In Meat We Trust (32 page)

Leaders of the meat industry’s primary trade group, the American Meat Institute, conceded the point, but they argued that federal inspectors were also part of the problem. “They don’t know
where they’ll fit [in a new system],” argued an AMI spokesman. “They’re not microbiologists.” Not so, retorted an official with the inspectors’ union. He and other inspectors were “not against technology,
and we’re not against moving forward.” But they objected to proposals that would replace conventional inspection with a “science-based system.” Nor were packing plants the only problem. The Jack in the Box episode was blamed less on
E. coli
than on line workers who had failed to cook hamburger to the required temperature. But state and city food and restaurant inspection systems suffered from that most common of ailments, lack of funds. Consider the case of Kansas: Its inspectors were charged with traveling to and inspecting thirty-two restaurants a week. Any one inspector might manage a cursory search for, say, cockroaches and overflowing dumpsters, but it’s unlikely they’d have time to do much more.

Changes were needed, but what those should be, and how to implement them, was open to debate. Some critics argued that the USDA should shift its mission from agricultural cheerleading to consumer protection. Easier said than done. For over a century, the department had tried to be, and often succeeded at being, all things to all people: it had led the way in eradicating crop and livestock diseases and in promoting improved agricultural and livestock management. But it was also the cheerleader-in-chief for the nation’s food industries, and employees promoted both production and consumption of everything from steak to broccoli, from poultry to cantaloupe. Asking the department to support and promote the interests of farmers, manufacturers, and consumers was bound to generate power struggles and gridlock. Worse, the work of the FDA and the USDA typically either overlapped or collided. In the wake of
the Jack in the Box case, one reporter pointed out the looniness of a food safety system that required the USDA to inspect canned soups that contained meat, and the FDA to inspect soups without. Reforming the status quo was easier to imagine than do; there are few human endeavors more entrenched than bureaucracies.

The Jack in the Box incident cast doubt on the USDA, on meat safety, and on food inspection, but a different disaster highlighted the role that agriculture played in putting meat on the table: the North Carolina manure spills of the late 1990s. Those marked a turning point; after that, it was hard for anyone to ignore the costs of factory farming.

No state had benefited more from the new geography of hog farming than North Carolina, and no group more than Murphy Farms, one of the biggest hog farmers in the United States. Murphy Farms was the brainchild of Wendell Murphy. After graduating from college in 1960, he taught high school briefly, but like that other schoolteacher-turned-agricultural-power-player, Warren Monfort, Wendell Murphy wanted a different life. In the early 1960s, he bought a corn mill, which he operated with his father and brother. From there it was a short leap into feeding hogs. In 1964, the Murphys recruited their first contract “growers,” and as in the broiler industry, the Murphys functioned as banker and coordinator, loaning their growers the money needed to buy piglets and feed, and selling the hogs when they were ready for market. Over the next twenty years, the family embraced confinement production, signed up dozens of contractors, and built farrowing operations. In the late 1980s, they expanded into Iowa because, said Wendell, “we wanted to find out
if we ought to be in the hog business in Iowa or North Carolina.” He concluded that North Carolina had more advantages, especially weather, but that didn’t stop the family from establishing additional outposts in Missouri and Illinois. But as had been the case with the Monforts back in the 1950s, the Murphys’ desire for growth collided with lack of outlets: Murphy Farms produced more hogs than North Carolina packers could process.

Deliverance arrived
in the form of Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based hog slaughter and pork-processing company. Like Murphy, Smithfield’s president, Joseph Luter III, wanted to expand but couldn’t lay his hands on as many hogs as he needed. Urban sprawl had devoured Virginia farms, and he was trucking a third of his kill from the Midwest, a logistical burden that raised his costs relative to midwestern slaughtering operations. His problem became the solution to the Murphys’. In early 1990, Luter announced plans to build the world’s largest hog slaughterhouse in North Carolina, not far from where Murphy and other hog-farming giants raised millions of animals. When the new plant opened in 1992, it ignited North Carolina’s already robust hog-farming industry: in 1991, the state turned out 2.8 million hogs; in 1994, the number hit 7 million, nearly all of them clustered in the southeastern corner of the state.

But even in hog-friendly North Carolina, hogs, pork packing, and the jobs both created came at a price, and critics dug in their heels. “We are not against
the smaller farmer,” explained a spokesman for the Alliance for a Clean Swine Industry, but he and other opponents objected to “the bondage of feces and urine” created by big hog farms. But what mattered more? Jobs or odor? According to many residents in that part of the state, jobs did. When Bladen County officials held a hearing to consider Smithfield’s request to build, more than a thousand people showed up, many of them wearing “I support Smithfield” buttons, and a “wildly cheering”
crowd roared its approval when the state’s commissioner of agriculture urged county officials to let Smithfield move forward. As hogs, and jobs, proliferated, local media tracked the turmoil and the debate. In February 1995, reporters at the
Raleigh News & Observer
published a series of reports on the impact of the state’s hog industry, little of which was flattering, especially the portrayal of Wendell Murphy as “Boss Hog,” the legislative kingpin who called the shots and built the industry. (Murphy, who served in the state legislature from 1983 to 1992, was not insulted. “All of a sudden,
I found myself a hero,” he said later. “It was like all of a sudden people really started coming to me: ‘Man, you are really good. We didn’t know you were doing all this stuff.’”) The series, which won a Pulitzer Prize, described the complaints of people who loathed the industry’s odors and feared the pollution, detailed the way the legislature had smoothed the path for hog farming and the world’s biggest slaughtering house, and noted the gratitude of those who saw impoverished counties gain jobs and income. It captured, in short, the complexity, paradox, and unease that was meat in late-twentieth-century America and drew attention to agriculture, an economic sector whose efficiency had rendered it all but invisible in the eyes of the general public. In the wake of the coverage, the state’s legislators pondered changes to the legal structure that had long supported and empowered Murphy and other hog producers.

And then came the storms. In the summer of 1995, and not long after the Pulitzer series ran, torrential, prolonged rainfall inundated large parts of the state. Water swamped a dike on an “industrial swine” farm, and nearly 30 million gallons of feces and urine poured into the New River. Hog waste stood eight inches deep on a nearby road, and sludge coated crops in the fields of nearby farms. “Didn’t nobody mean
for it to happen,” said one of the owners of the company that had built the lagoon. “It just happened.” Maybe, maybe not, but reporters discovered that the farm, which was less than two years old, had been the first one built using a new set of strict environmental guidelines designed to protect citizens, land, and water from industrial hog wastes. Over the next few weeks, several more lagoons, including one at a chicken farm, collapsed, washing more waste into waterways. The “environmental Alamo,”
said one reporter, destroyed the illusion that giant hog farms were benign. The environmental Alamo had siblings: In 1999, Hurricane Floyd struck the North Carolina coast. Four rivers flooded and thousands of hog carcasses littered the state’s countryside. The ensuing stench and mess, and detailed reporting about it, fueled the debate about livestock production and meat.

So did the 1998 trial of Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful people in American media. Her journey to a Texas courtroom began in the mid-1990s, when bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, ravaged cattle herds in England. Winfrey dedicated a program to the subject and listened as her guest, a former Montana cattle rancher, railed against the dangers of meat in general and diseased meat in particular, arguing that if mad cow struck American herds, the outbreak would make “AIDS look like
the common cold.” He explained that scientists believed that the British outbreak erupted after cattle ate feed manufactured from diseased sheep meat. Winfrey responded by announcing to her audience of millions, “It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger! I’m stopped!” Whether by coincidence or cause, within a day cattle futures plunged, dropping so low that trading was halted. A few weeks later, a group of Texas-based cattle ranchers and feeders, including Paul Engler, sued Winfrey, using a 1995 False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act as the basis of their suit. (A number of states had passed such “veggie libel laws” in the early 1990s after a television news program warned about the dangers of Alar, a coating used by apple growers to protect their fruit.) The judge who heard the case ruled that the disparagement laws did not apply, forcing the cattle groups to prove that the talk show host had intended to damage the industry. They could not, and she walked out of the Amarillo courtroom cleared of any wrongdoing. But Oprah Winfrey was Oprah Winfrey, and her fears of hamburger cast still more doubt on meat and the farms and factories that produced it.

Manure spills, dead hogs, and bacteria-tainted meat highlighted Americans’ contradictory relationships with their food and their values: they wanted cheap, low-fat meat, and they wanted it from a drive-up window, but satisfying those desires carried costs in the form of environmental damage and real threats to health. But nothing says more about the paradoxical nature of the American character than this: even as hog factories and fast-food chains flourished, some Americans began building an alternative food system based on diametrical opposites: small-scale, traditional livestock production and “organic” meats that contained neither antibiotics nor corporate fingerprints.

8

Utopian Visions, Red Tape Reality

W
HEN COLORADAN MEL COLEMAN’S
first “natural” cattle carcass rolled off a slaughterhouse line in 1980, he was there waiting for it, his new, $300, custom-made ink roller in hand. The carcass came to a stop and Mel rolled the stamp over its surface, and there it was: a side of “Coleman Natural Beef,” ready to change the world and improve the condition of the Coleman bank account. Or not. The local USDA inspector happened to be on site that day and he ordered Mel to stop. “I don’t have papers
on that roller,” he said. “Do you have permission to roll that carcass?” “Permission?” said Coleman. “This is my roller . . . What more permission do I need?” Much more, explained the inspector, in the form of paperwork and official USDA sanction. Mel scraped the ink off the carcass and set out to master the byzantine USDA regulatory process. He made an appointment with the department’s regional inspector and explained that he wanted permission to use the words
natural beef
on his labels. “What the hell are you talking about, Coleman?” she asked. “Cattle are natural—all cattle are natural!” Mel encountered one dead end after another in Colorado and eventually took himself to Washington, DC, and the heart of the USDA maze. Two years and a two-foot-thick file of paperwork later, he received permission to use the word
natural
to describe his beef products. By the time Mel died in 2002, his family’s company was the largest purveyor of natural and organic meat in the United States.

The founding and growth of Coleman Natural Meats is an important element of the story of meat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but it’s not the only one. As the Colemans built their company, whose structure mimicked that of conventional meat makers, a group of activists far from the Colemans’ rural Colorado valley were laying the foundations of an alternative food economy, one that they hoped would not be dominated by Big Ag and Big Food. They succeeded, but they, like Mel Coleman, had to rely on the USDA to gain the regulatory mechanisms, research, and retail markets necessary to foster that project. By the start of the new century, they’d been so successful that alternative foods had captured the interest of middle-class consumers, and fringe had moved into the mainstream.

Mel Coleman’s saga began in the 1970s. That decade’s turmoil threatened the survival of his family’s cattle-grazing operation, founded in the 1930s and located near the town of Saguache in south-central Colorado. Between the energy crisis, inflation, and declining demand, they were fighting what Mel described as a “losing battle.”
The minutes of a company meeting in the summer of 1976 capture the family’s woes in terse terms: “Inflation costs
and depressed cattle market have made it impossible for the corporation to continue on as we have.” Six months later, the family pondered the possibility of refinancing the grazing operation or selling their cows, their pasture acres, or both. All told, they lost nearly a half-million dollars from 1975 to 1978.
“We had to do something—and quickly—or we were going to lose everything,” Mel said.

That “something” arrived thanks to Mel and wife Polly’s daughter-in-law, Nancy Coleman, married to their son Greg. The younger Colemans had recently moved from Saguache to the Boulder area, then as now a bastion of hippie entrepreneurism and counterculture lifestyles (the Naropa Institute and Celestial Seasonings were only two of the town’s alternative enterprises). Nancy had been raised on good food and sought it out at local “health food stores,” as they were called then, of which there were many in and around Boulder. But she could not find anything like the beef that she’d grown up eating. On a trip back to Saguache, and presumably knowing that the family’s cattle operation was in trouble, she suggested that her father-in-law change tactics. Instead of selling his livestock to conventional meatpackers, why didn’t he slaughter it himself and sell the beef as a natural, drug-free product? Mel said later that a “tingle ran down
[his] spine” when he heard her idea. In 1979, the family incorporated Coleman Natural Meats, a company that the then-fifty-four-year-old Mel ran.