by Jayson Lusk
I can see it now: some future president thirty years from now—after repealing the fat, soda, and meat taxes, the salt and saturated fat bans, and the prohibition against food traveling more than a hundred miles—saying, “I think this would be a good time for a Happy Meal.” That is, if there is still someone around able to sell her one.
While Prohibitionists were concerned with the meal’s beverage, others took aim at the main course. Many high school English students will remember Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle, about the Chicago meatpacking industry. Fewer will probably remember that Sinclair wasn’t primarily concerned about the meat. The Jungle overtly promoted socialism, with the book’s main character eventually converting to the cause and going by the name Comrade Jurgis. Published eight years before the First World War and a decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, the book featured characters who could confidently promise a socialist utopia, claiming among other things an “unlimited food supply” and that “after the triumph of the international proletariat, war would of course be inconceivable.”9 It also bears mention that Sinclair was an ardent supporter of Prohibition.
Despite a failed run for the governorship of California, Sinclair could still take some pride in knowing he’d caused enough public outcry to help get new food safety regulations through Congress. Alas, he was dissatisfied that he managed “only” to clean up the meatpacking plants. A dismayed Sinclair said, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”10 His stomach punch helped lead to the first major federal food regulations and the creation of the precursor to the modern-day FDA. Ironically, this is the same FDA that modern-day progressives deride and the same meatpacking industry criticized in present-day books such as Fast Food Nation. At least Sinclair was upfront with his politics.
Although Sinclair complained about collusive meatpackers, it wasn’t until 1920 that Progressives were able to dissolve the National Packing Company. Federal efforts to prevent monopoly power had been around since the Progressive Woodrow Wilson sought to curb food inflation during World War I. During that time, he had the Federal Trade Commission investigate the agricultural industry from “hoof to the table.”
What exactly has resulted from the century-long attack on the meatpacking industry? Despite decades of investigation and regulation, the meatpacking industry today remains dominated by a few large firms, just as it was in Upton Sinclair’s time. Four companies are today responsible for 80 percent of the beef processed in the United States.11 And the industry probably employs as many immigrants as it did in Sinclair’s time. Killing is nasty business no matter who does it, and it was only slightly less pleasant in 1900 than it is in 2012. As long as there are those who wish to eat meat, there will be those willing to pay others to kill. And until we find some better way to do it, employment in a slaughterhouse provides the best alternative for some people working their way up the economic ladder.
The fact that most of the meat processed in this country comes from a few large firms says more about the way the costs of processing beef change with the scale of production than it does about all the Progressives’ attempts to hinder cost-cutting efforts. The research shows that any market power these firms have gained through consolidation has been far more than offset by technological innovations and cost-cutting measures.12 We have to remember, after all, that these “evil” meatpackers have somehow found a way of selling us beef and pork that is now 20 percent less expensive and poultry that is 50 percent less expensive than it was in 1970.13 And it is safer, leaner, and of more consistent quality, too.
As evidenced by the creation of food safety standards, not all changes in the Progressive era were counterproductive, and there was at least one other development that had a positive impact on modern-day agriculture. Justin Morrill, a congressman from Vermont, unable to attend college because his father could not afford the tuition, became an outspoken advocate for low-cost college education. In the late 1800s, Morrill helped enact the Land Grant Act, which provided for the establishment of publicly funded agricultural and technical educational institutions across the nation. The act was followed by legislation providing federal funds for agricultural research and education. These developments eventually led to the creation of universities and agricultural experiment stations from Cornell University to the University of Minnesota to the University of California–Berkeley. These Land Grant universities created new, higher-yielding plant varieties and more productive and sustainable cropping systems, and spread the new scientific findings about food and agriculture all over the countryside. The benefits of these investments have been substantial, with current estimates indicating that the benefits of the research have exceeded their costs by a factor of 32 to 1.14 Economists estimate the rate of return on agricultural research at between 10 and 50 percent.15 Try consistently getting that in the stock market! And no matter what you’ve been told, the primary beneficiaries of this research haven’t been farmers, industrialists, or agribusinesses—but you and me, the food consumers.16 Yet the food police’s most ardent wish is to strip us of these benefits and have us pay more for food.
If America seemed to be on a path toward a more natural and less industrialized food production system, the Great Depression and the Second World War would change all that as the country recognized the need for a production system that could feed the nation in a cost-effective manner. Spawned by the innovations coming from entrepreneurs and the agricultural colleges, dramatic productivity increases began to occur. In the early 1900s a farmer could expect to harvest about 29 bushels per acre of corn planted. With the development of hybrid seeds and the application of synthetic fertilizer, average corn yields increased to about 40 bushels per acre in the 1950s, and jumped to 113 bushels per acre in the 1980s. Today, with the use of biotechnology, average corn yields are around 130 bushels per acre, and yields of close to 300 bushels per acre can even be attained in ideal conditions.
It wasn’t just corn; the same thing was happening in all facets of agriculture. In the 1960s a sow could be expected to produce about 1,400 pounds of pork through the offspring she birthed. Today the average sow will produce about 3,600 pounds of pork. The result is that food is now much cheaper than it once was. As a percentage of their income, Americans today spend half as much as they did on food a hundred years ago. Of course, incomes have risen dramatically over that time as well—meaning that the real price of food has substantially fallen. It took a schoolteacher in 1900 a little more than one hour’s worth of work to earn enough to buy a dozen eggs. Today’s schoolteacher has to work less than three minutes to earn enough to buy a dozen eggs.17
Dramatically higher levels of productivity imply that today’s farmers (and, by implication, today’s consumers) get much more food using many fewer inputs. That’s the signal that falling food prices send us: we’re using up less of the things we all deem valuable. Despite the fact that agricultural output is 2.75 times higher than in 1950, U.S. Department of Agriculture data reveal that agricultural input use has remained essentially unchanged.18 That’s like a technological innovation enabling me to write almost three books in the same time it now takes me to write one. These changes imply that farmers can now produce a lot more food with a lot less land. Indeed, despite now having a lot more to eat, agricultural land use is down 27.5 percent since 1950. One would expect this development to be a source of great pleasure and pride for the modern food progressive worried about the environment and the poor, but the food police are anything but happy about the way we eat.
The U.S. farm population peaked around 1910, and after the First World War, commodity prices fell precipitously as European agricultural production resumed. Progressives of the era lacked the power to enact the price controls they desired, but the intellectual framework provided by the Progressive era enabled the New Deal policies of the 1930s. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that Franklin Roosevelt enacted farm price supports and supply controls in an effort to better the lot of farmers.
The Progressives’ efforts eventually led to outright destruction of agricultural commodities at a time when much of the nation was starving. One of the most notable cases was that of Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn, who was taken on by the U.S. government for the heinous act of growing too much wheat. Even though he planned to use the wheat only on his own farm, the Supreme Court decided that his actions had violated the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. His sin? By growing more wheat than his allotment, the court claimed, he had indirectly pushed the price below the bureaucratically determined minimum. The solution was simple: his wheat had to be destroyed.19 This kind of inanity wasn’t limited to court cases. The earlier Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 paid farmers to destroy hogs, and millions of dollars were paid out to cotton farmers to plow their crop back into the ground!
So, despite the lines at the soup kitchens during the Depression, the planners of the era deemed it morally acceptable to destroy food in an attempt to ratchet up farm prices. Fortunately the government no longer destroys commodities to control supply, but many of the price and income supports that arose as part of the New Deal remain, in convoluted forms, today. Ironically, today’s food progressives abhor farm programs and blame them for everything from obesity and diabetes to the massive growth in farm size and rural outmigration.
One would think the take-away lesson for progressives is that the results of government planning and control rarely match the good that was intended. Yet progressives apparently believe that the problem is one not of too much government control but of too little. In his pitch to keep Republicans from regaining office, Obama made this analogy for the recent economic downturn: Why would you give the keys back to a guy who has just driven his car into a ditch? The first generation of food police banned alcohol, destroyed crops, dismantled agribusinesses, sued farmers for making their own planting decisions, enacted obstinate farm subsidies, and issued wartime food ration booklets. Do we really want to hand them back the keys?
HIPPIE FOOD AND THE HEIRS OF THE PROGRESSIVE FOOD MOVEMENT
Like the first Progressives, the 1960s generation was poised for a revolt against food industrialization. Those seeking peace and love also needed a new diet to fit their worldview. Generations removed from production agriculture, the hippies rebelled against the prevailing system and went back to the farm to grow and eat food that wasn’t being manipulated by the Man. Communes, food co-ops, and organics came to symbolize hippies’ dropping out of society and expressing their distrust in the prevailing economic order.
This was a generation raised in the atomic age. They were primed for fear, and that’s what they got. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made them fearful of pesticides and environmental degradation, Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines sparked paranoia about the treatment of farm animals, and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb raised alarm about overpopulation and the mass starvation of humans.
The movement rejected technology as a potential solution to the problems; after all, it was technology that had created the nuclear weapons underpinning the fears they faced. Moreover, the hippies were rejecting a capitalist system that benefited the creators and owners of new technologies. At least with respect to food and agriculture, the hippies were becoming Luddites, and they were anticapitalist by creed.
They rediscovered organic food, which has its roots in the natural and organic food movements in Germany. In the 1920s, after German scientists discovered a process to create synthetic nitrogen and thereby drastically improve crop yields at a much lower cost, a German philosopher and mystic, Rudolf Steiner, became appalled at this “unnatural” development and reacted by encouraging “biodynamic,” or organic, food production. The mystic and “natural” aura surrounding the process later engendered the hippies’ embrace of organic food.20
Although the hippies were a subculture, they had significant influence on American culture writ large. Not only did they influence a generation of teenagers to wear bell bottoms and listen to the Grateful Dead, but they affected the way Americans thought about food. A previous generation that had operated under the implicit assumption that newer food technologies were better—TV dinners, Tang, canned biscuits—now began questioning that wisdom. Although tie-dyed T-shirts soon went out of fashion, it took time for the fashion of “natural” and organic foods to take hold. Now organic has gone mainstream.
In fact, organic has gone too mainstream for the elite wing of the modern food progressives. Whatever we were told about the benefits of organic, it seems that it wasn’t actually about the food after all. In his bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan subtly makes this case by “exposing” the size of the modern organic farms. Of course, the problem with organic labeling standards, now defined by the USDA and FDA, is that they have nothing to do with social justice, small farms, or local production. The hippies promoted organic only to find now that they don’t like what they created. Just like all religions entering a modern world, organic-ism is undergoing its own reformation. Disciples are now converting to the locavore-ist, vegetarian, terra-ist, or slow-food-ist denominations.
The modern food progressives are no longer disgruntled teenagers. They are now influential journalists, academics, regulators, and politicians. Their advocacy has led to a garden on the White House lawn, a new mandate for the FDA, Michelle Obama’s Childhood Nutrition Act, and a host of new proposals to regulate food and health. Unlike with the Progressives of the early 1900s, however, the scientific and technological optimism is gone. Today’s progressives want a revolt in food, a retrograde revolution seeking to return food and agriculture to some romanticized past. And to accomplish their objective, they have spread anxiety and fear about our modern food system and created a caricature that cannot withstand scrutiny.
How did we reach such a state of affairs? The American food system was once considered the envy of the world—we produced more, innovated more, and ate better and more cheaply than the citizens of almost every other country in the world. And by and large, we still do, no matter what romanticism is expressed by progressives about European food. It is common to hear American travelers in Europe remark, “We don’t have anything like this in the States,” but as the European politician Daniel Hannan retorted, “Yes you do: They’re called restaurants, for heaven’s sake.”21
Before we accept the premise that our food system is in need of revolution, it is prudent to look back, see where we’ve been, and recognize how far we’ve come. In the midst of the industrial revolution, self-described socialists wished to put an end to capitalist-driven industrialization by overthrowing the bourgeoisie. But they, like the food police today, failed to appreciate the incredibly positive change brought about by technological development and the capitalistic system. In her book Grand Pursuit, Sylvia Nasar beautifully articulates what escaped their notice:
For a dozen centuries, as empires rose and fell and the wealth of nations waxed and waned, the earth’s thin and scattered population had grown by tiny increments. What remained essentially unchanged were man’s material circumstances, circumstances that guaranteed that life would remain miserable for the vast majority. Within two or three generations, the industrial revolution demonstrated that the wealth of a nation could grow by multiples rather than percentages. It had challenged the most basic premise of human existence: man’s subservience to nature and its harsh dictates. Prometheus stole fire from the gods, but the industrial revolution encouraged man to seize the controls.22
Over the past two centuries, we have witnessed what can only be described as a miraculous transformation in the safety, quality, and quantity of the food we eat. Yet, at least in the realm of agriculture, it seems the food police would tie our hands, wrest the controls from the engine of growth, give the gods back their fire, and let nature run its course. With history as our guide, let us not yield to the demands of the food police but anxiously await what more the technological innovators have to offer.
ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT TO EAT?
We make about two hundred food-related decisions each day.1 With so much practice, isn’t it obvious that we are capable of knowing what to eat? Not so, according to the food police.
When it comes to the healthfulness of our dietary choices, we are apparently unable to think clearly. Our wants and desires must be transformed. When answering a question about what the government is doing to reduce food waste and make nutritious foods more appealing, Tom Vilsack, Obama’s secretary of agriculture, told a crowd, “It’s going to take time for people’s taste to adjust … So, we have to make sure that what we do is create the appropriate transition.”2 I wasn’t aware that my taste buds needed a transition.
In a recent speech promoting her Let’s Move! anti-childhood-obesity campaign, Michelle Obama said, “It’s not about telling people what to do.”3 That’s normally what people say right before they try to guilt you into doing what they want you to do. It does make one wonder what the First Lady’s campaign is all about if she isn’t trying to tell us to do something.
It is not just that the food police want us to make different food choices—advertisers, after all, routinely try to accomplish this feat—it’s that our choices are deemed incorrect or morally defunct and must be changed even if it means using the government’s regulatory power to do so. Whereas we can choose to ignore the advice of preachers or advertisers, the same cannot be said of regulators.
To see how the food police are gaining the helm of power, we have to turn to the halls of academia and to the seemingly obscure work of a group of psychologists seeking to rewrite the rules of economics with a field of study called behavioral economics.4 Why worry about some academic squabbling? Because behavioral economics has provided the philosophical basis and the real-world traction for supplanting our own preferences and beliefs, as revealed in our individual choices, with those of the food elite. If you want to know why food paternalism will be around a long time after the Obama administration is gone, you have to understand that the elite have created a pseudoscientific theory for why their helping hand is needed.
