Making Meat, the Writer's Pitfall, and Online Interaction With Readers

Finally, a good example of the way website/online interaction can inform a writer's work! (*1)

A couple of days ago, I commented on a New York Times op-ed piece about land use and meat supply. You can read my comment here, but what’s relevant is the point I made about farm land: Farmers compete with city folks for land. What’s farmland now may, in ten years, contain houses or office buildings, a shift in land use typically identified as “urban sprawl.”

A person identifying herself as Louisa commented on that blog entry. Here is her comment:

Not quite…it’s not land vs. urban spaces, which are actually pretty efficient, but land vs. SUBurban spaces, with all the sprawl that entails. I live in a small town surrounded by farmland. Every year, more farmland is bought up by developers to turn into another grossly oversized subdivision filled with 4,000 sq ft houses- whose owners then turn around and lobby for nuisance laws that are aimed at, among other things, farm smells and sounds. After moving out into the country because it’s “so picturesque.” So yes, we do need to have the conversation about what kind of agricultural system we want. But we also need to have a conversation about what kind of living space we want, and whether we want to do more to protect farmland from becoming suburban sprawl.

I am grateful that Louisa took the time to read and comment (more grateful than she probably knows!), but as important, her comment reminded me that I need to beware of the writer’s pitfall: Don’t assume readers know what you mean. I’ve spent so many years working on the meat book that I tend to write/think in shorthand and make assumptions about what readers know and don’t know. In this case, I should have been more clear about the relationship between farming methods and urban societies.

First to her comment: She’s correct: The more houses, office buildings, and gas stations we build, the more likely we are to use what was once farmland. As I type this, I’m sitting in a house that is sitting on land that was part of a farm just twenty years ago. So, yes, I’m aware of the “urban sprawl” part of the equation. (And, because I live in Iowa, I’m also aware that, as Louisa points out, when people move to houses like mine, they often complain about rural smells and sounds.) (*2)

But I failed to make a more subtle distinction. Americans have chosen to live “in town” rather than “in the country.” Nearly 80% of us live in “municipalities” of one kind or another. Only two percent of us work as “farmers.” So that two percent has to figure out how to make food as efficiently as possible. If we shut down all the Ames, Iowas, razed the “sprawl,” and forced everyone to move to, say, Manhattan or Brooklyn, we’d still have the same equation: Nearly all of us would rely on a tiny minority to make our food.

But even if the agricultural two percent suddenly had access to farmland once devoted to houses and office buildings, it’s unlikely they would decide to send their cattle, hogs, and chickens out into the “pasture” to range freely.

Why? Because those are labor-intensive forms of agricultural production, and we’d still have just 2% of the population making the food. That’s a primary reason that farmers back in the 1950s embraced confinement as a way to raise livestock: they faced a serious labor shortage. They didn’t have enough “hands” to raise livestock the “old-fashioned” way. If they wanted to keep farming, they had to figure out how to do it without additional labor.

Why was there a labor shortage? Because after World War II, farmers’ sons and daughters decided they wanted to live in town, not on the farm. So --- as those sons and daughters left the farms, they became part of the “urban majority” who relied on farmers to produce food for them. But those farmers, in turn, were left short-handed and in need of ways to make their operations more efficient. (*3)

So when I write about the connection between life in an “urban” society and systems of farming, I need to be more clear about what I mean. City folks are not farmers. They rely on others to grow food for them. In an urban society like ours, most people have CHOSEN not to be food producers. The people who do produce the food are then faced with a quandary: How to make enough food for everyone?

It’s perhaps worth repeating the point I made in that blog entry: When a people choose to live in an urban society rather than an agrarian one, they also enjoy the benefit (luxury) of time for intellectual work. The farming two percent make it possible for the rest of us to sit around and invent iPads and smart phones, blog, write critiques of the food system, or whatever. We can engage in "other" work because we don't spend time growing or preserving food.

Again, the physical form of the urban setting is irrelevant. Sure, if we all moved to Manhattan, we'd free up land for farming. But it's unlikely we'd have more FARMERS. We'd still have 98% of the population living in an urban setting, and two percent making the food.

So. Memo to self: in the manuscript of what is becoming a “real” book, I need to be wary of skipping A so I can get to B.

Again, many thanks to Louisa for her help. __________________ *1: We writers hear this all the time: We can engage with readers! (Yes, of course.) We can use feedback from readers to shape our work! Umm. Okay? Maybe? Not sure. And I've been one of the doubters. But now I "get" how interaction can, in fact, shape my work.

*2: Indeed, that conflict was one of the first ideas that came to me when I decided to write this book. See this blog entry I wrote for Powell’s Books six years ago.

*3: Another point is worth mentioning: Even those “young” people who chose to stay on the farm were no longer willing to work 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. They were even more willing than their fathers and mothers to embrace labor-saving tools and systems of production, including livestock confinement.

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 Five

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

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So. Where does this leave us? With an uproar rooted in fear and emotion rather than in fact, and the possible bankruptcy of a family-owned business whose owners were devoted, and I do mean devoted, to food safety. 

I need to be clear about something: I’m all for good food. I’m not a shill for “corporate” America or for “Big Ag,” as the critics call it. I don’t eat much meat and when I do, I buy “good” stuff. Is it expensive? Yes, it is. That’s why we don’t eat much of it. (At our house, meat is an accompaniment to a main dish, and almost never the main dish itself.) (*1)

I’m all for environmentally sound farming practices (and so are most farmers.) I’m all for “real” food: eat butter, not margarine. Eat real cheese, not the fake stuff. And for god’s sake, please don’t eat Twinkies. (Ugh! I’m not a nanny-type, but if it were up to me, Twinkies and other fake food would be off the shelves.) I’m also for cooking at home, for those who have the time, and for eating wisely rather than stupidly. (see *1 below)

But I’m also for smart shopping: If you want to buy some burger, it’s real simple: don’t buy pre-packaged stuff.

Or, more precisely, don’t buy pre-packaged stuff with a brand name. Don’t grab pre-formed, pre-packaged burgers from the freezer section. That stuff’s been mixed at a packing plant and yes, odds are it contains LFTB. 

Instead, go to your meat department, and look for stuff packaged there in the store. Chances are it’s been ground in-store, using bits of meat left over from the other cuts of meat. Use common sense. Your stomach will thank you. 

Finally, if we’re going to have a conversation about food, let’s discuss rather than shout. Let’s try to be factual and honest and focus on reason rather than fear-mongering.

Here’s one thing I’ve picked up on in the past few years: There are a lot of people on the web who are “reporting” on food. But they’re not reporters in any conventional sense of the word. They’re advocates and they have an agenda --- and this is true on both “sides,” by which I mean the pro-food, locavore, “our food system is dangerous” side, and the “American farmers feed the world,” farmers-are-good-stewards side.

It’s in their best interest to persuade people and many of these "reporters" play fast/loose with the facts, employ emotional language, and rely on innuendo to make their point, assuming, apparently, that most people who read their work are gullible and won’t ask questions. These advocates present themselves as “reporters” but what they trade in is not accurate reporting, but polemic and sensationalism. 

Bottom line: Read with care. When you read an outrageous statement or an assertion that feels like a bombshell, don’t take it at face value until you’ve verified its accuracy. Eventually you’ll be able to separate the crap from the substance. 

You heard it here first.

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*1: At my house, there are only two of us, and we're not teenagers, if you know what I mean. And we both work at home, which means there's time to plan and prepare meals. (MAJOR money saver.) So, yes, it's "easy" for us to buy "good" meat. But I am well aware that for families pressed for time, and for those operating on marginal budgets (and I was both of those people for many many years), there's not always time/money to investigate and then act on alternatives. That's why my bottom line on all this is: don't eat so much meat. I stopped eating meat for "political" reasons when I was in my 20s back in the 70s. But the political morphed into the pratical and not eating meat is how I stretched tiny dollars into very good, and healthy, food for years on end. I recommend it. Anyone who says food isn't worth it (or too hard) just because there's no meat involved is wrong. Period. And no you don't have to become some fancy-schmancy "gourmet" (god but I hate that word) cook nor do you have to become a suffering vegetarian.

Yes! More On the Pink Slime Controversy: Facts Matter

There was a good piece about the "Pink Slime" uproar in yesterday's Bloomberg News --- more facts than we're used to getting, and a thorough account of the role of BPI, Inc., the company (wrongly) blamed for PS and its use. (*1) One of the players in this uproar is a woman named Bettina Elias Siegal, who blogs about food and particularly about food in American school lunch programs. Upset about the sale of PS to lunch programs, she launched an online petition to have it pulled from school lunchrooms.

I mention that here because of a quote from her in the Bloomberg article:

While blogger Siegel said the job losses are “tragic,” she notes that BPI “should have had no hesitation to inform consumers” that its product “was in the ground beef from the beginning,” perhaps through labeling. “I have never expressed anywhere a desire to drive this company out of business,” she said.

No wonder there's so much confusion and misinformation floating around! Siegel apparently doesn't know that BPI doesn't sell the product direct to customers. It isn't responsible for whatever labels are affixed to packages of hamburger that contain PS. BPI sells its lean finely textured beef (its trade name) to companies like ConAgra, who then add it to other ground beef to make hamburger, and then sell the burger to its customers.

So whatever labels the stuff could, or should, carry aren't up to BPI, but to the company/institution that actually packages the burger that contains PS. (A bit convoluted, but presumably you get my point.)

Is this a trivial matter of semantics? Probably. Unfortunately, such trivialities and missteps and errors keep piling on and adding up --- and now the Roth family may end up going out of business.

Yesterday I was in a Trader Joe's store --- and there, slapped on to the meat case, was a sign saying there was no PS in the company's beef products. And that processors and packers add ammonia to their products so that beef will have "that red color that customers want." (Or words to that effect. I didn't think to write down the wording; this is very close to the original.) To which I said "Huh?" And rolled my eyes.

Again: I remind readers that I'm not a shill for corporate America. I'm not attached to either "side" in this controversy. What drives me nuts is the way this affair is powered by an engine constructed primarily of misinformation, outright lie, emotion, and fear-mongering. This is our food system we're talking about. It's important. So I'd rather see the discussion rooted in substance rather than, well, fluff and fear.

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*1: Chops to Jen Robinson for pointing me to the article. I was out of the house most of yesterday and pretty well detached from the world.

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

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

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So --- back to the “pink slime” controversy: Many critics object to the fact that package labels don’t say “this meat contains meat scraps extracted from a carcass and subjected to ammonia gas in order to elevate its pH levels and kill bacteria.”  

Others object to the fact that LFTB is being used in school lunch programs. In response to that particular point, I’ll just say this: We barely pay teachers a living wage for teaching. What makes anyone think the American taxpayers are willing to spend more of their tax dollars on school lunches? (As with our drinking culture, we get the educational system we want.)

But let’s not lose sight of the reason meatpackers developed techniques to utilize those scraps: They were trying to keep consumer prices down and still allow the owners/shareholders of packing/processing companies to earn a profit. Those scraps represented a way to achieve both goals. 

Which brings us to the last of the major objections:Critics object to the CONTENT; to the stuff that LFTB is made from.

Many people believe that the ingredients in LFTB aren't “real” meat; that the scraps are byproduct material suitable only for dog food.

That truly puzzled me. How, I wondered, could any sane person think this is non-edible food? I finally found the answer: In 2009, a New York Times reporter wrote a story about BPI, and in that report he describes LFTB as

made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil.

Aha! Apparently, that’s where the “dog food” critique came from. Let’s think this through, shall we? 

The fact that the packing industry “once relegated” those scraps to use in pet food doesn’t make it “dog food.” What it means is that packers couldn’t figure out how to use those scraps in a way that consumers would accept (because of the “bone” problem).

But that's not the same thing as saying the scraps were/are “dog food,” or that they were inedible or unsafe for human consumption. All it means is that, barring a better method of utilizing those scraps, they’d turned them to profit by selling them to manufacturers of dog food.

Why would they do that? Because here’s a little-known but immensely useful fact about meatpacking in general and beef processing in particular: It’s damn near impossible to make a profit from the MEAT itself.

Packers have always relied on byproducts, whether hides, bone, hoof, thyroid, or whatever, to subsidize the cost of making the actual meat. Prior to the 1940s, those byproducts brought in good money: Packers sold hides to shoemakers, for example, and various animal parts to drug makers.

But from the 1940s on, meat byproducts declined in value: shoemakers replaced leather with vinyl, especially the soles; synthetic pharmaceuticals replaced old-fashioned drugs; plastic replaced bone buttons. You get the picture.

The loss of income from these byproducts was devastating to the packing industry. Many packers went out of business, and the survivors survived because they built ultra-efficient plants where machines replace human labor. (Another fact that drives critics crazy.)

Packers don’t have a choice, not if they want to keep the price of meat low enough to satisfy consumers: By itself, the meat won’t pay the bills. Packers must come up with other ways to reduce costs.  

So if they had meat scraps that couldn’t be mixed with other “beef,” their best bet was to sell the stuff to someone who could use it, in this case pet food manufacturers. But once packers developed a bone-free method of utilizing the scraps, they could add it to other ground beef and use it themselves rather than selling it to Purina. Makes sense to me.

Next: Be careful what you read. Even here!

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

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Four --- Part Five 

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By the early '00s, Roth’s method of manufacturing LFTB had been perfected (more or less; Roth is a guy who believes in constant improvement and refinement). BPI was selling LFTB to a host of customers, including grocery chains, food processors, and clients in what is known as the "hotel, restaurant, insitutional" trade (HRI).

Were there problems? Of course. In 2009, a reporter for the New York Times detailed some of the woes BPI encountered with its product --- but noted that BPI’s processing was regarded as more safe than most.

Which brings me to a point worth pondering: Journalists have been quick to report instances when BPI and other companies have been “caught” sending out product that was supposedly contaminated with a strain of e. coli or tainted with salmonella. But here’s what those reports rarely mention:

First, many times a company will recall a product if they suspect it’s tainted. They don’t have proof from tests, but, for whatever reason, they suspect a batch may be tainted, and so they pull it. Suspicion and proof are not the same thing.

Second, reporters rarely mention a crucial fact about testing methods: Those change constantly. And I mean from year to year, even from month to month. I picked up on this when I was researching the use of hormones in cattle production.

In the mid-1950s, cattle producers began adding diethylstilbestrol, or DES, to cattle feed. (It accelerated growth, so that cattle reached market weight faster, and on less feed. At the time, making meat at lower cost came close to being a national priority. Politics, foreign policy, and an educated consumer society drove the urgency.)

From the mid-1950s until 1979, when DES was banned, the tests used by the USDA and FDA to determine the presence of the hormone changed dramatically and often. The tests became both more powerful and more “accurate.” As results changed, so, too, did the definition of “acceptable” levels of use. What was an acceptable level in, say, 1958, had become “unacceptable” by 1963 because new test procedures allowed investigators to find more, if you will. 

That’s also true for e. coli. Researchers find “more” e. coli in foodstuffs in part because they’ve got far better tests now than they did in, say, 1986.

I hasten to add that, unlike humans, who evolve slowly, bacteria experience a much speedier evolutionary process; they also have the ability to become and to transmit resistance, which, in turn, means that they can change as they evolve.) So between rapid evolution on one hand, and better testing on the other, it’s no wonder that we hear so much about “contaminated” foods: We find more contamination because we have better ways of finding it.

But I gather from comments made by readers of my first two PS blog entries that many scientists believe that modern methods of cattle feeding may contribute to both the quantity and the virulence of e. coli bacteria. I’ve not had a chance to read up on that, but I’ll take their word for it. (For now.) (This is a good time to remind readers that I’m a HISTORIAN, not a chemist, microbiologist, or animal nutritionist.) (*1)

Next: Dog food, byproducts, and profits

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*1: A reader named Christopher Gordon posted a detailed comment about this in response to an earlier PS blog entry. I thank him for the time he took to comment:

I think you need to brush up on your knowledge about E. coli. It is one species of bacteria with many strains -- not all are harmful, not all can live in the same environments, and most are very specific and named. The strains normally present in grazing cattle have adapted to living in a higher pH than those normally present in humans. Any harmful strain in grazing cattle would not likely survive in our gut.

However, grain-fed cattle have much lower intestinal pH, and bacteria which colonize it will be able to survive in our intestines. This is where the dangerous strains of E. coil come to play -- they can survive in the acidic environment of cattle intestines, and can also survive in ours. What makes them dangerous are toxins secreted by these particular strains.

If you do a little research, you'll find scientific papers which show that finishing grain-fed cattle with a period of grazing or hay will correct the pH and significantly reduce or eliminate the nasty strains of E. coli. Additionally, the harmful strains are virtually unknown in cattle that are slaughtered after only grazing (no grain-feeding at all).