James McWilliams, Meat, History, the "Contrarian" View, and Land Supply

[UPDATE: Joel Salatin responded to McWilliams' essay with this post. It appeared first on Salatin's Facebook page, and then at Grist.] (How's THAT for a kitchen sink title?)

I'm a fan of James McWilliams, a historian whose last book was about our contemporary food system, but who has also written a brilliant book about the history of food in "early" America (that's the fancy term for the colonial era). He also writes op-ed pieces about contemporary food politics and system, and he's almost always on the "wrong" side --- so he's often referred to as a contrarian. (*1)

In any case, here he is in today's New York Times, pointing out that the more "natural" system of making meat isn't necessarily better than the existing "factory" system. In particular, he points out that it requires more land.

 If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.

He's right, of course. And that's one of the aspects of our food system that critics rarely, perhaps never, mention: Where are the acres to raise all that livestock going to come from?

As I point out in my forthcoming book, one reason that the "factory" system of livestock production took hold, especially in the 1950s, was because of rising demand for what had been agricultural land. And, too, the demand for meat, especially beef, proved more than the existing western range could handle. (Commercial feedlots were the solution to both problems.)

Put another way: We Americans wanted cities more than we wanted "natural" farms. As a result, farmers could no longer enjoy the luxury of grazing stock on very expensive land. They had to farm "intensively" rather than "extensively."

That's an important point. And as I'm fond of pointing out, one reason that we have so many critics tapping away on their keyboards today is because the vast majority of us (nearly 80 percent) live in cities. And one fact about city folks so obvious that it's easy to overlook is this: They're city folks, not farmers. They rely on others (farmers) to produce  food. Because we city people aren't out toiling in the fields, we enjoy the luxury of time --- time to think, to criticize, to write.

So. Land for urban places? Or land for happy cattle and pigs? We can't "fix" the food system until we decide which is more important.

Which is one reason that I say: the only realistic way to solve the "problem" of the current food system is by re-thinking how, when, and why we eat meat.

And, yes, ohmygod, but I've missed blogging.................. SO happy to have some time to indulge!

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*1: A beautiful example of what Orwell had in mind about language and politics: when McWilliams is defined as a contrarian, the implication, of course, is that there's a received, "correct" view -- in this case that the existing "food system" is evil and that we should return to a "natural" system of making food. (*2)

*2: Which itself implies that somehow there used to be a more "natural" way of making food. Oh, if only people knew....

Pink Slime: (More) History and A Dollop of Sermonizing. Part One

Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4 --- Part 5 

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This is the first of five blog entries aimed at adding background to the “pink slime” controversy. I spent a couple of days digging around for more information, and what I learned may (or, hey!, may not) be worth knowing. As always, my aim is to make your reading easy, so I’ve broken this into several, bite-sized (no pun intended) parts.

Part of my goal is to correct a MAJOR mistake I made in my first “pink slime” post: I wrongly equated the method used to make “lean finely textured beef” (LFTB), aka Pink Slime, with “mechanically separated” or “mechanically deboned” meat. I apologize for that mistake. (*1) Haste does indeed make waste and error, too. In this case, happily, my error does not affect my conclusion. (Yes, all this will make sense in a moment.)

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll use abbreviations: LFTB for the “pink slime” process, and MSM for the “mechanically separated” process. They’re not the same thing; LFTB is the grandchild of MSM. 

As I noted in my initial PS blog entry, beef and pork packers started using MSM in the mid-1970s, when they were trying to keep meat prices low at a time of extraordinary economic turmoil. The process allowed them to utilize meat scraps that were otherwise going to waste.

The problem with MSM was the “deboning.” Packers used blades/machinery to scrape carcasses clean of meat scrap. They “salvaged” lots of otherwise unused protein, but bits of bone got into the mix. Those bits were crushed when the scraps were mushed together and pressed through sieves.

These bone fragments hardly deserve the name of either “bone” or “fragment”: They were the size, texture, and consistency of pepper flakes, the kind that comes out of a shaker. Translation: not dangerous to anyone.

Unfortunately, others didn’t see it that way. Originally, the USDA insisted that any labels for the stuff contain the words “ground bone.” Packers balked; the USDA backed down; and in 1982 established new rules that allowed them package and sell the stuff without mentioning the word bone.

Then consumer advocates objected and took the USDA to court. At the time, consumer advocates were less worried about bone fragments than they were about the mineral content of the bone, arguing that people with some diseases have to monitor their intake of minerals, especially calcium, and so the product needed to be labeled accordingly. In late 1984, a US Court of Appeals ruled that the USDA’s new rules could stand. (Historical tidbit: Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion.)

Next: The search for an alternative

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*1. As anyone who knows me, or who has read my books or this blog, knows, when it comes to accuracy, I’m obsessive to the point of being anal. This time, however, I was in a hurry, and too tired to think, and, yes, I screwed up. I apologize.

The Sweetest Words A Writer Can Write

"The End."

Yes. A bit more than five years after signing the contract for this book, and five years (more or less) after finally starting it (the beer book came out the same week we negotiated a contract for the meat book) and minus the two years during which I did what felt like nothing because of an arm injury ----

I'm finished.

Well, okay, more or less. Here's an insider tip: Manuscripts are NEVER "finished" until about four hours before they go to the printer. Seriously. You'd be amazed at what happens during those last few hours.

Plus, nothing's finished until the editor says so, and I just sent it to her. (As in: about ten minutes ago.)

But you get the drift: About a year from now, the manuscript I just sent will appear in public as a book. 

Am I happy? I dunno. I'm too exhausted to know if I'm happy. This has been a serious slog. And if I EVER decide to write another book this complicated, you have my permission to lock me up. Permanently.

But perhaps my life will return to normal: Lots of blog rants. More time with my family and friends. More time to cook, read, walk, hang out, etc. Plus, hey! Tomorrow I'm leaving for Florida and my first real vacation since 2008. (Am I excited about doing NOTHING but drifting in a pool for the next four days? Yes. Yes. Yes.)

But lest anyone misunderstand: I wouldn't trade the privilege and pleasure of what I do for anything. Not ANYTHING. And it is a privilege to spend my time sitting in a room thinking, reading, and writing. I never forget that. I never take it for granted.

Lou Gehrig had it all wrong: I am the luckiest person in the world.

Capitalism, Us/Them, and Finding the Middle Ground

Another quickie post (because, yes, I’m still working on the manuscript --- and so close to the end that I’m finally enjoying the writer’s bliss zone). (*1) But I’m taking a moment to comment on two essays I read this week. 

The first is by Alexis Madrigal writing at TheAtlantic. The second is a response to Madrigal’s piece by Rob Horning writing at The New Inquiry. 

Madrigal’s essay is about the mechanisms of online advertising tracking. Trackers “follow” you around the web, and then sell the info they’ve gathered to advertisers so that said advertisers can “target” audiences with appropriate advertising (read: with ads that will make you want to buy what they’ve got).(*2)

 Much of Madrigal’s essay is devoted to the nuts/bolts of how this works. (Fascinating stuff, by the way.) But that’s all by way of his main point: What does tracking mean for us in our “real” lives (if indeed our online lives are separable from our non-online lives)? And is tracking a bad thing? 

Madrigal’s conclusion (for now) is that it’s a necessary evil (my term, not his): Online tracking is the price, literally and figuratively, we pay so that the web/internet can remain a mostly “free” resource. The folks at the New York Times, for example, can post much of its content for free, or for a minimal price, because ad tracking helps pay for that content. In his words:

There’s nothing necessarily sinister about this subterranean data exchange: this is, after all, the advertising ecosystem that supports free online content.

In his view, the alternative to tracking is the paywall, and as far as he concerned that poses a greater danger: 

Sure, we could all throw up paywalls and try to make a lot more money from a lot fewer readers. But that would destroy what makes the web the unique resource in human history that it is. I want to keep the Internet healthy, which really does mean keeping money flowing from advertising.

Horning disagrees. (*3) In his view, Madrigal’s conclusion amounts to a sell-out (no pun intended) to “capital.” By conceding the need for tracking, we’ve ceded our “selves,” our humanity, to capital. In his (more eloquent) words:

 The question here is about what the internet is for, and whether it allows us to imagine alternatives to capitalism or simply serves to allow capital to co-opt the alternatives generated by technological development.

But one might argue that the fact that it seems as though we can’t have an internet not fueled by advertising is a sign that the internet is already unhealthy, sick unto death. And perhaps we are all sick too if we can’t imagine a way to collaborate and communicate without also commercializing it, that we need private incentives to generate and share information . . . .”

And:

 There’s nothing not sinister about that, including the alibi generated through its association with our access to “free” content. That we think its free is indicative of our delusion: We are paying for it with personal information that may be used against us in perpetuity.”

Here’s my (admittedly paltry) contribution to this discussion. Despite their differences, Madrigal and Horning agree on one point: Tracking and advertising are an us/them situation. In their view, trackers/advertisers are “them” horning their way into our lives. (Madrigal’s “us” view, I should add, is markedly more measured than Horning’s. (*4))

I disagree. In my view, capitalism is less about us/them than it is a participatory system from which all of us benefit. Let’s consider, for example, Apple, the very model of capitalism, and, thus, presumably a “them.”

Apple has been criticized lately because it manufactures its products in China under allegedly less-than-stellar conditions. (I say allegedly because it’s not clear to me that anyone involved in the discussion is being completely forthright.) A strike against Apple. (*5) But consider the other positive ways in which Apple affects our lives. Consider, for example, the iPad.

Many people spent years imagining, designing, and developing those little wonders. They got paid for doing so. Apple’s marketing people earned money thinking about how to “position” the tablet in the market. When people visit an Apple store, they enounter a crew of employees whose job it is to help them understand and perhaps buy the iPad; that a crew earns money. When you buy an iPad online, someone in a warehouse earns in income by boxing your purchase for shipping (using packaging that others earned money to design, fabricate, and deliver) so that the woman in the brown uniform and driving the brown truck can deliver it to you.

Nor do the collective benefits of the iPad end with its delivery to your door: The iPad’s success elevated Apple’s stock and so its shareholders, including myself, earned more profit from it.

That’s obvious to the point of being simple-minded. But sometimes the obvious is what gets overlooked. Capitalism is less an us/them proposition than it is a participatory system: All of us, every last one of us, profits (literally) from this system. (*6) Tracking is less an us/them equation than it is a particularly efficient mode of stoking capitalism’s engine (and a device that, yes, many people have earned incomes inventing, designing, and implementing).

So perhaps one step toward “imagining” a better web/internet, and a better capitalism, is rethinking our stance on the conflicts (we believe/imagine) it engenders.

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*1: The writer’s bliss zone = the moment when he/she realizes that, wow, this is truly, finally, almost a finished work! Hey, this is going to be finished; it’s going to be a coherent whole, worthy of sharing with the rest of the world.

*2: Here’s my own recent encounter with tracking: I’ve been looking for a shoulder bag for five years and not had any luck. (I’m not that fussy, but most bags are less about practicality than about fashion, in which I’m not interested. Unless “practicality” is a fashion statement.) But about six weeks ago, I finally found one that came as close to perfection as I was likely to find. 

But it was expensive: “suggested retail price” was (if I remember correctly) $235. I found it online for $178. I’m a writer; I make shit for income. (Boy were my taxes easy to do this year!) So I was willing to wait --- for the price to come down; for a coupon; for a “sale.” 

I’ll be damned. Twelve hours after I found said bag, I was visiting some site or other --- no idea what, but probably a news-related site --- and there, at the of the page, was a banner ad, containing my bag and a hefty discount coupon. I clicked the ad, bought the bag (and set in motion the chain of events I describe in the body of my essay). 

*3: For lack of any better place to put this: Horning does not address one of Madrigal’s main points: How the hell do we pay for content? That’s a biggie.

*4: About the trackers, Madrigal writes: “None of them seem like evil companies, nor are they singular companies. Like much of this industry, they seem to believe in what they're doing. They deliver more relevant advertising to consumers and that makes more money for companies. They are simply tools to improve the grip strength of the invisible hand.”

*5: Frankly, I don’t get the criticism, especially because the critics are busy tapping out their critiques on devices, Apple or otherwise, built under similar conditions, probably while wearing clothing and shoes manufactured under similar conditions, and probably while sitting in a chair manufactured under similar conditions.

*6: At this point, many of you are rolling your eyes. “Has she never heard of Enron? Did she sleep through the stock market collapse/scandal of ‘08?” Yes, I have, and no, I didn’t. Of COURSE the system has “bad” players. Every endeavor has its shares of incompetents, devils, and bad guys. 

But it doesn’t follow, logically or otherwise, that the system is bad. I’ve experienced more than my fair share of incompetent physicians, to name one example, but they don’t make me want to toss modern medicine out the window. (Indeed, I thank the universe pretty much every day for its wonders, without which I wouldn’t be here to write this.) There are bad lawyers and evil politicians and shifty bankers. But the law, and our system of governance, and banking survive and function well because most players are good, not bad.

Historians: Missing in Action

By way of an update (and evidence that, yes!, I’m still alive): As I near the end of the Project From Hell, I finally understand why it has taken so. damn. long.

Well, okay, one of the reasons. (*1) And, hey, it’s connected to one of my favorite subjects --- how historians work --- and, hey, it allows me to rant, and bonus! break my rule about no blogging until I’m finished. (*2)

Here’s the deal: 

For the last two years, I’ve been at first surprised, and then outraged by my fellow historians, who, I have discovered, to my dismay, have zero interest in exploring the history of contentious contemporary issues. 

Or, as I now phrase it: WHAT THE HELL ARE HISTORIANS DOING? Besides, apparently, nothing?

Let me give you an example. It may seem trivial, but it makes my point:

For reasons that aren’t worth going into here (I’m trying to be brief), in the book’s last chapter I needed to discuss the microwave oven. That device, which can be found in 98% of American homes (and widely used in restaurants, too) is the single most important cooking tool to enter the American kitchen in the past century. 

So I needed to write two, maybe three sentences about it. But I couldn’t write those sentences until I first educated myself about the microwave oven’s history, and especially about the speed with which Americans adopted it.

Obviously microwave ovens are not my central topic. So this is a classic example of where it’s appropriate to rely on “secondary sources.” In this case, those secondary sources would be work by historians whose main topic was the microwave oven. 

So I conducted a “literature search”: I looked for other historians’ research on the microwave oven, its introduction into American kitchens, and its impact on Americans’ diets. 

Nada. Zip. Zero. Gotnuthin’forya.

Translation: in order to include those two or three sentences about the microwave oven, I had to drop what I was doing and do my own research into the history of the microwave oven, a task that would require at least a full day, but more probably two or three, just so I could write those two or three sentences.

Okay, so maybe a two-day detour isn’t such a big deal. Unfortunately, I encountered these research gaps over and over and over again --- for Major Big Deal Topics.

Consider the matter of livestock confinement, which is the practice of raising meat animals inside instead of outside on pasture. 

This is a hot button political/social issue in the US and has been for years. So it’s a no-brainer for historians, right? Surely, I assumed, someone has researched the history of confinement farming (which is now more than fifty years old). 

Nope. 

Here’s another Big Deal Topic: corporate-owned hog farms. For the last forty years, these farms, which consist of buildings that contain hundreds of thousands of hog, have provoked controversy, lawsuits and legislation (both state and federal), and have shaped environmental policies. Corporate hog farms are a BIG deal.

You’d think historians would be interested in researching the history of these farms.

Nope. Nada. Nuthin’ there.

Here’s another example: In the last 40 years, chicken has gone from being an afterthought to the number one meat in America. The lowly chicken toppled steak from its throne. Don Tyson built a mega-global corporation based on that change. 

You’d think someone would have researched that change, right?  

What did I find? Three short articles and one dissertation, each focusing on a narrow aspect of the American broiler industry in the mid-twentieth century. (“Broiler” is the industry term for meat chickens.)

In this case, that dearth of research translated into a month in the library --- working seven days a week, eight hours a day --- digging through poultry trade journals and newspapers and research bulletins piecing together the history of the broiler industry. 

And that didn’t include the separate topic of when and why Americans fell in love with chicken. (Which historians have also ignored.)

That’s the way it’s been for three years: one time-consuming detour after another to conduct substantive research that, by any measure of professionalism, should have at least been started by someone. 

At this point you’re thinking “Wait a sec. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? You’re writing a book about meat, so, shouldn’t you be doing the research?”

Yes and no. Yes, when I began this book, I expected to spend most of my time conducting primary research on dozens of meat-related topics.

But, again, those topics aren’t relics stashed in the dustbin of history. These are Big Deal issues NOW, right now in contemporary America: Corporate hog farms, the shift to chicken, the use of confinement, “corporate” farms versus the family farm.

These are matters that have generated controversy and legislation and environmental and agricultural policy for more than fifty years.

Because these issues are so controversial and affect us everyday, directly or indirectly, I was right to assume that some historians would have engaged in research that contributes to our understanding of them. Bare minimum, historians who specialize in agricultural history should have been working on this stuff.

Instead: nothing. 

If ever there was a time to say “What the fuck???,” this is it. 

What the fuck are historians DOING with their time (and, often, taxpayers’ money)? What? Tell me. I want to know.

In the meantime, however, historians’ do-nothingness sent me on one lengthy detour after another.

Which is why a) this book has taken sooooo much longer than I expected; and b) why, about a year ago, I decided that the back of the book will include a short essay titled “A Note To Historians,” in which I will pose that question (leaving out the “what the fuck” part).

End of rant. 

Oh, wait! Almost forgot the update: On or before January 15, 2012, I will finish this book, and it’ll show up in print (probably) a year later. 

I’ll be back --- soon.

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*1: The other being the two-year nightmare of dealing with the temporary lack of a right arm and more pain thanI could have imagined possible.

* 2: But---this counts as an update, so I’m not really breaking the rule. 

Yet Another Rant About Bad History

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'.