by Maureen Ogle
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
WHEN 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.
The Coleman family’s strategy for survival unfolded against a backdrop of renewed enthusiasm for organic agriculture, which had first gained substantive support in the United States back in the 1930s. During that decade, prolonged drought and soil exhaustion spawned spectacular dust storms; massive clouds of dust spun from topsoil rolled across the plains states, carrying their gritty rain as far as the East Coast. The devastation prompted some in the agricultural establishment to urge farmers to return to more “organic” approaches to working the land. But support for this alternative to factory farming waned under pressure of wartime demand for food, and in the 1950s, alternative agriculture and the establishment parted company thanks to what plant breeder Richard Harwood described as a McCarthyist “mood of intolerance” among the nation’s scientists. He remembered that decade as one when human and scientific “arrogance” spawned an “intellectual wasteland.” “I was . . . the most arrogant bastard that you want to run across,” he said later. He and his colleagues assumed that science would “dominate the universe. And we proceeded as if [it] would,” thanks in part, he admitted, to their belief that supplies of “very cheap energy” would never run dry. (Harwood eventually concluded that his arrogance was misplaced. In the 1970s, he began conducting research on sustainable agriculture and by the late 1990s occupied an endowed university chair in the subject.)
But in the wake of the environmental alarms and food famine of the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans questioned the wisdom of an agricultural model that relied more on petroleum products than on nature. At what point, some asked, did the environmental costs of antibiotics, commercial fertilizers, and pesticides outweigh the need for cheap food? If agriculture itself was toxic, would global demand for food eventually lay waste to the planet? Questions like these multiplied, especially after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
targeted agriculture in general and livestock operations in particular as major sources of water pollution.
Among those who questioned the status quo was Ken Monfort, and in 1971, he instructed his feedlot employees to isolate a thousand yearlings from the rest of the herd and feed them rations free of antibiotics and DES. In addition, the animals went to slaughter minus the chemical dip used to destroy parasites that otherwise burrowed into their flesh. Monfort sold his E-Colo-Beef to health food stores on the West Coast at a price about 40 percent higher than that of his conventional meat. (The brand name is not as unfortunate as it now sounds to our ears: E. coli bacteria had not yet achieved celebrity status.) The project didn’t last long. The cattle needed 10 to 15 percent longer than conventional stock to reach market weight, which meant that Monfort spent 10 percent more on feed. Once slaughtered, the carcasses yielded less meat because three-quarters of the livers were diseased and parasite-infected flesh had to be cut away. “When you start trimming away $2 a pound meat to get rid of grubs it starts getting expensive,” admitted a Monfort executive. (A company vice president later described the short-lived project as “a colossal blunder . . . that [would not] happen again.”)
But Monfort’s failure did not alter his view that Americans needed to rethink their appetite for meat. “Food is a scarce item,” he argued. “It will be scarcer.” He openly supported “small planet” advocates who urged Americans to feed the world by eating less meat. The idea gained credence in part because of the food famine, but also because of the work of Frances Moore Lappé, a California social worker. Her 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet popularized the idea that meat production was both inefficient and wasteful because farmers planted millions of acres to raise food for livestock rather than humans and polluted air and water in the process. Ken Monfort agreed. “It’s obvious humans should come first,” he said, and livestock “last on the list” of those getting grain. He argued that cattle producers could conserve grain by keeping herds on grass until they were at least two years old instead of sending them to feedlots at twelve or fourteen months. In 1976 he predicted that beef consumption would drop by 15 to 20 percent as Americans cut back on meat in order to provide food for hungry nations. (As we’ve seen, he was right about the decline, but wrong about the reason.)
Other pockets of support for alternative agriculture flourished here and there. In 1971, alt-farmers in New England organized the National Organic Farmers Association (later the Northeast Organic Farming Association), and an organic farming group in Maine had five hundred members by the mid-seventies. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, provided fringe farmers with information and inspired the creation of dozens of “alternative technology centers” in North America, many of which included a gardening or farming component and more than a few of which were attached to universities and colleges. The agricultural outliers proved to be a mixed bag. When reporters for the New York Times went looking for alternative farmers in the 1970s and early 1980s, they found college professors, an anthropologist, a scientist, and a former official of the Federal Trade Commission, hardly the long-haired dope smokers of the stereotype. At the center of this early national nexus stood J. I. Rodale (born Jerome Irving Cohen) and his son Robert of Pennsylvania. For decades, the Rodales had published magazines and books devoted to organic gardening and farming but otherwise worked in relative isolation, scorned by most (the “Don Quixote of the compost heap,” wrote one reporter in 1966). During the sixties and seventies, however, their reputations and profits soared as a new generation of farmers embraced hoe and compost.
More important, however, advocates of alternative farming elbowed their way back into the scientific and academic mainstream, most notably at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where Barry Commoner established the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems. Commoner, a scientist who picked up the environmental standard after Rachel Carson’s death in 1964, urged Americans to regard agriculture as part of a larger whole, although for quite different reasons from those John Davis elaborated when he’d developed the concept of agribusiness. An “ecosystem,” Commoner said, “cannot be divided into manageable parts,” and agriculture was but a piece of a “larger, over-all system of life which occupies a thin layer on the surface of the earth—the biosphere.” Commoner warned that Americans courted disaster because they ignored the damage inflicted by industrial agriculture’s “massive intervention into nature.” Commoner’s uncommon viewpoint and his scientific credentials attracted others who questioned the tenets of mainstream science and agriculture. Among them was physicist William Lockeretz. During the sixties, he, like many of his colleagues, was dismayed by the role that the scientific establishment played in the Vietnam War and by extension his attachment to that establishment. In 1971, he took a job at Commoner’s center to investigate the science of alternative agriculture. Lockeretz shied away from the mysticism espoused by some alternative enthusiasts; indeed, he avoided using the word organic because of its hippie connotation. “As far as our methods and our ideology we are very solidly within mainstream academic research,” he said. “The only thing that is unconventional is the particular system that we are studying.”
Lockeretz’s wariness was justified. At the time, and regardless of their credentials, supporters of alternative agriculture faced not just scorn but outright hostility. Some of it was perhaps warranted: many advocates linked alt-agriculture to mysticism, and others painted farming as a pastoral utopia. Farmers, wrote one essayist, must be allowed to seek “voluntary simplicity” and “must derive happiness and humane satisfaction from a life” free of the “consumerism, leisure, and delirious pursuit of novelty that characterizes [sic] our society.” Why farmers alone should do so was not clear, and that perspective ignored the history of American agriculture, which was a tale of farm families demanding access to “consumerism” and a standard of living on par with that of urban Americans. Still, at a moment when global food shortages captured headlines, it’s not surprising that many in the agricultural establishment scoffed at the idea of returning to old-fashioned techniques of crop and livestock production. Chief among them was Earl Butz, who shouldered the role of head cheerleader for conventional agriculture and made no effort to conceal his disdain for those who rejected it. That was obvious when he and Wendell Berry butted heads during a 1978 debate. Berry, a Kentucky college professor who owned a small farm where he cultivated his land using horses rather than machinery (“I like horses,” he explained; using them allowed him to remain independent of “the oil companies”), had emerged as the poet laureate, as it were, of alternative agriculture. In 1977, he published The Unsettling of America, a critique of, among other things, Butz’s view of agriculture. Berry believed that “independent” farmers embodied the “traditional values” necessary to a good society: “thrift, stewardship, private property, [and] political liberties.” But those values had been eroded by ones rooted in the “urban industrial” worldview. Butz dismissed Berry and his ilk as muddle-headed idealists, able to spin agricultural fantasies only because “modern, scientific, technological agriculture” had freed them from the drudgery of producing their own food. Agriculture was not a romantic retreat for poets and professors but a “machine” designed to make food and fiber. “We can go back to organic agriculture in this country if we must,” said Butz, but “someone must decide which 50 million of our people will starve!”
Faced with such derision, it’s unlikely that alt-agriculturalists would have made much progress moving into the mainstream on their own. But they benefited from the support of three other groups. First were environmentalists, at the time the most well organized and well funded of the public interest advocate-activists. Emboldened by the EPA’s linkage of agriculture and pollution, eco-warriors argued that factory farming relied too heavily on nonrenewable resources; that too many farms had been carved from fragile, unsuitable terrain; and that livestock confinement systems, pesticides, fertilizers, and the like were
poisoning land, air, and water. Nor were these head-in-the-cloud dreamers. They were well trained in Naderist watchdog/attack-dog tactics, including litigation, which had become an effective tool for negotiating social change; the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, for example, mounted court challenges to the use of hormones in livestock production. They also knew how to work the halls of Congress, where rule one was: Compromise and negotiate or go home.
The rural activists fighting corporate farming also supported alternative agriculture, in part for a practical reason: there were so few farmers and rural residents that those working to improve their plight could gain influence only by forging alliances with other advocacy groups. But the goals of the anticorporate crusaders dovetailed with those of alternative agriculturalists. As the cofounder of a rural advocacy organization put it, struggling small farmers needed “practical alternatives” to factory farming. By the mid-1970s, his group, the Center for Rural Affairs (CRA), one of the earliest and longest-standing rural interest groups, was sponsoring research into “appropriate farm technology and organic methods” with the goal of helping farmers wean themselves from expensive, energy-inefficient inputs. This was no hippie-feel-good, Garden-of-Eden project. CRA’s leaders grabbed science-based information as fast as the staff at Commoner’s laboratories generated it.
