In Meat We Trust

by Maureen Ogle

  Mel Coleman knew about the funding victory, but at the time, the task of building the family business occupied all his energy. Coleman Natural Beef was selling $20 million in meat products a year, and Mel had cobbled together a vertically integrated operation of the kind that characterized the broiler industry: he contracted with thirty ranchers scattered over two states to raise cattle according to his detailed specifications, and he briefly owned his own slaughterhouse (the family was forced to sell it when operating expenses threatened to devour their still-narrow profit margins). He marketed his meats directly to retailers rather than handing them off to a wholesaler or jobber, and by the end of the decade, Coleman meats could be found in more than 1,500 retail outlets. Although he hired a professional marketing manager after landing the Grand Union account, Mel remained the company’s best sales pitch. His strategy was simple: find the buyer, preferably by handing him or her a sample of the product in a grocery store. “There’s a particular person out there’s who’s interested in our meat, just the same way I buy Diet Coke.” He’d also introduced a “starter” meat: Rocky Mountain Pure, beef made from cattle finished on additive-free feed but not necessarily raised on organic grasses or hay. Mel was convinced that once customers tried Rocky Mountain Pure, they would “upgrade” to his 100 percent organic beef, which continued to sell for 25 percent more than conventional meats.

  There’s no doubt that Mel Coleman’s perseverance contributed to the company’s early success, but in the 1980s, the family also benefited from a surprisingly lively “natural” food niche. Granola, the mainstay of hippie co-ops in the 1970s, had gone mainstream by the eighties as major food manufacturers discovered the (profitable) virtues of “countercuisine.” Finding whole-wheat natural cookies on grocery store shelves eased shoppers’ decisions to add Coleman meats to their carts. But the Colemans also reaped the rewards offered by another, related food niche: demand for culinary exotica, a niche that played out primarily in restaurants. Mainstream chains like Red Lobster aimed for a mass audience; they could not satisfy consumers interested in, and willing to pay for, a more rarefied dining experience. Restaurants that catered to exotica enthusiasts distinguished themselves from the herd not just by price—high-end dining was nothing new—but by the food, which ranged from the esoteric to the weird and often included a backstory. The clientele at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, for example, were told that the meat on their plates came from animals that had lived a “wholesome” life or had been raised “biodynamically,” concepts presumably lost on the hoi polloi at Red Lobster. At Nora’s in Washington, DC, menus identified the precise origins of the meats served, including the name of the West Virginia pond that provided its trout. The chef at Quilted Giraffe in Manhattan offered his diners grilled free-range chicken. The price? A mere $75 (that’s a staggering $196 today). “Before they became available,” the chef admitted, “we never deigned to serve chicken.” Only the “cachet” of organic-natural had given him “the nerve to sell chicken at that price,” he explained. Not everyone could afford such gastronomic thrills, but that was the point. In a country where food cost so little, one way to differentiate the haves from the have-nots was with the unusual, the rare, the precious. Thus Grand Union’s enthusiasm for Coleman Natural. “We tell retailers that our product will bring in . . . people who buy dollar-fifty chicken and Häagen-Dazs ice cream,” explained the Colemans’ marketing consultant. (Hooey, scoffed the meat buyer for a major Southern California grocery chain, who pronounced Coleman’s meat “overpriced and overbilled” and natural beef a “fad.”)

  As aficionados of upscale ice cream and pricey poultry multiplied, so did Coleman’s competitors, especially because cattlemen were desperate to stanch the bleeding in beef consumption. Given that Coleman beef sold for a 25 percent premium over conventional stuff, who wouldn’t want a piece of the action? During the 1980s, others entered the arena. An alliance of Wyoming ranchers began marketing branded grass-fed beef, and a Mennonite cooperative in Kansas launched a beef line marketed as (mostly) free of hormones and other additives. In Northern California, Bill Niman and Orville Schell, who’d started a cattle ranch in the 1970s, supplied natural beef primarily to local restaurants. At the time, Schell’s name carried the weight because he had published first a series of articles and then a book about the livestock and meat industries’ addiction to pharmaceuticals. “I hope I don’t radiate any aura of holier-than-thou,” Schell told a reporter in 1986. He and Niman could “charge more” for their product, he explained, because “[f]ood consciousness” in the San Francisco Bay Area had “reached a state of evolution that [was] almost off the charts.” (That prompted an eye-rolling retort from Mel Coleman: “We sold to Los Angeles, Austin, Houston and Boston before Marin and Boulder came around. The Bay Area is really slow in doing this.”)

  Unfortunately for Coleman and other honest purveyors of alternative meats, the USDA had opened the gates and thrown away the key. In 1984, the department diluted the value of Coleman’s labels when it issued new rules that allowed any meat to be labeled “natural” as long as it contained no artificial ingredients and the carcass had been “minimally processed,” a vague stipulation that could include anything and everything. Fly-by-nights weaseled into the niche. A grocery chain in Coleman’s home state of Colorado stopped carrying natural meats because its buyer couldn’t distinguish good guys like Coleman from the less-than-honest. “I’ve got ranchers coming in here every week asking me to buy their natural beef,” he said, and he was “skeptical” about their credentials. Nor was the free-for-all limited to beef. Consider “Rocky the Range” chicken, which landed on the market in the mid-1980s. The company’s owners marketed their birds as “free-range” and “stress-free,” presumably because those descriptions resonated with their intended audience: laid-back Californians. But Rocky, which cost twice as much as conventional broilers, had less to do with pure and organic than with inventive salesmanship. It was the brainchild of food marketers, not farmers, and the chickens were raised by a conventional grower in Petaluma, the West Coast chicken capital. The farm’s owner cut doors in the sides of some of his coops so birds could roam freely—more or less: the coops were fenced. Chickens destined for Rockyhood were fed and watered exactly like the rest of the grower’s flock; no foraging allowed. A curious reporter persuaded two Los Angeles chefs, including Wolfgang Puck, one of the first to surf the food fetish–celebrity chef wave, to conduct a blind taste test of Rocky and a plain old broiler. Rocky failed, and Puck was annoyed that his own taste buds couldn’t tell the difference. “I definitely think we should find out why they charge so much money,” he announced. USDA officials were even less impressed. In 1990, the department told the company’s owners to cease and desist with its terminology. “We don’t have a working definition for range,” explained a USDA spokesman. “What is ‘range’ in the regulatory sense? . . . A horse rounding up chickens on the range?” The department also nixed the “stress-free” claim. “We can’t be wasting the government’s time with words we can’t enforce,” he said. “I guess a chicken could be stress free, but how could you tell?” Who could blame the department? The burgeoning natural foods industry was a morass of misinformation, wacky claims, and blatant lies. Who knew if biodynamically raised beef or pork was superior to conventional meat in taste or nutrition? What advertising leeway should be allowed to the rabbit grower who claimed that caging his animals in wooden pens maximized the impact of “beneficial magnetic forces”?

  Mel Coleman was prepared to stand his ground against frauds, but then came a blow that infuriated him. In 1989, the USDA announced that it would no longer certify beef as hormone-free; a department spokeswoman explained that it lacked the “wherewithal” and expertise to make such a judgment. (To be fair, bovines, like humans, have hormones and no meat is hormone-free.) Mel Coleman denounced the decision as a “great injustice.” First he’d lost “natural”; now he was being forced to give up “hormone-free,” the las
t card in his hand. He was no fan of excessive government, but in this case, he said, “[a]s bad as our government is, it still does have a little bit of credibility for consumers.” Federal labeling was his main defense against the fakes and “essential” to the success of his venture, he argued. “It’s all we are.”

  That explains why he joined other crusaders during the 1990 round of negotiations for a new farm bill: he and they wanted Congress to establish federal standards for organic produce and meat. Coleman, by then an old hand when it came to schmoozing bureaucrats and power players, worked with Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, longtime supporter of alternative agriculture, and at the time chair of the Senate’s agriculture committee, to write a bill that would give him and others legal access to the term organic. In June 1990, Coleman and others testified at a hearing over the matter hosted by two subcommittees of the House agriculture committee.

  Coleman quickly discovered he’d overestimated the overlords’ enthusiasm for change. A congressman from Missouri opened the hearing by complaining that the term organic farming implied that organic crops and meat were “better than food produced by other farming methods.” “I don’t, personally, believe that to be the case,” he said. “We have a safe, reliable, and affordable food supply with ample choices for all consumers,” he argued, and neither organic foods nor a standard for them was necessary. “I’m still trying to figure out how you can have an organic cow,” he added. The chair of the House agriculture committee, Texan Eligio “Kika” de la Garza, was even more skeptical. He told the assembled that during some preliminary on-the-scene investigating, he’d talked to an organic farmer. The congressman asked her where she obtained the fertilizer for her four-acre urban farm. “I assume you use manure,” he’d told her. “No, no, no,” she replied. “I use commercial fertilizer.” The congressman quizzed her further and discovered that she defined hers as an organic farm because she didn’t use synthetic pesticides. “Goodness knows,” de la Garza told the audience, “sheep, goat, poultry, cattle—it’s all too complicated. If someone uses manure, you have to go back to see that the manure didn’t come from cattle that had chemical therapeutic treatment.”

  The two USDA representatives who attended the hearing were even less enthusiastic. “[T]here is not much about this bill that we like,” said the head of the Agricultural Marketing Service, adding that the department opposed the establishment of federal organic standards for beef, pork, and poultry. The “greatest” threat to the nation’s food supply, he argued, was posed by “microbial contaminations” like salmonella rather than the “pesticides, animal drugs, or other chemicals” cited as problematic in the proposed legislation. Banning the latter did nothing to address the dangers of the former. The other USDA spokesman was even more dismissive. Livestock was “constantly exposed to parasites, bacteria, and viruses,” and in his opinion it was “impossible” to produce cattle, hogs, and chickens without using “synthetic drugs” and “therapeutic doses of antibiotics.” If only we could travel back in time and watch Mel Coleman’s reaction. If he wasn’t banging his head against the nearest wall, he probably wanted to do so. Making organic meat wasn’t impossible; he’d been doing it for years.

  Eventually a bill made its way out of committee and into the House and Senate, but the debates in both chambers proved to be unexpectedly contentious, and few lawmakers were willing to commit to “organic.” (If the content of the discussion is any indication, it’s also clear that most of them were confused about what the word meant.) Worse, during farm bill negotiations, Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican with seniority and clout, tried to eliminate much of LISA. In the end, the two bodies compromised by establishing a National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) and charging it with writing a set of standards (knowing, presumably, that in Washington, the best way to avoid conflicts and decision was by studying something to death). LISA survived but got a new name, one that reflected the alternative agriculturalists’ ability to use language that appealed rather than threatened: Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), “sustainable” having by that time become code for environmentally sound but not too far out (it was also punchier than “low- input”).

  Mel Coleman wasn’t willing to wait for the NOSB to hammer out the details. In 1991, he launched a new marketing campaign based on a slogan that avoided what he called the “o” word but adhered to the law: “What would beef be without hormones, steroids or antibiotics: It would be Coleman.” Coleman’s livestock and meat-making peers decided they’d had enough of him (although perhaps they’d had their fill of alternative agriculturalists and a public that turned up its nose at beef). Leaders of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and the National Cattlemen’s Association protested what they described as Coleman’s “negative advertising.” When he touted his meats as organic and natural, they complained, he cast “doubt on the safety and wholesomeness of the generic beef supply.” “Our problem with this campaign is that it clearly implies that Coleman beef is safer to eat than other beef and the scientific facts simply do not support that,” they explained. “Isn’t there some way to promote your product without kicking undue ‘mud’ in the face of the rest of the beef industry?” (It was surely no coincidence that Monfort/ConAgra, which processed Coleman’s cattle, picked that moment to raise its per-head slaughter fee by $5.) Coleman refused to back down. “I’ve paid a lot of dues in this industry and I’m not going to apologize just because we do things differently,” he said. “All the ads do is say our animals don’t get [chemical additives] and if you’re interested in that kind of a product, we’ve got it.”

  The uproar over organic standards and the near-loss of LISA/SARE persuaded alt-agriculturalists that they had to forge new alliances in order to strengthen their numbers. They sensed that more supporters were out there. The agricultural crisis of the 1980s and the encroachment of corporate hog farms had convinced many farmers that if they wanted to survive, they had to rethink their strategy. Sustainable agriculture proponents were eager to tap into that frustration. But they also recognized that they were in danger of losing control of their agenda because the idea of “sustainable agriculture” had been coopted by outsiders. As three longtime advocates put it, the phrase had “been embraced by virtually every constituency with an interest in agriculture,” from consumers to food processors to the input manufacturers at the heart of agribusiness. Whatever alternative agriculture had meant back in the sixties and seventies, by the 1990s it meant everything and thus nothing. Activists had to figure out how to differentiate their agenda. In 1991 and 1992, a consortium of sustainable agriculture groups organized a road show of seminars, panels, and round tables—a “national dialogue,” they called it—aimed at uncovering hidden pockets of support and determining where to go next and how to get there.

  Those gatherings pointed toward an inescapable conclusion: sustainable agriculturalists had to diversify their primarily rural agenda and link it to a broader community. In 1994, they launched the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, a loose-knit collection of reformers whose interests ranged from immigrant farm workers to minority farmers to consumer protection. But two years later, the movement took a great leap forward when it formally allied itself with activists engaged in building urban food systems. The new Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) linked farm to city and city to farm. Over the next fifteen years, the CFSC would inspire the “eat local” campaign; turn farmers’ markets into a minor industry; and force the NOSB to establish organic standards, especially for beef, poultry, and pork.

  The urban activists who partnered with the sustainable agriculture advocates came out of the “food security” movement. The working definition of food security can be summed briefly: every person, every community, every nation is secure when food supplies are available, accessible, and adequate. The idea was a byproduct of World War II. As the war came to an end, world leaders organized the FAO (now housed at the United Nations) to monitor global food supplie
s and address a tragic paradox: people in some parts of the world suffered malnutrition and starvation even as farmers in other regions collapsed into bankruptcy thanks to overproduction of foodstuffs. The FAO wanted to organize the distribution and sale of surpluses in a way that would guarantee food security for everyone. During the 1970s, food security provided the conceptual framework for managing the global food crisis that scarred that decade. The FAO, which hosted a conference to address the famine and coordinate the response to it, urged global leaders to construct a “systematic world food security policy.”

  The food security of the United States loomed large in that effort because so much of the world’s population depended on American agriculture. Scholars, politicians, and activists pondered the nation’s food security at conferences and congressional hearings, and most arrived at a surprising conclusion: despite an abundance of cheap food and a hyperefficient production and distribution system, the United States was food insecure. Most people lived in cities and relied on food supplies trucked in from other parts of the country, and an average supermarket held only about two days’ worth of food for the people it regularly served. A powerful storm, a railroad strike, or a military-related event could wipe shelves clean. Environmentalists argued that, in addition, U.S. food insecurity was systemic because farmers relied on petroleum-based inputs; agriculture as practiced was unsustainable and therefore food supplies were anything but secure. Others contended that Americans would enjoy food security only when they replaced big food manufacturers with what the Naderist Exploratory Project for Economic Alternatives called “a decentralized, safe, and ecologically sound food production and marketing system.” According to this view, Americans needed fewer factory farms and giant food processors, and more “localized, small-scale production of fruits and vegetables.”