In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), the scholar Thomas Malthus put forth a seemingly inevitable principle: population, left unchecked, increases exponentially, while food production increases only arithmetically. Thus, following the laws of mathematics, mass starvation must one day ensue, causing a die-off of the human race.
Yet Malthus was wrong, at least about the second premise of his principle: the production of food over the last two centuries has been able to keep up with—and often surpass—the exponential growth of the human population. Today, there’s more than enough food for the world’s 6.7 billion people, and most starvation arises, not from a basic lack of food, but from inadequate distribution, incompetent governments, or overconsumption.
Malthus’s fundamental error was underestimating the capacity of technology to increase efficiencies, extend productive land, and deflect costs into remote ecosystems and the future. He did not foresee the potential of irrigation, pest-resistant seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides to boost crop yields. Nor, for foods like beef, did he foresee the capacity of businesses to produce a more efficient steer by injecting it with hormones to grow faster, feeding it buckets of corn and soy to fatten it more quickly, confining it in a feedlot to keep it marbled and heavy, and treating it with antibiotics to help it survive these unnatural conditions. He did not foresee the potential of disassembling that steer on a fast-moving conveyer belt in industrial slaughterhouses, paying workers next to nothing to carve out every scrap, and of then transporting its meat—ground, dried, frozen, canned—from faraway farmlands to cities. And he did not foresee how efficiently and cheaply multinational corporations could distribute these meat products through supermarket chains and fast-food outlets to the hungry (and not-so-hungry) masses. How, after all, could he have imagined such a future?
Industrial farming, as the history of commercial beef in this chapter shows, has saved many humans from starving. Indeed, in many countries, overconsumption of beef, among other foods, has made obesity a far greater threat to human health than starvation. But rising obesity is not the only unintended consequence of the much expanded production and consumption of beef. As this chapter argues, keeping the output of beef apace with rising populations and surging per capita consumption has generated many shadow effects for people and ecosystems (including farm animals)
A Lithuanian immigrant from the imagination of Upton Sinclair, Jurgis Rudkus lives a life of unremitting misery. He toils in a slaughterhouse of Packingtown, Chicago, at the beginning of the twentieth century.Shrouded in gloom, knives slash at carcasses with lightning strokes. The floors and walls are cold, slippery, and bloody, the stench gut wrenching. The bosses are brutal, whipping workers to make the disassembly line go faster. The workers are given no training, no benefits, and virtually no wages. Driven by greed, the meatpacking oligopoly greases a city of graft run by gangster politicians.
Every scrap of meat—even the rancid and disease ridden—is shoveled, along with rats and their feces, into the ground beef and sausages, canned and pickled as delicacies. Before long, Jurgis is cheated into debt, then injured and cast aside, without work or pay. Forced to struggle even harder to support the family in this slaughterhouse hell, his young bride goes mad after being sexually abused by her boss.
Then, having served jail time for beating his wife’s abuser half to death, when it seems life couldn’t possibly get any worse, Jurgis is unable to scrounge up enough money to save his wife from dying in childbirth. Grief stricken, he slogs on, working at menial jobs in Chicago to support his toddler son. When, however, the boy drowns in a ditch steps away from his ramshackle home, life loses all meaning for Jurgis. After this, he lurches about without purpose, becoming a hobo, a strikebreaking scab, a political lackey, a falling-down drunk.
Sinclair’s moralizing novel, which without any subtlety he titled The Jungle , ends after Jurgis discovers socialism, and from the ashes of his despair comes the hope of an electoral uprising of the workers of America. In his account of a Chicago slaughterhouse in the early years of industrial ranching, Sinclair had sought to show how the pursuit of efficiencies and savings was turning the family farm into a factory, with bosses exploiting workers to produce more “food,” faster and cheaper. The Jungle is arguably Sinclair’s most influential work in a lifetime of publishing over 90 books. But the reaction of the American public disappointed him. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”1
The reaction of American consumers to such stories—disgust and outrage, then demands for government controls to ensure sanitary working conditions and the quality of meat—has been common elsewhere, too. Meat sales have sometimes declined after readers experienced the shock of “seeing inside” a slaughterhouse, but this has always been temporary, and, as this chapter documents, per capita meat consumption has been rising in every culture since the early 1900s.
The Jungle was a bestseller in the United States. But it did not cause the mass uprising Sinclair had hoped for. To his dismay, the outrage stirred up by his novel was not over the hardships of Jurgis and his fellow workers, but over the unsanitary slaughtering in the meatpacking plants. Wasn’t the health of consumers at risk? Sinclair had spent many weeks researching his novel in the meat slums of Chicago: his description was vivid, specific, as seemingly real as any journalistic exposé. Beef sales began to tumble as sales of his novel climbed. Public pressure for action grew; before long, the U.S. Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.2
These acts, which created the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, gave the government better control over the quality of the meat bought by the average American consumer. Conditions for U.S. meatpackers in the first half of the twentieth century began to improve, too, under pressure from public health advocates and unions. The stomach-turning scenes in The Jungle did not, however, produce a manifesto for a world vegetarian revolution, and after the initial drop in U.S. beef sales, did nothing to alter the trend toward eating more meat. Instead, as this chapter also documents, over the last century, the capitalists of Sinclair’s world—who were using assembly lines even before Henry Ford—have managed to further improve the “efficiencies” of producing beef.3 Ranches are bigger. The cattle fatten faster on a diet of cheap grain, growth hormones, and antibiotics. High-tech disassembly plants process the beef. And cattle graze in chemically fertilized pastures and cleared rainforests.
As a result, industrial farmers over the last century have been able to produce enough beef to easily outpace the needs of growing human populations, so much so that many people now consume too much for a healthy diet. The trend toward consuming ever more beef, as chapter 16 will document, is an increasing strain on environmental resources, from local waterways to tropical rainforests to the global climate. On a more optimistic note, chapter 17 will chart a shift among some consumers toward eating more “sustainable” beef, such as natural, organic, or grass fed. Yet, as that chapter will show, such environmentally friendly change is chasing a stampede of demand for cheap steaks and ground beef sold by industrial meatpackers. Understanding the reasons for this demand requires us to step back and look at the history of consuming farmed meat.
Agricultural societies began to emerge 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, when nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle in fixed locales. The resulting increase in consistent food supplies spurred a trend toward larger towns and, eventually, cities. Still, farming practices in traditional agricultural societies did not allow for quick weight gain in domesticated animals. Most farmers kept cattle, horses, or camels for transportation, for plowing and dunging their fields, and for producing milk, rather than for meat. Indeed, archaeological evidence and written records suggest that per capita meat consumption was generally low and stable in most traditional agricultural societies—rarely more than 5-10 kilograms (about 10-20 pounds) a year.4
Peasants in many of the subsistence societies of Europe, imperfect records suggest, rarely ate meat more than once a week, and large quantities only during celebratory feasts. Although nobles, wealthy landowners, marching armies, and city dwellers tended to eat more meat than peasants did, their numbers were comparatively small. Animals generally supplied less than 15 percent of all dietary protein in Europe, even into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to one study, meat accounted for less than 3 percent of the average annual food energy in early-nineteenth-century France. Another study calculated the per capita meat consumption of poor Welsh and English laborers in the late 1700s at just over 8 kilograms (18 pounds) a year. Still another put the annual average consumption of meat in Germany in 1820 at less than 20 kilo-grams (44 pounds). The per capita consumption of meat was even lower in most other parts of the world, such as in China, India, and Japan, although colonial settlers in countries like Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand were beginning, even before industrialization, to consume much higher amounts of meat (especially beef and mutton) than those consumed in Europe.5
Eating habits changed significantly in western Europe and North America after the mid-1800s as agricultural output rose, cities expanded, and industrialization intensified. The average diet began to include more meat, fish, dairy foods, fruit, and sugar—and less staple cereals and legumes; rising imports of foods from colonies also provided more choices. The beef industry expanded particularly quickly. Beef producers in countries like the United States began to integrate small ranches into industrial meatpacking plants. In 1850, just 185 meatpacking plants were operating in the United States, producing $12 million worth of red meat; by 1919, there were over 1,300 plants, producing $4.2 billion worth.
Similar shifts in diets and meat processing began to occur across the globe over the next 100 years. After World War II, the pace of change accelerated with new crop varieties, new chemical sprays and fertilizers, ever larger mechanized farms, and more efficient processing techniques, and as these changes spread to the populous countries of the developing world, most notably those of East Asia.6
The number of farm animals has been climbing rapidly since the 1950s. There are now over 1 billion pigs, 1.3 billion cattle, 1.8 billion sheep and goats, and 17 billion chickens. Worldwide, annual meat production has jumped more than fivefold since 1950—to over 260 million metric tons. Annual per capita consumption of meat from 1950 to 2005 more than doubled: from 17 to 40 kilograms (38 to 88 pounds). Beef accounts for around 25 percent of this total, behind pork at 38 percent and poultry at 30 percent.7
China is by far the world’s largest national consumer of meat, with annual consumption now over 68 million metric tons and rising, in large part because of steadily increasing per capita consumption, at just over 52 kilograms (115 pounds) a year in 2002. China consumes far more meat than other heavily populated countries like India and Indonesia. India consumed 5.5 million metric tons of meat in 2002, and Indonesia 1.8 million metric tons; this translates into an annual per capita consumption for that year of 5 kilograms (11 pounds) in India and 8 kilograms (18 pounds) in Indonesia. China is increasingly relying on grains and soy meal to sustain its livestock (and promote rapid weight gains); by 2000 it was already using about one-quarter of its grain to feed livestock—twice as much as in 1980.
Although the United States is the world’s second largest national meat consumer, with annual consumption now over 39 million metric tons, its per capita consumption—at 125 kilograms (275 pounds) a year in 2002—is far higher than China’s.8 Beef remains at the core of the American meat diet. The consumption of beef in the United States took off after 1870: the cattle shipped over by European colonists were thriving in the open plains of the American West and the market for beef was expanding as refrigerated railway cars allowed more beef to reach consumers in the growing cities of the East Coast.
Americans, on average, were eating 23 kilograms (about 50 pounds) of beef a year in 1910-15. This average would rise and fall over the twentieth century—from a low of just under 19 kilograms (about 40 pounds) in 1930-35 to a high of close to 39 kilograms (about 85 pounds) in 1970-75—with an overall annual average for the twentieth century of nearly 27 kilograms (about 60 pounds) per person. By the start of the twenty-first century, average annual consumption of beef had risen to around 29 kilograms (64 pounds) per person, an amount not dramatically higher than in 1909 (when the U.S. government first began to keep records) and one that has held fairly steady despite regular advertising campaigns to encourage more beef consumption.9The reason is simple: Americans began to eat far more poultry—from an annual total of less than 5 kilograms (about 10 pounds) per person in 1909 to nearly 27 kilograms (about 60 pounds) in 2004. Largely as a result, beef as share of total meat consumption in the United States has declined over the last 100 years, from around 45 percent in 1909 to less than 35 percent in 2004.10
Some cultures, such as those of India, have long traditions of vegetarian diets. Others, such as many in Asia, have long culinary histories of popular dishes with little or no meat. Various surveys of consumers in countries like the United States and United Kingdom have also shown rising interest in vegetarian choices. Still, the percentage of vegetarians remains low in wealthy Western countries—with surveys usually finding that between 4 and 10 percent of respondents identify themselves as “vegetarian” (in various senses and with various degrees of commitment).
Although more people across many cultures seem to be choosing a vegetarian diet, this is having little statistical impact on the worldwide consumption of meat as the human population rises and as increasing numbers of people eat more meat. Average meat consumption in developing countries, for example, was 10 kilograms (22 pounds) per person in 1964-66; by 1997-99, it was 26 kilograms (57 pounds). The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects it will rise to 37 kilograms (82 pounds) per person by 2030—despite continuing rapid rates of population growth.11 The globalization of industrial meat production over the last century explains how the world has been able to supply so much meat to so many people. The beef industry is typical—with U.S. meatpackers, agricultural companies, and fast-food corporations playing leading roles.
Many consumers still imagine beef comes from a vast and rugged ranch—from Wild West Texas or the Aussie outback. Indeed, in much of the world, this is the case. But hundreds of millions of cattle also live at least part of the year in crowded and confined feedlots. Such factory farming methods now account, according to some estimates, for over 40 percent of global beef production.12 The animals on many industrial farms live with little natural light or fresh air. To “produce” veal, for example, some farms separate calves from their mothers a few days after birth, lock them in stalls so small they cannot lie down or groom comfortably, then feed them a liquid diet from buckets to keep the “meat” tender and pale to meet consumer preferences. These calves are typically slaughtered after 16 weeks.
Few consumers have seen such stomach-turning practices, and fewer still have openly protested the treatment of cattle (unlike the many who have protested the hunting of whales or harp seals). The total number of cattle in these conditions has been rising steadily over the last 100 years. Some 500 million head of cattle roamed the earth at the start of the twentieth century. Now there are nearly three times as many. But the near tripling in the total number of cattle does not accurately reflect an even bigger rise in the consumption of beef as producers bring heavier cattle to the market even faster than when the “Beef Trust,” an oligopoly of wealthy Chicago meat-packers, controlled the U.S. beef industry at the start of the twentieth century.
The power of the Beef Trust in the United States peaked in 1917, when the five biggest meatpacking firms accounted for over half of the market. Then, under pressure from “trustbusters” in the federal government, and following a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into collusion among firms to divide markets and fix prices, the largest meatpacking firms agreed to sign a consent decree in 1920 that forced them to sell off stockyards, retail stores, railways, and livestock journals.
The following year, Congress established the Packers and Stockyards Administration to combat price-fixing and collusion in the beef industry. Over the next half century, small ranchers received better prices for cattle through open bidding at auctions. The working conditions within many meatpacking plants were improving as unions won increases in wages and benefits and government regulators forced higher standards for safety and sanitation. These improvements were not to last, however. In the 1960s, the Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) began to recruit migrant workers from Mexico for plants in rural areas (away from union strongholds). As other meatpackers followed suit, wages across the whole industry fell markedly over the next two decades
Regulation of the beef industry took a sharp turn during the administration of Ronald Reagan (1981-89). By 1980, the market control of the largest beef producers was far less than in the days of the Beef Trust. The Reagan administration, however, began to allow meatpacking firms to merge and gain control over local cattle markets.14 Today, just four firms control more than 80 percent of the meatpacking: Tyson Foods (which acquired IBP in 2001), Excel (a subsidiary of Cargill), Swift and Company (formerly ConAgra Beef), and the National Beef Packing Company. This market control, as bestselling author Eric Schlosser writes, “is now at the highest level since record-keeping began in the early 20th century.”15
Today, for many workers, meatpacking is again, as in the days of Jurgis Rudkus, a low-paying and dangerous job, even as U.S. consumers spend about $70 billion a year on beef. A typical plant, according to Schlosser, “now hires an entirely new workforce every year or so.”16Many of these workers are illegal immigrants.
Because of different geographies, farming traditions, and regulatory systems, considerable differences exist in how ranchers and meatpackers treat cattle across and within countries. Some American farmers, for example, rely solely on grass to feed cattle. Most cattle, however, eat grass for six months or so on a ranch, then, in the language of industrial farming, are “finished” during the fall and winter months in feedlots holding as many as 100,000 cattle, where they feed on grains, often mixed with antibiotics and protein supplements, to fatten them as quickly as possible.17
Corn is the most popular ingredient for cattle feed in the United States, with government subsidies ensuring cheap and plentiful supplies; 50-60 percent of the corn harvest in the United States is now fed to livestock. Grazing cattle, on average, gain no more than 0.5 kilogram (1 pound) a day, whereas cattle in feedlots tend to gain more than twice as much, over 1 kilogram (2 pounds) a day. Many cattle also receive growth hormones, which can increase weight gain by 20 percent. Over 90 percent of cattle raised in the United States by industrial methods now receive growth hormones through injections or implants (a practice banned by the European Community in 1988).18
Together, these practices in the United States result in a highly efficient weight-gain program for cattle. Steers at the beginning of the twentieth century would commonly live at least 4-5 years before slaughter. By the 1950s, ranchers were able to get a steer to slaughter weight within 2-3 years. Today, the new antibiotic feeds and hormones can enable a calf to gain over 500 kilograms (and reach a profitable slaughter weight) in as little as 14 months.19
Ranchers commonly truck these cattle to slaughterhouses able to process hundreds of carcasses every hour.20 As in the days of Jurgis Rudkus, efficient slaughtering still relies on workers with razor-sharp knives along a disassembly line. But meatpacking firms have found additional efficiencies and savings, too. Today’s machines can, for example, slice even more “legal meat” from carcasses. The merger of firms during the Reagan administration substantially reduced operating costs. Busting unions and relying on illegal labor have made operations cheaper still. Disassembly lines are now faster, too, with some able to handle close to 400 cattle per hour, almost twice the typical rate of 25 years ago. Giant slaughterhouses, such as those of Tyson, Excel, Swift, and National Beef, have been able to reduce costs by as much as 40 percent since the early 1980s, with the result that, according to the Department of Agriculture, wholesale beef prices have gone down almost every year since then.21
On the other hand, these advances in producing more affordable beef have not been without costs. The “advanced meat recovery systems” of the 1990s relied on hydraulic pressure to strip any remaining meat off the processed carcass bones. This extra meat was valuable filler for hamburgers, hotdogs, and pizza toppings. But applying too much pressure—or removing the spinal cord improperly—laced meat with bone and nerve tissue: the USDA, for example, found spinal cord tissue in some of the meat in 1997. Consumer groups, such as the National Consumers League, called for a ban on such meat recovery systems, arguing that the meat recovered was, not proper beef, but beef-bone mush that was leaving consumers at greater risk of mad cow disease.
At the time, the beef industry saw little reason to panic. Used properly, recovery systems did not taint beef. Besides, unlike cattle in the United Kingdom, cattle in the United States did not suffer from mad cow disease. Still, under pressure from consumer groups, and worried about public reactions, some major buyers—notably General Mills and McDonald’s— decided to no longer use advanced recovery beef. Several meatpacking firms—facing stricter regulations, rising costs of supervising advanced recovery machines, and purchasing policies of firms like McDonald’s— decided to mothball these machines. By 2004, the number of processors using them had fallen from 35 to below 30.
For ranchers, the capacity to fatten and process cattle more quickly has not necessarily meant greater profits. The beef industry has always been a tough business. According to the publisher of the Cattle Buyers Weekly , relatively high labor costs and variable cattle prices mean that profit margins for meatpacking firms rarely exceed 2 percent.22 Dependent on these firms, the latest generation of ranchers raising cattle during the spring and summer months for sale to feedlots are facing especially hard times. “Hell,” a South Dakota rancher grumbled in a 2002 interview, “my dad made more money on 250 head than we do on 850.”23Slim profit margins, however, do not mean meatpacking firms are not prospering. Just the opposite: over the last half century, the globalization of industrial beef production has played a central role in the growing profits of the fast-food industry, whose continued expansion is generating even more demand for cheap beef.
The growth of the fast-food industry over the last 50 years has altered patterns of meat consumption across many cultures. With restaurants in over 120 countries and territories and with record-high revenues in 2007 of nearly $23 billion, the world’s largest fast-food chain, McDonald’s, serves over 50 million customers a day and is now the largest buyer of beef in countries like the United States. Many other fast-food chains featuring hamburgers, such as Burger King, Wendy’s, A&W, and Hardees, are serving many millions more customers. Still other fast-food outlets offer different choices—fresh submarine sandwiches, thick-crust pizza, fried chicken, and spicy tacos, for example. Indeed, the world’s largest submarine sandwich chain, Subway, now operates over 26,000 restaurants in over 80 countries—with, it brags, more outlets in the United States, Canada, and Australia than McDonald’s. The world’s largest chain of pizza restaurants, Pizza Hut, operates in over 100 countries and territories. The world’s biggest chain of fried chicken restaurants, Kentucky Fried Chicken, serves 8 million customers a day from more than 11,000 restaurants in more than 80 countries and territories. These last two chains are part of the world’s largest restaurant “system,” YUM! Brands—a parent company that also owns Taco Bell, A&W, and Long John Silver’s, giving it control of more than 35,000 restaurants.24
Supersizing meals is a common strategy among these fast-food chains to entice and keep customers. Take Burger King’s Stacker: four slabs of beef, four strips of bacon, and four slices of cheese, for a total of some 1,000 calories. The sales pitch to consumers is hardly subtle: in one Burger King commercial in 2006, a manager yells, “More meat!” at workers making a burger. Nor is the Stacker even the biggest hamburger. Hardee’s Thickburger, for example, weighs in at over 1,400 calories—about 70 percent of a typical person’s recommended daily calorie intake. Advertising fast food as a deal, as getting “more” for “less,” is true even for restaurant chains like Subway, which proudly claims that its subs are so healthy and so fat free that eating them every day is an easy way to diet—a sales pitch the company runs alongside its latest advertising jingle: “Double the meat, double the cheese!”
Other fast-food chains, seeing the growth of ones like Subway, have begun to offer “healthier” choices as well, such as salads, fruit bowls, veggie burgers, and bottled water. The big profits, however, remain with the Big Macs, the Whoppers, the Stackers, and the Thickburgers. Some chains have even lost money on the healthy items. Wendy’s fresh fruit bowl, for example, failed to sell well even after a $20 million advertising blitz in 2005. “We listened to consumers who said they want to eat fresh fruit,” explained a spokesman for the fast-food chain, “but apparently they lied.”25
Given such trends, the current global crisis of rising obesity is hardly surprising. The United States has some of the world’s highest rates of obesity: two-thirds of adults are now overweight (Body Mass Index of 25 or more) or obese (BMI of 30 or more). Children are overweight, too: currently about one in six children from 6 to 19 years of age. The U.S. Surgeon General now estimates the total medical cost of illnesses related to obesity at well over $100 billion a year. This is a sharp rise from just two decades ago, when fewer than half of adults were overweight.
Rates of obesity are rising in the rest of the world as well, even in the developing world, where changing lifestyles and diets increasingly high in sugar and fat are causing even the undernourished to gain weight. Over one-and-a-half billion adults are now overweight, with at least 400 million of them obese. Even children under the age of five—some 20 million worldwide—are now overweight.26
In this era of Burger King Stackers and Meat Lovers Pizzas, the global consumption of meat is expected to rise even more over the next few decades. On average, people are already consuming around 175 pounds (about 80 kilograms) of meat a year in the developed world. Still, wealthy consumers are capable of eating far more, as annual per capita meat consumption in the United States shows (about 100 pounds higher). Yet the biggest potential for growth is in the developing world. Although, on average, people there are consuming far less meat, per capita consumption has been steadily climbing since the 1970s, and although it will remain well below the First World, all trends suggest the Third World will continue to close the gap over the next decade or so (reaching about 80 pounds per person by 2020).27 The beef industry will supply much of the future worldwide demand for meat—a trend, as we’ll see in chapter 16, that will further intensify and extend the ecological impacts of consuming beef.