In Meat We Trust (28 page)

As it turned out, residents of Guymon and the surrounding county weren’t the only ones arguing over the impact of corporate hog farms. By the 1990s many Americans in both town and country were questioning the power of the new food giants, arguing, as others had nearly a century earlier, that they exercised too much control over the nation’s plates. In the Midwest, political activists organized to oppose the encroachment of corporate farms, and other critics challenged the dominance of meat in the American diet. That backlash announced the arrival of the newest power player in the meat and livestock industries: public interest groups that advocated on behalf of consumers, the environment, and what was left of “family farmers.”

7

The Doubters’ Crusade

I
N THE SPRING OF
1981, Mike Douglas, who hosted a daytime talk show (its popularity on par with that of Oprah Winfrey’s twenty years later), welcomed two guests to the program. One was Ralph Nader, a household name thanks to two decades of advocacy on behalf of American consumers. The other was Michael Jacobson, a Nader disciple who founded (and at this writing still heads) the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an organization that specializes in attacking food manufacturers and reforming Americans’ eating habits. Nader and Jacobson regaled viewers with the horrors of modern meat and inducted bacon and hot dogs into a “Junk Food Hall of Shame,” commemorating the moment by throwing meat onto the floor. Their showmanship did not go unnoticed. Officials with the National Pork Producers Council and the American Meat Institute (AMI) filed complaints with Douglas’s producers and with the Federal Communications Commission, arguing that Nader and Jacobson had used the airtime to promote “innuendo, implication
and unsubstantiated information” and foment “consumer distrust in the nation’s food supply.” The show’s producer, no doubt sensing a ratings bonanza in the make, offered meat equal time. On the appointed day, representatives from trade groups showed up—but so did Nader and Jacobson; Craig Claiborne, a widely published food writer who had recently embarked on a low-sodium diet; and The Captain and Tennille, a then-popular singing duo who touted the virtues of vegetarianism. With the stage stacked against them, the beef and pork representatives changed few viewers’ minds.

Such theatricality was part of Nader’s stock-in-trade, and by that time he’d been using it against meat makers for almost two decades. He’d launched his anti-meat crusade back in the late 1960s when he attacked the manufacturers of hot dogs, at the time the unofficial food of American childhood (thanks to the postwar baby boom, hot dog consumption soared 75 percent in the twenty years after the end of World War II). Using statistics he’d wrangled out of the USDA, Nader reported that in 1937, the typical dog contained about 19 percent fat and 20 percent protein. A 1967 hot dog, however, was nearly a third fat but less than 12 percent protein. Prodded by the publicity—Nader’s was already a household name thanks to his best-selling book
Unsafe at Any Speed
, an exposé of the automobile industry’s devotion to profits rather than consumer safety—in the summer of 1969, the USDA agreed to consider new regulations to govern the dog’s fat content and held a public hearing so that consumer advocates and meat industry representatives could weigh in on the proposals. The meat men asked for 35 percent, explaining that fat yielded a juicier, more toothsome dog. More like coronary delights, insisted the packers’ foes, and toxic to kids and grownups alike; they demanded that hot dogs contain no more than 25 percent fat. Then Virginia Knauer, President Richard Nixon’s consumer adviser, stepped in and issued an ultimatum: 30 percent and no more. The consumerites were delighted; USDA officials and meat industry representatives, flummoxed. Was the White House telling the Department of Agriculture what to do? Yes, Knauer assured them, it was. (Nixon later phoned Knauer to affirm that he backed her “100%”
on “the hot dog issue.” He was on a low-cholesterol diet, he explained, but he identified with the dog because of his “humble origins.” “Why, we were raised on hot dogs and hamburgers. We’ve got to look after the hot dog.”)

That hearing and the appearance on
The Mike Douglas Show
were all in a day’s work for Nader and his Raiders, activists who dedicated their lives to the cause of “consumerism.” For the rest of the twentieth century, Naderites would challenge the safety of meat products, the nutritional value of meat, and even how farmers raised the livestock that produced that meat. Those crusades, and others like them, changed the dynamics among government, private corporations, and ordinary citizens and fueled the growth of a consumer-interest infrastructure.

From the 1960s on, Nader was the most prominent face of a consumer activist movement that had begun back in the 1930s and grown steadily since then, an inevitable byproduct of the consumer-based economy. After all, if consumption made the economy go ’round, consumers themselves surely constituted one of society’s most important groups, a view confirmed by the events of the 1930s and 1940s. Much of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, for example, was designed to foster consumer activity. During World War II, federal officials enlisted shoppers as home-front warriors, urging them to monitor prices and report retailers who violated price control regulations. Organizations of “citizen consumers,”
and there were many, adopted the language of rights to demand the same recognition and protection granted to other interest groups, such as labor, agriculture, and business.

Ralph Nader, who was born in 1934, intended to further the cause. He believed that consumers were among society’s most vulnerable groups, their needs and wants too often ignored by politically motivated government bureaucrats, elected officials, and profit-driven corporate managers. Nader, the son of Lebanese immigrants, grew up in a small Connecticut town where his father owned a restaurant. The elder Nader was opinionated and argumentative and expected both his customers and his children to give and get the same. The younger Nader was by all accounts bright to the point of precociousness, studious, and, when interested, capable of intense concentration and focus. Ralph left his hometown to attend first Princeton and then Harvard, where he obtained a law degree. Along the way, he became obsessed with a need to combat corporations, which he dubbed “private governments,”
a phrase that echoed Upton Sinclair’s phrase of choice, “invisible governments,” and which, in his mind, wielded power to an extent that was unhealthy for a democratic society. The sales of
Unsafe at Any Speed
and income from a lawsuit against automakers earned Nader enough money to expand his crusade against corporate evils. Driven by zealousness that bordered on fanaticism, Nader—tall, lanky, gaunt to the point of being a bit spectral, and a reclusive workaholic—exuded charisma that inspired others to follow.

Nader may have been eccentric, but his attitude toward corporations was shaped by the era in which he lived. The 1950s are typically thought of in terms of McCarthyist anticommunism and
Leave It to Beaver
conformity, but it was also a decade in which the dangers of an atomic and chemically saturated world bombarded the American psyche. In 1953, for example, more than a thousand sheep died under mysterious circumstances in Utah, deaths that angry stockmen blamed on fallout, as it was called, from a Nevada weapons test site. The Atomic Energy Commission denied the charge, but that assertion lost authority the following year after drifting residue from a weapons test in the Pacific Ocean deposited a coating of white ash on twenty-three men aboard a Japanese fishing boat. The men became ill and one of their group died. This time it was impossible to pretend that fallout was not to blame. Worse, analysts determined that the dust contained a substance called strontium-90, and a few years later, the editors of
Consumer Reports
(founded in the 1930s to alert Americans about unsafe products and fraudulent manufacturing practices) informed readers that Sr-90 was embedded in the nation’s food supply, especially in milk. Then there was the Nightmare Before Thanksgiving: just days before the November holiday in 1959, the secretary of health, education, and welfare warned consumers that some of the nation’s cranberry crop was contaminated with the residue of aminotriazole, a herbicide and a known carcinogen. Most Americans celebrated that holiday season cranberry-free. Even the suburbs, that postwar haven from the city, weren’t safe, a fact millions of homeowners discovered when their backyard septic tanks turned lawns into toxic soup and new synthetic detergents rendered tap water undrinkable.

In the fall of 1960,
Time
magazine summarized the nation’s fears in a cover story titled “Environment v. Man.” The author told readers that every year, more than four hundred new chemicals were unleashed on an unknowing public, substances that wormed their way “into the air
people breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.” The “invisible” invaders “damage plants, kill fish, slip undetected through sewage-treatment plants and blanket entire cities with clouds of noxious vapor.” A medical expert calculated that 15 percent of cancer diagnoses were likely due to environmental causes. Nor were chemical assaults the only such woe. In 1965, eighteen thousand residents of Riverside, California, became ill, and several died, after drinking municipal water contaminated by salmonella, a word most Americans had never heard until then. The head of epidemiology at the National Communicable Disease Center described the rise in salmonella poisoning as “a major national problem.”
He and other experts blamed food-processing plants where workers manufactured enormous quantities of everything from frozen TV dinners to dried milk to boxed cake mixes. One careless move at just one factory, the epidemiologist explained, could spawn an “infection that [could] spread
throughout the country.” There was, it seemed, nowhere to run and no place to hide from the dangers of modern life. The relentless onslaught explains the robust sales and gut-punching impact of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book
Silent Spring
. Her work has been credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement, but a more accurate assessment is that the book was less a launching pad than a tipping point, as Carson articulated fears shared by many Americans. (It helped, however, that Carson was one of the best-known writers in America, thanks to two earlier, best-selling, prize-winning books about nature and science.) Had
Silent Spring
been released in, say, 1952, it’s unlikely that it would have had the same impact. Instead, it landed in the hands of a public well versed in the dangers of DES, DDT, and Sr-90.

Confronted with unpronounceable food additives, salmonella, and toxic milk—to say nothing of unsafe cars—Americans longed for someone, anyone, to voice their concerns. No wonder, then, that the circulation of
Consumer Reports
more than doubled in the second half of the 1960s, that so many people regarded Ralph Nader as a hero, and that so many law students abandoned conventional careers to join his crusade. In 1969, not long after the hot dog campaign, Nader landed on the cover of
Time
magazine, his face presented as a Warholesque collision of orange and green, that image sliced by a banner announcing “The Consumer Revolt.”
“Evidently there’s a dearth
of causes right now,” grumbled a vice president at the Jewel grocery chain. “Consumerism has become like motherhood and the flag, with everybody jumping on the bandwagon.” Nader thought that critic had it backward. “Other issues such as Vietnam
and civil rights have divided the country into camps,” he argued, and those who had something to sell would always be divided from those who wanted to buy. But among consumers, there was “no split.” Everyone, black or white, young or old, rich or poor, was a consumer, and consumerism was a “people’s movement.” Nader tapped into that collective identity and into the frustration and fear that afflicted the most affluent society in history. He also understood that because consumers were voters, he could always count on some politicians to support him. But Nader’s genius lay in his ability to particularize the war on corporate power. Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, who battled meatpackers using the arcana of antitrust laws and courtroom maneuvers, Nader taught Americans to think about consumer protection in terms of the stuff of daily life, whether baby food or automobiles.

Nader’s war on the hot dog is a good example of the way he framed corporate evils in terms that resonated with the public. When he launched the hot dog crusade in the late sixties, he knew that Americans were already unnerved by a string of reports about the alleged relationship between fat and disease, thanks to another face from the cover of
Time
magazine, Ancel Keys, then one of the nation’s most famous scientists and primary perpetrator of the fat-is-bad theory. Time and again, Nader and his colleagues would use Keys’s ideas
to educate the public about the evils of corporate power and the way in which corporations sacrificed the public health in favor of profits—but also to warn Americans about the dangers of meat.

Keys’s influence and the “fat is bad” mantra took shape after World War II, when medical experts began warning Americans about a heart disease epidemic. The evidence for the alleged epidemic was (and is) shaky, based as it was on anecdote rather than fact. It was true that physicians were diagnosing more heart disease, but that was because they had better tools with which to identify it. Moreover, thanks to medical advances like antibiotics, life expectancy rates were rising and more Americans were experiencing the ailments that afflict aging hearts. Rather than tout those explanations, however, many in the medical establishment linked the epidemic to diet. Once again, the connection was flimsy: during the 1940s, the rates of heart disease and heart attack had declined in Europe but gone up in the United States. At the time, and thanks to war-related food scarcities, Europeans ate diets low in protein, fat, and calories. That was enough to convince the easily persuaded: people living in “poor” countries experienced fewer heart attacks than affluent Americans who feasted on foods rich in fat, sugar, salt, and protein. Therefore, rich diets and rich people reaped rich numbers of heart attacks. Never mind that this leap into cause and effect rested on virtually no research, and none that controlled for other factors, such as whether postwar Europeans walked more than Americans or engaged in more physical labor. In 1948, Congress responded to the fear-mongering by creating the National Heart Institute and the National Heart Council. As is often the case, Congress offered the organizations little in the way of money, so staffers at the new agencies launched public relations campaigns designed to prove the heart disease danger and thus persuade senators and representatives to part with the public’s money. Worried that it might be left behind in the scramble for financial support, the American Heart Association (AHA), a decades-old but moribund organization of physicians interested in (medical) matters of the heart, hired a public relations firm that transformed the AHA into a fundraising powerhouse devoted to broadcasting the evils of heart disease. The ensuing publicity generated research proposals from scientists looking for a share of public and private money, and so began the search for facts with which to flesh out the phantom epidemic.