In Meat We Trust (37 page)

But many otherwise interested farmers held back, waiting for the USDA to establish standards for organic livestock and meat production. The rules that the USDA
finally issued in 2002 were straightforward (or as much so as possible when bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists are involved). Farmers and retailers could market beef, pork, and poultry as organic if the meats came from animals raised without growth-inducing hormones or antibiotics and fed diets of organically grown, all-vegetable feedstuffs manufactured in an organic-certified mill. Farmers were required to provide livestock with access to the outdoors, although confinement was allowed under limited conditions and only for brief periods. (One of those conditions, however, constituted a significant loophole: producers could confine their livestock if they believed that leaving them on pasture posed “a risk to soil or water quality.”) Finally, the livestock had to be slaughtered and processed in an organic-certified facility.

Those seemingly simple guidelines were littered with bureaucratic land mines. Consider the case of Peaceful Pastures in Tennessee, whose owners raised and marketed organic poultry. Tennessee law mandated that all poultry slaughter take place in a USDA-inspected facility. There were plenty of such operations around, but they were set up to handle conventional poultry. The couple couldn’t find a USDA-supervised slaughterhouse that would provide “custom-kill”
services and adhere to organic standards. The pair considered building a small processing facility on their farm—until they read the fine print in the rules. “I’d have to build
an office for the inspector,” said Peaceful Pastures owner Jenny Drake, complete with a separate phone line. The couple would have to pave their parking lot and install handicapped-accessible bathrooms. “We have to meet the same physical standards as a Tyson’s, and we just can’t do it,” she sighed. “[I’m] so right-wing I make Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal,” she added, but as far as she was concerned, big business and what she termed the “rich agribusiness lobby” were making her life miserable. Virginia farmer Joel Salatin agreed. He raised organic hogs, chickens, and cattle, and he, too, tried to build an on-farm slaughter facility. USDA officials directed him to the guidelines, a detailed list of necessities that infuriated Salatin, who saw no need to build employee bathrooms. “I told them
we were 50 feet away from two houses with bathrooms, and besides, we’re a family operation: We don’t have employees. It didn’t matter to them,” he complained. “Then they said we had to have twelve changing-lockers for employees—even if we didn’t have employees.” Salatin denounced the obstacles as “bureaucracy in action,” a bureaucracy with but one purpose: to “protect big agribusiness from rural independent competition.” USDA employees were sympathetic, to a point. The official who dealt with the Tennessee couple understood that these rules would likely prevent someone who wanted to slaughter and sell a few hundred chickens a year from earning any profit. But, he asked, “do we want to let people
slaughter meat in the backyard and sell it on the sidewalk?” Doing so, he feared, could introduce tainted meats into the nation’s food supply. That argument carried zero weight with those trying to change the nation’s hearts, minds, and diets. One only needed to consult a daily newspaper to know that whatever else they might be, conventional foodstuffs, and especially meat, were hardly safe.

Given these obstacles, it’s a miracle anyone bothered to produce and market organic meats, and many people decided not to do so. A Massachusetts man who’d built up a clientele for his meat at a local farmers’ market wanted the organic designation, but to get it, he complained, he’d have to “hire someone
to do the paperwork, pay twice the price for organic feed, and find a certified slaughterhouse that would take a small amount of animals.” His customers were already paying up to $5 a pound for his ground beef. The cost of obtaining and maintaining organic certification would “price [him] out of the ball game.” He decided that because he dealt with his clientele face-to-face, it made more sense simply to explain to buyers that his products were organic.

But as the previous example indicates, and as the Coleman family had known for years, many shoppers were prepared to pay top dollar for alternative meats. Those shoppers’ ranks increased in the early twenty-first century thanks to widely broadcast recalls of tainted meats, outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and new concerns about antibiotic resistance. So red tape notwithstanding, organic meat production attracted conventional cattle and hog farmers looking for something, anything, to boost the still-sagging sales of beef and pork. That was particularly true of cattle growers, many of whom pinned their hopes on the high end of the market. After all, exotica enthusiasts had snapped up certified Angus steaks, or highly marbled, flavorful cuts from Wagyu or Kobe cattle, or pricey “lite” beef from livestock bred for lean rather than fat.

In the early years of the new century, the winner of the carnivorous exotica contest was grass-fed beef. The idea was not new; since the 1940s, the trade journal
Stockman Grass Farmer
had catered to the interests of a small but dedicated group of ranchers who specialized in finishing cattle on grass. Grass-fed beef had enjoyed a brief moment of glory in the 1970s as some feeders, including Ken Monfort, bought range cattle and sent them directly to slaughter rather than finish them on high-priced grain. The beef went to grocery stores labeled as “grass-fed” and carrying a lower price tag than grain-fed beef. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some ranchers and farmers reversed that equation and promoted grass-fed as a premium product, one that was (allegedly) healthier than grain-fed beef. Conventional cattle ranchers Wendy and Jon Taggert, Texans who’d long sold their livestock to commercial cattle feeders, began keeping back part of their herd, finishing it on grass, and marketing it directly to consumers under the name New Image Grass Beef. Jon explained that they wanted “a little bit bigger piece
of the pie” to stay on their own plates. Beef “is a very healthy product,” Wendy Taggert told a reporter by way of elaboration. “We’re just making it healthier.”

The popularity of grass-fed beef reflected how far the alternative food movement had traveled, but it also laid bare the fracture lines emerging among alternative food producers. In early 2002, some Northern California ranchers banded together to sell grass-fed beef to high-end area restaurants. A reporter who covered the story noted that the group found plenty of takers for their product—which cost about twice as much as conventional beef—because of grass-fed’s “political and culinary appeal”
to upscale buyers. But demand for grass-fed escalated markedly that year after a writer named Michael Pollan published a
New York Times Magazine
article in which he argued that conventional beef production was bad for both cattle and people. Marshaling the same argument that sustainable agriculture advocates had been making for nearly thirty years, Pollan told readers that there was nothing cheap or healthy about meat, not if one “add[ed] in the invisible costs:
of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on.”

Pollan’s essay was enough to convince Alice Waters, by then a “foodie” celebrity, to serve grass-fed beef in her restaurant rather than the grain-finished meat she’d been buying from Niman Ranch. Bill Niman, that company’s cofounder, was aghast. He’d been raising organic cattle for years, finishing them on (organic) grains before slaughter, and he resented the notion that his beef was unhealthy or ecologically incorrect. Niman dispatched an e-mail to Pollan. “As you know,”
he told the writer, “the story is very complicated and the lay public considers all feedlot cattle the same. This is absolutely not true.” The belief that grass-fed beef or other free-range meats could replace conventional stuff was also unrealistic, Niman told a reporter. “People want to imagine
a beautiful vision of a chicken out there eating earwigs and cows roaming free around the pasture,” he said. But that vision could not “feed millions of people every day.” That was particularly true of grass-fed beef, he explained, which was as seasonal as “a peach or a tomato. Eat it in May or June ’cause that is when it is peaking.”

Niman’s arguments carried little weight with those eager to claim a share of the exotica niche or to change the world. Inspired by Pollan’s article, the Chefs Collaborative, a collection of what one reporter described as “prominent”
chefs, restaurateurs, and food activists, launched a campaign to persuade restaurant owners to switch to grass-fed beef. The project raised a few eyebrows. An executive with a small chain of upscale steakhouses found it “ironic”
that the collaborative claimed to have been inspired by the “standard of excellence” found in European meats, and yet every day Europeans poured into his restaurants searching for quality beef of a sort they could not find at home. A founder of the Center for Consumer Freedom, a watchdog group opposed to what it described as “nanny culture,”
denounced the collaborative as “a haughty organization
with an elitist point of view” and a “let them eat cake” attitude. “We are an elitist
organization,” said collaborative member Eric Schlosser, “but change has to start someplace, and people who have better access to information and spending power can be the start of all sorts of changes.” Schlosser, who had recently published
Fast Food Nation
, a
Jungle
-like exposé of the fast-food industry in general and fast-food meat in particular, argued that many historically significant movements, including Abolition and women’s suffrage, had been “led by educated, middle- and upper-income people,” and he believed that the crusade for a more sustainable food system was another such movement.

Change was on the way, although perhaps not the kind Schlosser intended. Several months later, two alt-meat pioneers, Coleman and Niman Ranch, were snapped up by investment groups. Niman Ranch lost its independence first. In the thirty-odd years since Bill Niman and Orville Schell had founded their venture, the company had never earned a profit. That had not stopped Niman from pursuing a strategy of aggressive growth after Schell left in the late 1990s. (“I consciously deferred
profitability [in order] to expand the brand,” he explained.) He added organic pork to his array of products, a move that required him to contract with a small army of hog producers, and expanded his market from Northern California to the entire United States. His ambitions outstripped his funds, and in late summer 2002, Chicago-based Natural Food Holdings committed two of its executives and a fistful of cash to the task of saving Niman; in exchange, Natural commandeered four of the seven seats on the Niman board of directors. The new investors sold the original feedlot, choosing instead to send cattle to conventional feeders for finishing and shipping the livestock long distances to slaughter. Those decisions generated profits but infuriated Bill Niman. When the investors acquired the company outright in 2009, Niman resigned, publicly berating the new owners for betraying his mission.

The Coleman family also cashed out in 2002. Mel Coleman Jr., company president since the death of his father earlier in the year, sold to Petaluma Holdings, an investment consortium that owned Petaluma Poultry, one of the country’s largest processors of organic poultry, as well as Swift & Company. (Swift was the new name of what had been ConAgra Beef, the Greeley outfit that once belonged to the Monforts.) The new owners planned to position their portfolio of natural and organic meats in chain stores like Costco and Safeway. Over the next few years, they merged with what had been Natural Food Holdings and then with a third investment firm, KDSB Holdings. In 2006, this new entity incorporated Coleman Natural Foods as the parent company for its many alternative meat brands and companies, which by then included Rocky the Range Chicken, Rocky Jr., and Rosie the Organic Chicken.

These moves were not surprising—at least not to those with a nose for business. The organic food sector made up just 4 percent of all American food sales, but it was growing at the rate of about 20 percent a year. Sales of organic meats, however, were ratcheting upward at a rate of 50 percent a year. While that number needs to be seen in perspective—the $600 million that consumers spent on organic meat was a mere jot of the $158 billion that Americans spent on all beef, pork, and poultry—signs pointed toward continued growth. Tyson and other mainstream meat makers were launching lines of natural meats (presumably banking on the fact that few consumers understood the difference between natural and organic labels). Retail behemoth Wal-Mart had announced plans to expand its organic food offerings, a decision that translated into pressure on packers and food processors to come up with the goods. Then there was
the 2006 publication of Michael Pollan’s
Omnivore’s Dilemma
, which became an immediate bestseller and remained one for several years. The book’s centerpiece and most indelible image was Pollan’s portrayal of conventional livestock production: thousands of cattle crammed into feedlots and standing shin-deep in manure, their bodies riddled with bacteria and damaged by a diet of corn. From an investor’s point of view, that grim scenario translated into the hottest ticket to profit since the microwave oven: organic alternatives to conventional beef, pork, and poultry. It’s not surprising that investment groups like Natural Holdings and Petaluma Poultry were on the prowl for sources of alternative meat.

Not that “alternative” meats were all that alternative. By the time Pollan’s book appeared, half of all organic food purchases were made in conventional grocery stores, including Costco and other big-box retailers, and every major grocery chain boasted its own private-label brands of organic goods, including meat. Of the other 50 percent of organic food sales, most were made at natural food stores, primarily Whole Foods and similar chains. The demand from those grocery outlets spawned a new industry of middlemen: organic “handlers,” as they were called, scoured the countryside grabbing up, and often contracting in advance for, organic carrots, apples, and chickens, anything alternative that could be processed and packaged for sale to giant retailers. In the race to supply the new alt-powerhouses—Safeway, Kroger, and Costco—farmers’ markets and other local farmer-to-consumer outlets ran a distant third. Shoppers still flocked to the Saturday-morning farmer-food carnivals, but the prices they paid there inched up because farmers who once struggled to find outlets for their carrots and broilers held the upper hand. Why bother with a farmers’ market when organic handlers crowded the farmhouse door, begging for supplies that were scarce relative to demand? Eyed from the retail end, the new food utopia, it appeared, looked much like the old mainstream. Was alternative the new normal?