by Maureen Ogle
Chief among the researchers was Ancel Keys, who argued, based on evidence that ranged from sketchy to nonexistent, that high-fat diets elevated serum cholesterol, which led to atherosclerosis (“hardening of the arteries”), which led to heart attack, an equation dubbed the “diet-heart hypothesis.” From there, Keys leaped to two conclusions: Fat is bad. Because meat contains fat, meat is bad for your health. His claims were both simplistic and incorrect. Fat is essential to human well-being, and the body contains plenty of it in the form of cholesterol, a substance it uses to manufacture hormones, among other things. Over time, cholesterol can build up in arteries and cause them to “harden.” Saturated fats, which come primarily from animal products, can also deposit fat in arteries, so eating excessive amounts of that class of fats can contribute to atherosclerosis. But not all fats come from animals; plants contain fat, too, and some fats are unsaturated, even in animal-based foods. Half the fat in beef is saturated, for example, and half unsaturated. But Keys, to the regret of his peers, colleagues, and opponents (of whom there were many), was an intellectual bully and a relentless self-promoter of the World According to Keys. Having decided that his view was correct, he promoted it, the facts be damned. Other scientists and even officials at the American Heart Association challenged his lack of evidence, but Keys ignored critics (and elbowed his way into a position of power at the AHA and turned its machinery to his cause) and rebutted challengers by arguing better safe than sorry. Even if there wasn’t any proof, if there was a chance that fatty foods caused heart disease, Americans ought to be told. The ever-savvy Keys also knew that he who controlled the medium also controlled the message, and his ability to explain his ideas in simple language appealed to journalists, who dutifully reported theory as fact. In 1961, editors at Time magazine solidified both Keys’s reputation and his ideas by putting him on the magazine’s cover.
Ralph Nader wasn’t interested in scientific squabbles or questions about Keys’s credibility, but he recognized an opening when he saw it. The “fat is bad” claim gave him a reason to wage war on meatpackers, with the hot dog as his weapon of choice. The frankfurter war heated up in early 1972 when Consumer Reports published a behind-the-scenes—or, more accurately, under-the-skin—look at the dog. “Once upon a time,” CR’s reporter told readers, the frankfurter had been “a reasonably honest product” composed of meat, a bit of water, a dollop of fat, and plenty of protein. No more. The 1970s edition contained as much as a third fat and a lot of water—legally, as much as 54 percent. A dog labeled “All Meat” could, and likely did, contain a combination of any number of animal parts, such as lips and tongues, pork, beef, chicken, mutton, or goat, as well as cereal and dried milk or soy meal. And then there was the plastic package that housed the dogs. If it was airtight, no problem. If not, the water provided a breeding ground for bacteria. A safe threshold, the reporter noted, was 10 million bacteria per gram, but 40 percent of the samples tested by the magazine surpassed that number, and one contained 140 million bacteria per gram. Add in some sodium nitrite—newsworthy at the time because of its allegedly carcinogenic qualities—salt, spice, monosodium glutamate, corn syrup, sodium ascorbate, and/or ascorbic acid, and there it was: the all-American hot dog.
Those revelations and continuing pressure from Naderites prompted USDA officials to ponder still more regulatory rules for hot dogs, including a ban on meat byproducts in their manufacture. Department protocol mandated that it request public input before making changes to existing rules, and under normal conditions, the “public” consisted of spokespersons for whatever industry’s products would be affected. But normal had been Naderized, and to the horror of hot dog makers and meat industry lobbyists, the actual public weighed in. A Maryland schoolgirl took pencil in hand to make a polite but firm request: Please stop adding “pig swill” to hot dogs, she wrote. “We get bad lunches at school as it is and I would hate to have to turn down hot dogs if you put it in. And besides I would starve the whole day!” P.S., she added, “If you really have to put pig snouts in, could you blow their noses first, please??” The young lady had company. A New Jersey woman complained that it was bad enough that meat makers added “cancer producing” preservatives to their products. But making hot dogs from “the same meat that they now put in dog food” was too much. “How much more does the American consumer have to take?” she asked. “Let us get off the dollar bandwagon and get back to eating pure foods. Our children ask the industries to stop polluting their bodies.”
The “wiener is being clobbered,” mourned the president of the American Meat Institute as hot dog sales plummeted. Oscar Mayer Jr. interpreted the attacks as “personal affronts to him and his meat-packing forebears.” The Mayer family had been manufacturing sausages and other processed pork products since the late nineteenth century and had built a global company by focusing on convenience foods and by inventing packaging materials and processing technologies for them. In the early 1960s, its hot dog, already an all-American bestseller, gained new fans thanks to what is arguably one of the most memorable advertising ditties in history: the so-called Wiener Jingle (“Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener”). A colleague reported that Mayer Jr. was “absolutely stunned” by the uproar. Other meat makers were less stunned than infuriated. “I have an answer to the stupid jerks in Washington, including Nader,” said the president of an Illinois meat-processing company. “I would suggest that all packers stop buying [livestock] for a two-week period to show the American people what these jerks in Washington are doing to the farmer and packer and, in the end, the American consumer. It’s time someone tells these jerks where they fit.” The president of another meat company offered a more measured response in a letter to Richard Lyng, the assistant secretary of agriculture, suggesting that rather than ban protein-rich byproducts like tongue, liver, and lips, the USDA should educate the public about their nutritional value. A ban based on emotion and “aesthetics,” he argued, would propel the USDA down a slippery slope. Gelatin, for example, was manufactured from bone. Did the department also plan to ban “gelatin desserts” such as Jell-O? Mushrooms were “grown in manure” and typically eaten raw. Was it also going to ban mushrooms?
In the end, both sides got something they wanted as the USDA hewed to the middle road rather than the slippery slope: under new rules, sausages manufactured from just one type of meat would wear a label boasting that fact. Those that included the dreaded snouts, eyes, and lips would be labeled as containing byproducts or “variety meats,” terminology that was blessedly vague by packers’ standards and too vague by those of consumer advocates.
Naderites had less success with another project, one carried out in partnership with environmental advocacy groups (another new feature of the political landscape): an assault on the use of hormones and antibiotics in livestock production. In 1970, newspapers carried an Associated Press report that steaks and burgers probably contained traces of DES, long since identified as a carcinogen. Federal inspectors pulled tainted carcasses from meatpackers’ lines, but a spokesman for the FDA assured Americans they had nothing to fear. “Most of us can’t get too excited about the occasional animal showing up [with] two parts per billion of stilbestrol,” he said. That comment sounds callous, but his dismissal stemmed less from indifference than from a belief in his own expertise. Unlike average Americans—the ones reading the newspaper report—he and other experts understood the fine points of DES, animal nutrition, and physiology, including the fact that bovines’ bodies contain natural estrogens. In his mind, minute traces of DES residue were nothing to worry about. A human would have to eat tons (literally) of residues before suffering any damage. The FDA was so confident about the safety of DES that it granted cattle feeders permission to double the amount they could use. What the public heard, however, was the word cancer coupled to an airy dismissal from an official seemingly indifferent to the public’s health, which was more than enough to keep consumer advocates in attack mode. In response, the FDA and USDA announced they woul
d use more sophisticated tests for residues and prosecute those who violated federal regulations; in early 1971, both the House and Senate investigated the use of DES and other chemicals in the nation’s food supply. There the matter might have ended, but not long after those hearings, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study of the so-called DES daughters, a group of young women who had been diagnosed with a rare form of vaginal cancer. The women’s mothers had been prescribed DES while pregnant (in the mid- twentieth-century, doctors used the hormone to prevent miscarriage), and that, hypothesized the researchers, had caused the cancer. After that, it was impossible for the FDA to ignore the matter. In 1973, the agency banned DES, although the prohibition did not go into effect until 1979, stalled by a series of court challenges. Although DES left the farm, the FDA allowed livestock producers to use other, noncarcinogenic hormones.
The Naderites also tried to eliminate antibiotics from livestock production. On the face of it, science appeared to affirm the need for a ban. In the late 1950s, scientists had discovered that bacteria could and did develop immunity to antibiotics and that, more troubling, resistant bacteria could pass that trait on to their offspring and even to other, unrelated bacterial species nearby. Scientists and physicians believed that resistance was exacerbated and encouraged by steady, regular ingestion of the drugs, which was precisely how most antibiotics were administered on livestock farms. In 1966, the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine described the resistance effect as “intellectually fascinating and therapeutically frightening.” Unless humans began taking more care with how and when they administered the drugs, the editors warned, physicians treating infectious disease would “find themselves back in the preantibiotic Middle Ages.” By that time, however, the entire food industry had found uses for antibiotics and had no desire to let go. Processors, for example, used Aureomycin to preserve fish and poultry. Still, it was hard to ignore either the facts or pressure from scientists and consumer advocates, and as the 1960s ended, the FDA commissioned an investigation of nonmedical uses of the drugs and recommended that food manufacturers limit their use of antibiotics to ones not used on humans. Beyond that, however, the investigators’ advice amounted to timid banalities: Gather more information about drug use in livestock production. Add stiffer warning labels to drug packaging. Collect data; exercise caution. To be fair, the committee’s members—physicians, veterinarians, bacteriologists, and biologists—explained that they were reluctant to issue stronger recommendations because they lacked evidence that pointed to a different conclusion. They believed that long-term doses of antibiotics provoked bacterial resistance, but as yet, they noted, scientists did not understand how or even if those doses affected humans who ate meat from drug-treated livestock. Barring definitive data, they argued, there was no reason to ban the drugs.
Even so, in 1972, FDA officials announced that antibiotic-laced livestock feeds constituted a “potential health hazard” and that manufacturers would henceforth be required to demonstrate the “safety and efficacy of their products.” Translation: For the time being, antibiotics were safe from the meddling of Nader and his Raiders. The “bad news,” groused the editor of a livestock industry magazine, was that manufacturers would be forced to spend millions on research, an expense they would surely pass on to farmers and consumers. An official with the National Livestock Producers Association was equally irritated. There was no “better research” available, he fumed, “than the 200 million healthy Americans eating 200 pounds of red meat and poultry per capita annually, thanks largely to low-level use of antibiotics. I’d say that ought to be enough research.”
It’s easy to conclude that federal officials caved to pressure from pharmaceutical manufacturers and meat industry trade groups, and there’s no doubt that both groups lobbied to protect their interests. But that alone does not explain why Naderites failed to oust antibacterials and hormones from the barnyard. At the time, two other factors carried more weight. First, although scientists had affirmed the reality of antibiotic resistance, for better or for worse, none of the available research produced concrete, irrefutable evidence that linked antibiotic-laced feeds to specific cases of human antibiotic resistance. In the words of the FDA’s commissioner, the available data was “grossly inadequate.” No one had died from eating meat from animals raised on antibiotics (or DES), so no one could be certain beyond a doubt that the drugs posed a danger. If 100 percent certainty was the relevant criterion, certainty lay on the side of the status quo. Second, the scientific community had more at stake than did farmers and pharmaceutical manufacturers: their professional credibility. Imposing a ban based on no evidence was a cure worse than the disease, because it undermined the authority of science. In this case, science trumped knee-jerk fear.
Another Nader-driven project, the 1967 Wholesome Meat Act, also produced a mixed victory. That law imposed federally mandated inspection at slaughterhouses operated by intrastate meatpackers, companies that slaughtered livestock only within a state’s borders. Prior to the law’s passage, they had not been subject to federal inspection—and, as often as not, no inspection at all. But 15 percent of the animals slaughtered in the United States came from such facilities, as did a quarter of all processed meats. Prodded by Nader, Congress passed the 1967 law, which required those packers to adhere to the same federal inspection standards that governed interstate packers. To Nader’s dismay, the final bill gave states little incentive to comply. If they ignored the stipulated deadline, federal officials, using taxpayer money, would show up and do it for them—and then hand administration of the inspection program back to the state. Consumer activists complained that those inspectors, beholden to neither state legislatures nor federal officials, would become pawns of meatpackers who would encourage them to look the other way when tainted meats passed along the line. Even worse, however, the law spawned a consequence that Nader never intended: it drove many intrastate packers out of business. As the industry’s smallest and most vulnerable members, few could afford to comply with the regulations that the law imposed. Such was the case with United Packers in Opelousas, Louisiana. An inspector told the owner that he would have to replace his plant’s floors, walls, and ceilings at a cost of at least a quarter-million dollars, and even that, the inspector warned, might not be enough to meet compliance. United’s vice president complained he could understand if such regulations enhanced consumer safety and improved food purity, but as far as he could tell, that was “the furthest from being the situation.” “Is there a conspiracy between big business and USDA to put small independent companies out of business?” he asked. “Needless to say, if the giants in the meat industry are the only ones left in business, then the consumer will certainly suffer and the farmer and rancher . . . will be forced to accept the prices the giants are willing to pay.” There wasn’t a conspiracy, but in the economic turmoil of the 1970s, every packer struggled to survive, and the financial requirements of the Wholesome Meat Act pushed smaller ones over the edge. If nothing else, the lesson Naderites learned was that good deeds could have unintended consequences, hardly surprising given that, at the time, consumer advocates were still learning how to navigate the murky terrain of federal bureaucracies, of which there were many: by the late seventies, thirty-three federal agencies housed four hundred subagencies and bureaus that managed more than one thousand programs aimed at consumers’ needs.
But navigate they did, and setbacks and disappointments were not enough to stop the growth of public interest and consumer advocacy. Nader-inspired activism spread beyond the Washington Beltway, as crusaders settled in rural areas and devoted their energy to protecting small farmers—“family farmers,” they were called—from the clutches of agribusiness, a term that, in the hands of reformers, became a euphemism for “corporations trying to control agriculture.” The critique of agribusiness and corporate farming was initiated by the Nader-inspired Agribusiness Accountability Project, founded in 1970 and dedicated to dissecting and publicizing the r
elationships that linked corporations, agriculture, and the nation’s land grant colleges and universities. The group was best known for a report (later published as a book) titled Hard Times, Hard Tomatoes. Lead author Jim Hightower argued that corporate interests had commandeered land grant research in the name of transforming farms into factories and replacing family farms with Big Ag. The book was a classic example of muckraking journalism in the Naderist mode and justified the squirming it induced among land grant officials. But Hightower and his colleagues overlooked, or more likely didn’t understand, the larger context in which American agriculture had changed since World War II. Family farmers had pioneered the shift toward large scale, confinement, and the use of livestock additives because they wanted more efficient, profitable farms and a lifestyle on par with that of city people. That history mattered not a whit to those trying to save the family farm, and from the 1970s on, a network of rural activists battled corporate involvement in agriculture. In 1972, for example, crusaders persuaded a Nebraska state legislator to introduce a bill that would outlaw farms that produced or sold more than $5 million worth of goods (roughly $27 million today). Nebraska was “relatively free of the cancer” of corporate farming, he argued, and his bill would ensure that it stayed that way.
