Meatonomics (3 page)

Finally, the steady rise of meatonomics has followed a disturbing, yet rampant political change: corporate influence over lawmaking has risen dramatically in the last half century. Driven largely by the expense of television advertising, the cost to get elected to US office
has increased tenfold (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in the last fifty years.
²⁶
This skyrocketing price tag has in turn dramatically boosted the amounts spent to influence lawmakers and the number of lobbyists peddling influence. (For a graphic example of how lobbying works at this level, check out the 2005 Golden Globe–nominated film
Thank You for Smoking
.) In the past three decades, as annual spending to influence Congress rose from $100 million to more than $3.5 billion (in inflation-adjusted dollars), lobbyists grew their ranks tenfold.
²⁷

The animal food industry is just one of many special interests to capitalize on this massive change in spending and influence, but its efforts have been particularly successful. In the past few decades, the industry has convinced lawmakers to pass scores of state and federal laws that protect animal food production in a variety of ways. These include such disturbing examples as the emasculation of dozens of laws that once prohibited cruelty to farm animals and the passage of new prohibitions against food defamation, undercover investigations, food injury lawsuits, and phantom ecoterrorism.

For almost as long as they've been in use, factory farms have been synonymous with three kinds of problems: environmental, nutritional, and ethical. This book proposes a fourth category: economic. We'll see how factory farming offloads massive costs onto society and how its contrarian economics drive other problems like overconsumption. Low prices are certainly not the only reason people overindulge in animal products, nor can we blame economics exclusively for the many problems associated with animal food production and consumption. Clearly, a complex set of personal and social factors are at play in our food choices and in the consequences those choices have for us and the world around us. Psychology professor Melanie Joy has proposed the term
carnism
for the belief system that drives meat consumption. This entrenched system, Joy says, “is supported by every single institution in society, from medicine to education.”
²⁸
However, while this belief system is likely responsible for persuading Americans to consume animal foods in the first place, it is in large measure the
price
of these goods that determines
how much
meat and dairy people buy. Thus, I seek to show that economic forces play a much greater role in our consumption choices than we've previously thought.

I also argue that while American consumption of animal foods is often perceived as demand driven—or spurred by consumer preferences and disposable income—it is actually heavily supply driven, or propelled by producer behavior. For instance, popular explanations for consumers' rising consumption of animal foods look at demand drivers like rising incomes and lifestyle changes.
²⁹
But it's not that simple. The latest research shows that changes in production methods, such as the shift from traditional farming methods to low-cost industrial practices—and the resulting declines in retail prices—deserve most of the credit for the increase in consumption.
³⁰
In other words, it is mainly producers, not consumers, who have spurred the massive increase in animal food consumption over the past century.

Moreover, state and federal governments provide key assistance in this demand-boosting process by laying out subsidies and protectionist policies that let producers sidestep the vast majority of their own production costs. Consumers get it from every side—the USDA tells us to eat more, industry tries to convince us substances like saturated fat are good for us, and lawmakers impose liability on those who might investigate, criticize, or sue meat or dairy producers. As we'll see, collectively, these meatonomic forces routinely impair the ability of consumers to make healthy decisions about what and how much to eat. These forces also cause systematic failure in the American market for animal foods.

Market failure
is econo-speak for a market's inefficient allocation of goods and services which, if fixed, would yield better outcomes for all. In the following chapters, I present a three-part argument that illuminates in detail—and shows how to fix—the significant market failure caused by the economics of animal food production. First, I show that the federal government is at fault for fostering economic conditions that benefit no one except the animal food industry. With bureaucrats often turning a blind eye to how or what can be communicated to consumers, the industry engages in a sophisticated messaging campaign
that is often misleading or confusing—and sometimes simply false. Regulators routinely strike out when it comes to exercising control over this and other industry activity, and through misguided legislation and policymaking, lawmakers actually encourage the industrial food complex to impose its production costs on us. When this kind of governmental negligence leads to market failure, as it does with meatonomics, the phenomenon becomes government failure.

Second, I argue that because of this government failure, the microeconomic system that produces meat and dairy is characterized by heavy overconsumption, huge inefficiencies, and massive hidden costs. This broken system damages Americans' health, hurts the environment, treats animals cruelly, and causes other harms. Moreover, these problems generate significant, measurable, financial consequences. As former US Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) famously remarked, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.” $314 billion in health-care costs. $38 billion in subsidies.
^*
$37 billion in environmental costs. $21 billion in cruelty costs. $4 billion in fishing-related costs. Collectively, these costs would almost triple the retail prices of animal foods if they weren't offloaded instead onto consumers and taxpayers.

But the picture is not all doom and gloom. The book concludes with several suggestions to fix this broken market, restore our health, and heal the environment. On an individual level, we can each help by changing how we consume. On an institutional level, relatively simple policy changes can stimulate the economy, save 172,000 lives, eliminate $184 billion in external costs, incentivize Americans to make healthy eating choices, and cut carbon-equivalent emissions to a level not seen since 1950. This solution is practical and realistic, and because it's coupled with an income tax credit for all Americans, it's politically feasible.

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness,” said the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. We once thought the Earth was both flat and the center of the universe. A few centuries ago, we thought it wise to add lead to wine. As recently as 1929, we believed a little cocaine in our Coca-Cola was good for us.

This book asks us to challenge our assumptions about the production and consumption of animal foods—including their health effects, ethical issues, and economic impacts—and our government's role in the process. Do low prices always benefit consumers? Can we always trust peer-reviewed research? Do lawmakers and regulators really act in our best interest? Are factory farmers truly concerned for their animals' welfare? Do we actually know
why
we consume the foods we do at the levels we do? “Your assumptions are your windows on the world,” says Alan Alda. “Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”

In his 1932 novel
Brave New World
, Aldous Huxley imagined a future in which humans exist solely to support the economy and are conditioned from birth to buy things. Government bureaucrats manipulate the sheep-like citizens with drugs and slogans to make them consume as much as possible. In Huxley's vision, 26th-century consumers learn that “ending is better than mending” and “the more stitches, the less riches”—that is, buying new things is better than fixing old ones. But for US consumers, this eerie futuristic fantasy—with government using marketing slogans and other undue influence to drive consumption—has arrived a few centuries early. This chapter explores government marketing as a feature of meatonomics and considers its consequences for consumers.

In the Brave New World of the 21st century—where big box stores and mega markets dominate the landscape—our government uses innocuous-sounding “checkoff” programs to encourage us to buy more animal foods and other goods. The mechanism's name persists from a time when the assessments were voluntary and producers willing to opt in participated by simply checking a box. Nowadays, the programs are tax-like and mandatory, even though the benign checkoff moniker remains.

The way they work is simple: Congress slaps a small assessment (less than 1 percent of wholesale price) on certain commodities, and the collected funds are used to pay for research and marketing
programs that boost the goods' sales. So when animal food producers collect $1 per head of cattle, $0.40 per $100 of pork, or $0.15 per 100 pounds of dairy, they pass those funds on to national marketing organizations. The proceeds are allocated among state and regional industry organizations throughout the country. There aren't many Boston Tea Party–like protests when it comes to making the payments—probably because most consumers don't know about checkoffs and most producers think their trade groups put the money to good use. These trade groups don't equivocate much about what they do or why they exist. The Kentucky Cattlemen's Association, for example, keeps it simple, saying its business purpose is “Promotion of the beef industry.”
¹

Although few Americans have heard of checkoff programs, we've all heard or seen the catchy, feel-good slogans they've generated:

Beef. It's What's for Dinner.

Milk. It Does a Body Good.

Pork. The Other White Meat.

Written, spoken, or sung—and flashed across every medium, including print, radio, TV, and the Internet—these statements have bombarded American consumers for decades. The echo of one particularly snappy jingle that went with a ubiquitous 1990s commercial—“The Incredible, Edible Egg”—still rattles in my brain. And while that phrase and many others predate social networking, they persist because their sticky messaging fits in perfectly with today's meme-saturated, web-dominated world. Like an ink stamp, these messages imprint themselves with authority on our subconscious and become part of our belief system. What's for dinner? Without even knowing why, many think,
Beef.

Across the board, animal food checkoff programs are remarkably effective at making us buy more than we would otherwise. According to the USDA, for each dollar of checkoff funds spent promoting animal foods, “the return on investment can range as high as $18.”
²
The beef checkoff program raises sales by $5 per checkoff dollar spent.
³
The pork checkoff program drives $14 in sales per dollar spent.
⁴
While
it may not boast a memorable motto, the lamb checkoff provides an unusually huge boost, driving additional sales of $38, or seven extra pounds of lamb, for each dollar spent on promotion.
⁵
But the biggest winner might be the dairy industry, which recently boasted that over a year and a half, checkoff efforts contributed to more than 7 billion
additional
pounds of milk sold.
⁶
That's an
extra
forty-seven servings of dairy per person in the United States—above and beyond the hundreds of servings we would have consumed anyway during the period. Clearly, milk is up to more than just doing a body good.

All told, these programs provide funding of $557 million yearly for animal food producers to promote their goods.
⁷
This massive, government-mandated marketing budget gives the meatonomic system something few other microeconomic systems have: an exceedingly deep marketing war chest, deployed to boost sales of
all
goods from
all
producers in the program. A few other commodities, like cotton and soybeans, have checkoff programs of their own. Yet in every other industry, except for those lucky enough to have a checkoff program, individual corporations must fork out their own funds to increase sales rather than rely on government programs to prop up their numbers. With meatonomics, on the other hand, the effect of checkoff programs is that we all buy more of nearly every conceivable animal food than we would otherwise. Like a diner with an insatiable appetite, the animal food industry relishes the higher sales that result. Dairy promoters brag that since their checkoff program started in 1983, annual per capita consumption of milk “has climbed 12 percent to 620 pounds.”
⁸

Some say checkoff programs have been unfairly linked to government and are actually just the tools of good old-fashioned capitalism. They argue these checkoff arrangements involve only private firms who pool advertising monies without government participation, and their mission and methods are no different from those of any private advertiser. However, the US Supreme Court decisively rejected this position in a 2005 case involving the beef checkoff. In
Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association
, beef industry participants who disagreed with the message of the latest beef campaign claimed that being forced
to fund it violated their right of free speech.
⁹
The Supreme Court disagreed, holding the message was actually
government speech
(a form of speech the government can make others support). The court said: