so that consumers can make point-of-sale decisions about whether to use Brand X or Brand Y, depending on its ecological history. (This life cycle history, by the way, is known as a Life Cycle Assessment.)

He argues that consumers will act ecologically when they have ready access to information; “ready” in this case meaning at the point of sale: while standing in the grocery or furniture store thinking about making the purchase. (Again, I'm simplifying a more complex argument.)

I was curious to know what other readers thought, so I went to Amazon. At the time (again, this was a couple of months ago), the only review consisted of the following:

Goleman's narrow view of ecological intelligence is limited to how to be a better consumer. He does not address the fundamental questions of our culture's core beliefs about our place as individuals in the greater ecosystem.

If you're looking for fresh ideas on expanding beyond relating to the world as a marketplace, you will probably be disappointed.

My reaction was “Gee, that guy doesn’t know much about history.” Because if he did, he’d know that the American revolution was fueled in large part by consumer-based action.

“Huh?” you say. “Consumer action? I thought the American revolution was about taxes and representation. What’s consumer action got to do with it?” Almost everything. Sure, taxes, representation, and Parliament’s excessive intrusion into colonial life helped fuel the revolution, but so did the colonists’ understanding of their actions as consumers.

Next time: Revolution, American and otherwise