Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world (3 page)

— to take away our own home markets?

The congressman went on and on, but to Butz his plaint — and the message from much of his own constituency — had grown predictable and confounding, especially in light of the president's new mandate. Poage wanted the administration to back new quotas and tariffs on Malaysian palm oil. Butz was chagrined. As he recalled in a recent interview, "It was back to square one with the education campaign. The hardest thing to sell — and get the American farmer to understand — was that to expand exports we had to expand imports. We had to get farmers to think differently. They had been used to being protected. Yet the president wanted the government out of the farming business.

"So what was I to do?" Butz continued. "I finally came to the

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conclusion that I would have to take some heat to get the point across — even if it was from our own constituency." The new official line, Butz explained, was "to stand up for free trade on both sides — it was the only way I was going to keep some legitimacy bringing down other barriers abroad. President Ford gave me a lot more freedom than President Nixon, so I was able to go ahead on something that should have been done a long time ago."

Freed from Kissinger's "dirty little fingers" in international matters, Butz moved his new agenda quickly. To delay any new tariff or import legislation, he deployed his closest political staff to testify in front of a House Agriculture Committee meeting, where Poage was in high boil. Butz instructed his staff to tell the representatives that he would have to prepare a special report before considering their demands, and that the report would not be ready until May. The stall thus lodged, Butz assembled a group of his most ardent free trade advisers and planned what they came to call "the round the world free trade mission." Palm oil would be one of its first subjects, and Malaysia, where the bulk of it was grown and processed, would be one of his mission's first stops.

Palm oil had been around as a commercial fat for many years. The British had introduced Elaeis guineensis as a plantation crop in the late nineteenth century. Later on, the Malaysian government had subsidized the palm's widespread planting as a way to resettle thousands of poor Malays onto the new nation's rugged frontier. But palm oil, which is more chemically similar to beef tallow than traditional vegetable oil, was difficult to process. Some of its original American importers referred to it as axle grease. Its competitors called it tree lard.

In the mid-1970s, however, new technologies transformed tree lard into a viable commercial fat, one fit for everything from frying french fries to making margarine to baking cookies and bread and pies and no end of convenience ("built-in maid service") foods. It was, in a sense, the fat world's compatriot to the sugar

WHERE THE CALORIES CAME FROM

world's HFCS. Because it was a stable fat, products made with it lasted forever on supermarket shelves. True, a manufacturer might have to use more of it to achieve a good "mouthfeel," and that meant an increased caloric count in the resultant food product, but that, at least at the time, was a secondary issue. Price was key. And palm oil prices were unbelievably good — all the time. The trees produced heavily all year round. Palm oil was also tastier than many vegetable oils, mainly because of its molecular similarities to lard. There was one other thing: Palm oil was such a highly saturated fat that its proponents secretly touted it as "cow fat disguised as vegetable oil."

American health and medical experts already knew that saturated fats were bad for the cardiovascular system, plugging up arteries, sending blood pressure spiraling, and raising the chances that a consumer of such fats might die a premature death. In the Agriculture Committee's hearings on palm oil, Poage himself tried to marshal the health argument. "Palm oil is more highly saturated than hog lard," he testified. "I do not think that the American housewife should be put to the proposition of buying this palm oil without any notice whatever that it is not what she thinks it is. She thinks when she buys vegetable oil that that's all there is to it, and that she has got something good for her family. When she buys this type of vegetable oil, she ought to have a warning." Hence, in his bill, Poage proposed that all food containing palm oil come with a label stating that it "contains or was prepared or processed with palm oil, a highly saturated imported vegetable product."

Although Poage was more interested in the economic damage that palm oil was wreaking upon his soybean constituency than in its health impacts, he also happened to be on target. Hog lard, even then rarely used, was 38 percent saturated; palm oil was 45 percent saturated. His idea to label palm oil as a saturated fat was ten years ahead of its time. Yet in Congress, not a single medical authority testified against palm oil. As much as the medical establishment was concerned about saturated fats, palm oil seemed

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an unlikely candidate to be singled out for censure. The small body of science on the fat was mixed. It had been linked to gallstones in hamsters and hypertension in rats. But it also had been assessed positively because of its ability to prevent vitamin A deficiency in such nutritionally underdeveloped nations as Indonesia. Public health advocates were hardly prepared for a battle. The U.S. regulatory system for foods, split between the booster-ish USDA and the overburdened FDA, was hardly the place to initiate and fund speculative food science. Then, as now, foods were lightly regulated; their long-term medical consequences were less important than their immediate safety, purity, and usefulness.

And then, as now, food was an increasingly globalized political issue. In Malaysia, palm oil could make or break a career, and Butz's counterpart, Musa bin Hitam, had ridden it to the crest of power. Tough-minded and pragmatic, Hitam ran the country's powerful Ministry of Primary Industries, which among other things was responsible for palm oil production and sales. He operated the ministry like a business, setting goals for his staff and making quick response to trade queries a priority. Americans doing business in Kuala Lumpur knew Hitam as a progressive bureaucrat and a worthy negotiator.

On April 23, 1976, Hitam met Butz at Kuala Lumpur International airport and swept him off to a series of stopovers. The stops were meant to impress one message upon Butz: If Malaysia were to remain a strong ally in a still volatile Southeast Asia, the country needed enhanced trade with the United States and other developed nations. As Hitam later wrote, the palm oil trade was a "fuel for democracy."

"You must realize that 85 to 90 percent of our national budget comes from what I look after," Hitam told Butz. "In rubber alone, each 1 percent increase means $25 million in export earning for us." The same was true with palm oil, Hitam went on. Palm oil wasn't like soybean oil, which was merely a by-product of soy meal production. "It's a big bit of our entire earnings, sir."

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As the two men strode through a palm plantation in Selangor, Butz began to warm to Hitam, recalls John DeCourcy, a senior agricultural attache in the U.S. embassy in Kuala Lumpur at the time. Soon the secretary was telling funny stories from his own repertoire that illustrated the American version of Hitam's concerns.

"And he managed to get Hitam talking about something that no other American ever did: What could America sell to Malaysia?" DeCourcy recalls. "Traditionally all of Malaysia's imports — chicken parts, canned goods, even orange juice — had come from Europe, usually via some U.K. group that had longtime colonial ties. But Mr. Butz — he connected with this guy like no other I'd ever seen. Why, he even sat down and ate durian [one of the most foul-smelling fruits in the world] with him — and without betraying even a hint of discomfort or surprise."

Only two days after the visit, DeCourcy and Hitam both received messages from Butz. To Hitam he wrote: "May I assure you again that we intend to remain competitive in the edible oil field . . . and that means access to our markets. . . . We are delighted with your plans for product diversification, market development, and market diversification. We feel your interest and our interest in this area are identical." To DeCourcy he wrote that "we are going to stand foursquare for the principles of freer trade."

In other words, Poage be damned. Palm oil would be welcomed in America.

Reading his letter and breathing a sigh of relief, DeCourcy couldn't help but chuckle. He had just witnessed a deal that could alter the course of a nation — one that had been pulled off by a quirky man from Purdue who could eat a smelly durian with the relish of a farm boy chomping down on the season's first ripe watermelon.

Earl "Rusty" Butz, of course, would be remembered by most Americans not for his accomplishments in bringing down the cost of food, but rather for his one great vice: joke-telling. His

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most infamous — and last — official transgression took place in September 1976, when Butz was flying from the GOP convention in Kansas City to Los Angeles with a group of friends. It was late. The secretary was tired. Bored, he began telling jokes. Asked by John Dean why Republicans couldn't get more African Americans into their tent, Butz replied with an anecdote he'd heard from an old ward politician, something to the effect that all blacks really wanted was sex, loose shoes, and indoor plumbing. Dean published the remarks in an article he was writing for Rolling Stone. Gerald Ford, in a tight election campaign, castigated Butz. His own party stalwarts urged him to fire Butz. The president refused. The press picked up on the infighting and within a week, Earl Butz had resigned and returned to Purdue.

By the early 1980s, however, Butz's true legacy was everywhere evident. There were no more shortages of meat or butter or sugar or coffee. Prices on just about every single commodity were down, as were the prices of foods made with such commodities. In what would prove to be one of the single most important changes to the nation's food supply, both Coke and Pepsi switched from a fifty-fifty blend of sugar and corn syrup to 100 percent high-fructose corn syrup. The move saved both companies 20 percent in sweetener costs, allowing them to boost portion sizes and still make substantial profits.

Meat production worldwide soared as feed costs of soy meal and corn fell. That, in turn, spurred huge increases in the supply of soybean oil, a by-product, leading to even lower prices for that industrial fat. At the supermarket, calorie-dense convenience foods were thus becoming more and more affordable. High-fructose corn syrup made from the growing surpluses of U.S. corn had made it easier and less expensive to make frozen foods. TV dinners and boxed macaroni and cheese were downright cheap. At fast-food stands, portions were getting bigger. Fries were tasting better and better and getting cheaper and cheaper. (McDonald's, which at that time fried its potatoes in palm oil, had built its first Malaysian oil processing plant just months after Butz's

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visit.) And the very presence of such alternatives as palm oil forced traditional fat suppliers like the soybean growers to lower their prices as well.

In short, Butz had delivered everything the modern American consumer had wanted. A new plenitude of cheap, abundant, and tasty calories had arrived.

It was time to eat.

SUPERSIZE ME

(Who Got the Calories into Our Bellies)

If the wobbly economy of the 1970s had left consumers fulminating over high food prices and the forces that caused them, the same economy had driven David Waller-stein, a peripatetic director of the McDonald's Corporation, to rage against a force even more primal: cultural mores against gluttony. He hated the fifth deadly sin because it kept people from buying more hamburgers.

Wallerstein had first waged war on the injunction against gluttony as a young executive in the theater business. At the staid Balaban Theaters chain in the early 1960s, Wallerstein had realized that the movie business was really a margin business; it wasn't the sale of low-markup movie tickets that generated profits but rather the sale of high-markup snacks like popcorn and Coke. To sell more of such items, he had, by the mid-1960s, tried about every trick in the conventional retailer's book: two-for-one specials, combo deals, matinee specials, etc. But at the end of any given day, as he tallied up his receipts, Wallerstein inevitably came up with about the same amount of profit.

Thinking about it one night, he had a realization: People did not want to buy two boxes of popcorn no matter what. They

WHO GOT THE CALORIES INTO OUR BELLIES

didn't want to be seen eating two boxes of popcorn. It looked . . . piggish. So Wallerstein flipped the equation around: Perhaps he could get more people to spend just a little more on popcorn if he made the boxes bigger and increased the price only a little. The popcorn cost a pittance anyway, and he'd already paid for the salt and the seasoning and the counter help and the popping machine. So he put up signs advertising jumbo-size popcorn.

The results after the first week were astounding. Not only were individual sales of popcorn increasing; with them rose individual sales of that other high-profit item, Coca-Cola.

Later, at McDonald's in the mid-1970s, Wallerstein faced a similar problem: With consumers watching their pennies, restaurant customers were coming to the Golden Arches less and less frequently. Worse, when they did, they were "cherry-picking," buying only, say, a small Coke and a burger, or, worse, just a burger, which yielded razor-thin profit margins. How could he get people back to buying more fries? His popcorn experience certainly suggested one solution — sell them a jumbo-size bag of the crispy treats.

Yet try as he may, Wallerstein could not convince Ray Kroc, McDonald's founder, to sign on to the idea. As recounted in interviews with his associates and in John F. Love's 1985 book, McDonald's: Behind the Arches, the exchange between the two men could be quite contentious on the issue. "If people want more fries," Kroc would say, "they can buy two bags."