The Meat Racket

The Meat Racket, the Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business, by   Christopher Leonard, Simon & Schuster 2014

Don’t pick up this book unless you have a nose for outrage because what our industrialized food business has done for factory farming – and your lunchbox – is shocking.  According to author Christopher Leonard, what we’ve now got right in our heartland is a new oligarchy, completely vertically integrated food factory production.  So what’s wrong with ruthless efficiency and restructured operations?

According to Leonard, it’s dangerous – an economic model that drove independent farmers and related operators out of the business – and it could be risky for consumers.  Here’s why:

·      Only four beef companies control 85% of the national market

·       Only four companies make 65 percent of the pork we eat

·       Forty years ago there were 36 companies that produced chicken.  Now there are two – that’s right, two – companies that make half the chicken we eat, and these two companies control each aspect of the production process.

Where else have we heard of a few operators taking control of entire industries?  Carnegie?  Rockefeller?  Railroads? IC's? The inevitable impact of uncontrolled consolidation – price increases and supply problems – that happened in energy producers could just as easily appear among our food suppliers.

It’s enough to send us down the tofu aisle, past the bacon burgers and turkey meatballs.  Leonard draws on Tyson as the bad boy model for his expose, and the basic data will shock you:

·        Final interviews with billionaire Don Tyson, a trademark American entrepreneur whose bold competitive moves created a new industry

·       While the industrial meat industry tallied record profits, government antitrust and bankruptcy among small independents remained unsolved, “problematic” issues

Leonard offers no easy prescription to break up the conglomerates, or to return small farmers to financial health.  Instead, he digs into the history and the strategic moves that allowed these new operations to consolidate and grow.  He begins the book with a human story, one that is hard to read and leaves us never wanting to eat another chicken nugget – “How Jerry Yandell Lost the Farm”:

          Kanita Yandell was waiting for the men to come and clean out the carcasses so her family’s farm could die in peace. And the men showed up, eventually, arriving in a caravan of trucks emblazoned with the red oval Tyson logo.  The men got out and milled around next to the long chicken houses that had been emptied out earlier.  Kanita didn’t become afraid until she saw them donning the blue plastic suits:  big, baggy plastic suits with bulging helmets that swallowed their heads.  They were dressed like men who handle nuclear waste.  And they did this to enter the chicken houses where Kanita had worked with her sons just days before….