The Meat of The Matter

Meat is a touchy subject. I empathize with the plight of The Meat Seeker’s Mission. Unfortunately, it’s hard to have a big effect on the meat business simply by asking a restaurant where the meat comes from. I do appreciate the attempt at supply chain transparency though, and think it’s a healthy development for the US food system.

I come at this from a different angle. First, meat is not inherently “bad”. Food can’t be “bad” or “good”, it’s food. I also know a little bit about the meat business. I traded lean hogs on the floor of the CME, and invested in TallGrassBeef, a grass fed, grass finished beef operation that will deliver to your door. TallGrass was one of the first to embrace the pastured movement in the United States. By the way, the beef tastes great too! Additionally, my wife works on an organic livestock farm, Barrington Natural Farms, raising pastured chickens, goats, pigs and cattle. Another friend of mine operates Crawford Family Farm in New Glarus, Wisconsin which chefs say is the best lamb in the United States.

Factory farmers care about their animals every bit as much as the romanticized version of small independent farmers. Without healthy animals, they don’t make a profit. I am not here to defend factory farming, but it’s not exactly the Boogey Man it’s made out to be.

The issues confronting the meat industry are not simple, and cannot be solved by a couple of blog posts. Ever since the meatpacking plants were established in Chicago before the turn of the 20th century, the meat industry has become more and more centralized. Factory farming grew up out of World War Two, and the perceived need for a stable protein supply in case our country confronted a situation like that again. Bear in mind the US had been through two world wars and the Great Depression where millions of citizens were starving. Access to cheap food was important. It’s still important today.

Michael Pollen and others have written about the food issue in the US. Most of the time writers embrace more federal and state regulation as a solution to the problem. This is the wrong tactic. Government regulations increase the cost of production and increase regulatory capture by big corporations. More regulation puts smaller farmers out of business. As the world changes, innovation ensues, and science progresses, regulation is often out of date and cannot keep up. What results is a fight between incumbents that have built business models on the current regulations, and innovators that have found a better way to produce that run afoul of regulations.

The answer is to embrace free, transparent markets.

However, that is a massive challenge. Think about all the regulatory agencies that have a hand in regulating our food supply. USDA, FDA, EPA, ICC, NIH, CDC, Dept of Homeland Security, DOD, and on and on. Then there are agencies in all 50 states, and private industry groups. The bureaucratic oversight on the US Food industry is overwhelming. It leads to stupid situations. A farmer that grows organic pastured, non-GMO grain fed chickens in Indiana cannot sell direct to consumers in Illinois. They are forced by regulations to go through distribution. Dismantling the regulatory apparatus that oversees our food system should be job number one if we want to have a better food supply.

The second thing that needs to be changed is the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is one of the most heavily lobbied bills each year in Congress. There is little difference between the two political parties in the outcome of the bill. Every President, regardless of party, signs it. The bill is laden with things like price supports, price floors, subsidies for production, rules on how many acres that can be planted, rules on distribution, and mandates. Those factors create economic incentives that influence the entire farming industry. For example, we pay peanut farmers a subsidy to produce. They overproduce, and the US government buys peanuts to take them off the market so the price doesn’t go too low. This increases the cost of a jar of peanut butter by fifty cents. That’s just one example. If we look at each crop, and trace the end price back to the subsidies that were used to get to that price, we’d find all kinds of economic disincentives and incentives that create the universe of farming we have today.

If we want to change our food supply and begin by passing more regulations, the outcome will be more expensive “natural” food, and comparatively cheaper factory farmed food. Only the wealthy will be able to afford it. What we have seen is with increased regulation, it’s been tougher and tougher to make it as a family farm. In the last twenty years, we have seen family farmers sell their land to corporate farmers.

I am all for changing the way America farms and consumes food. But, the change first has to come in the way we regulate, and legislate our food industry. Once economic incentives are changed for the industry, they will change their practices and it will result in cheaper costs for “natural” food and more Americans will have access and be able to afford it.