NOV 2

16: NOV 2. Unit 4: Ethical Issues in Eating and Food Production

Assigned Reading

• Lawless, Kristin. Formerly Known as Food, Chapter 8, "Food Choice" (197-217)

• Winders and Ransom, "Introduction to the Global Meat Industry" 1-23 (22)

• Mayer, Jane. "How Trump is helping tycoons exploit the pandemic" New Yorker, July 13, 2020. (first seven pages)

Some questions for this unit

• Is the American food production system a result of the American diet or vice versa? Who is driving the demand curves?
• Does Montgomery's perspective apply to the American food production system?

• Some similarities: Mining soil for food export. Stratification in access to food. Contentious foreign policy issues over food. Population increases through the present.
• Some dissimilarities: Global corporations with intensified production and distribution systems and access to new markets. Corporate concentration has its own effects (see "Global Meat")

• Do we find evidence of "regulatory capture" in the meat industry?

Slaughter vs. Hyperslaughter

• A few slides from some research on industrial slaughter. On Sharepoint.

Lawless, Kristin. Formerly Known as Food, Chapter 8, "Food Choice"

• We are "upside down" on food

• concentration of companies, controls of foods
• poor disproportionately exposed to BPA (needs more research).
• poor have double the diabetes rate. p. 200 other SES related food/health outcomes
• advertising effects: logos stimulate taste buds. targeted advertising

• Thesis: Am food companies have created a kind of acceptance of ind. foods and set of ideas about health and nutrition that are largely the product of advertising by industrial food companies over about 40 years. - food elites and food desert dwellers alike. interesting.

• At Occupy Wall street protests: vegan oatmeal from McDonalds, veggie sandwiches from Subway.
• Households over $60k eat the most f. food.

• Thesis: Am food companies also divide us, stigmatizing whole foods as food for elites. McD's commercial as example. [Healthy food culture is often stigmatized as extreme, counter-cultural, and obsessive.]

• Bloomberg soda case

• 208: Background to industrial food advertising. Targeted women ('60s): ind food higher SES, part of the future. Critique of food movement for elitism and paternalism.

Winders and Ransom, "Introduction to the Global Meat Industry"

• major concerns and questions, p. 1.
• paradoxically, increased meat production can create food insecurity for some. 2.

• global meat industry is a product of gov't and industry collaborating
• overproduces food animals relative to population.
• creates dangers for environment and workers. (from hyperslaughter)

• Data 1960-2016

• 45 million metric tons to 259 MMT.
• $65 billion to about $400 billion.
• note that US has declined from peak consumption, also some Europeans.
• population increase 1960-2016 3 billion to 7.4. (Recall discussion of dem. transition.)
• increases in numbers of animals: 270% for pigs and 900% for chickens.

• meat exports: mostly from global north. Asian and emerging industrial countries importers. p. 12: increases in China, for example, 3.5kg to 57.6kg.

• How did global meat grow so much?

• increases in feed grains. along with ag tech to put more land into produciton, GE corn and soybeans increased yields.
• WTO - promotes free trade agreements for meat import/export.
• former communist countries became markets.
• increased corporate concentration. both production and processing.

• 3 consequences of global meat for consideration:

• 1. corporate concentration - read at 16.
• 2. tension bt. cheap meat and food insecurity - smallholder meat production in decline from competition.
• 3. social and environmental injustice.

digress on slaughter and hyperslaugter

Mayer, Jane. "How Trump is helping tycoons exploit the pandemic"

• Unionization efforts at meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses (2/3 of beef and 1/3 of poultry workers). NLRB surprisingly open to challenges to union certification in last few years. Wouldn't stay cert. election even in Covid crisis.
• Montaire Corporation - privately held, mostly by Ronald Cameron.

• Characteristics of employment at meatpacking plants.

• Use of temp agency for deniability on immigration status.
• Typical for ICE raids to target slaughterhouses.
• Wages often very low and limited to no healthcare.

• Covid meat crisis: Tyson ad, Emergency order declaring slaughter workers essential (also a crisis in supply chain), limited liability for illness. Hard to credit the shortage scare given export production, but we could have cut production to domestic supply needs. Company could withold health data with impunity.

• Waivers of regulations: Line speeds. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.