Sysco — the giant, often-invisible food distributor — offers 400,000 products to the bulk of the nation’s restaurants and other institutions. It has a 17.5 percent market share, made $37 billion in sales in 2010 alone, and dispatches a cavalcade of silver trucks daily from 180 locations across the U. S.

In other words, Sysco is wholesale food in America, the same way Cargill is farming and Walmart is, well, all of retail. Or, as Salon put it back in 2009, Sysco has “come to monopolize most of what you eat.” So when the company changes a policy — like it announced it was doing on Monday, when it pledged to do away with meat from pigs raised in gestation crates — there is bound to be a striking ripple effect.

In a statement to the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS), the company wrote: “Sysco is committed to working with its suppliers to create a gestation crate-free supply system, for the good of all. Like many of our customers, we’re going to work with our pork suppliers to develop a timeline to achieve this goal.”

As their name implies, gestation crates are essentially steel cages that keep pregnant sows confined in a space roughly the size of their bodies. They’re commonly seen — along with battery cages for egg-laying hens — as among the least humane livestock practices. Animal behavior expert Temple Grandin describes gestation grates as the equivalent of “asking a sow to live in an airline seat” (without lavatory privileges).

Over the course of the last year, thanks to consumer demand, and an ongoing effort by HSUS, most major players in the fast food, grocery, and food service industries have gone — at least on paper — gestation crate-free. The list includes Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Denny’s, Carl’s Jr., Safeway, Kroger, Costco, Kraft, and Hormel (the maker of Spam). Even Smithfield Foods — the nation’s largest pork producer — has agreed to phase out the crates by 2017.

So Sysco can’t, by any means, say it’s first to make the pledge (and the company has yet to specify a timeline for the switch), but its move might have the largest impact so far on the practices farmers are using on the ground.

“The power of Sysco is the size,” says Josh Balk, manager of corporate strategy at HSUS. “This will make it so much easier for smaller restaurants to adopt a no-gestation crate policy if they’d like — because it’s what their main distributor delivers. It will also change the buying practices of many companies who they deliver to without those companies even knowing it.”

It’s still hard to say how all this pledging — most of it attached to dates that are five to 10 years in the future — will truly impact animal agriculture, but Balk is optimistic. He says that although Smithfield still has five years to make the change, for instance, it does report the percentages of its corporate hog farms that have switched to so-called “group housing” in its last few annual reports. The agriculture giant Cargill has also reportedly moved 50 percent of its operations to group housing.

And of course there are notable holdouts. This spring we reported that Domino’s Pizza was applauded by the American Farm Bureau Federation when it announced it would not be following the trend (I’ll take a large meat lover’s with extra cruelty, please!). And Tyson Foods, says Balk, has been the “most outspoken opponent” of the change, and the most likely to actively defend the use of the crates.

Just how Tyson plans to do business in a system that is rapidly moving away from the practice is a mystery. But it’s likely that the company is hoping that consumer attention to the issue dies down before many of its partner companies (like Sysco, for instance) have to follow through on their pledges. But I have a feeling — if the HSUS has anything to do with it, at least — that probably won’t be the case.

One of the biggest water polluters in our country is the factory farm. In 2008, a Government Accountability Office report panned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to know where most of these farms were located, let alone if they were releasing their manure into rivers, lakes, and streams.

So in early 2011, the EPA announced a rule asking such farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs, to submit basic information, like their address and how many animals they have, to the agency. On Friday, July 20, EPA quietly announced it was withdrawing that rule, planning instead to try to collect the data from the existing records held by states, even though it has tried that before, with poor results.

In trying to understand why the EPA would back off such a seemingly innocuous yet important data collection project, I imagined myself inside a meeting of EPA clean water officials as they made the decision to withdraw the rule.

Setting: A 10-top table in a soulless gray-hued conference room, Federal Triangle, Washington, D.C.

Official One (storms into room, slams hand on table): I wish those House Republicans would all go on a schmoozy farm tour and fall into a manure lagoon! I can’t believe they accused us of flying spy drones over American farms.

Official Two (looking worn): Well, we are flying planes over factory farms in Nebraska and Iowa.

Official One: That’s because we can’t enforce the Clean Water Act without aerial inspections. Ever since the National Pork Producers Council sued us, the only way we can know if factory farms are polluting the water is if they tell us by applying for a discharge permit –

Official Two: Not likely.

Official One: Or if we check up on them with flyovers, where we can see manure flowing into waterways.

Official Two: Well, our work will get a little easier when we at least know how many factory farms there are, how many animals they have, where they are located, and how they manage their manure. I mean, how can we regulate the biggest source of water pollution in the country if we don’t even know where they are?

Official One: Yeah, I’m glad we’re going to release that rule requiring CAFOs to report those details to us soon. We’ve been working at getting better intel on them for over a decade!

Enter Official Three.

Official Three (looking dejected): Hi guys.

Officials One and Two: Hey.

Official Three: So … you know how it’s an election year, and those Nebraska senators just gave us a bunch of shit for the aerial flights over CAFOs? That’s not playing too well in the farm belt.

Official One: Yeah?

Official Three: Yeah. And all the big agricultural lobby groups, like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Producers Council, are saying that us collecting data on them is going to open up large farms to agriterrorism. I know that’s bullshit, but in rural America, this data collection effort just looks like more government meddling.

Official One: But these guys are in an industrial occupation! Their cows, pigs, and chickens produce three times as much poop as all Americans every year. And we don’t even know where it’s going! Not knowing where they’re located or what they are doing with their waste is like not knowing where sewage treatment plants are located, and if they are following the correct protocol for managing waste.

Official Three: Well, it’s just going to have to wait. We’re going to withdraw our rule requiring CAFOs to report basic data.

Official Two: People who care about clean water are going to be pissed.

Official Three: Well, we are going to try and work with the states to gather that information from them.

Official One: Hah! Remember when the Government Accountability Office said all the data we gathered from states about their CAFOs was inaccurate and unreliable? And aren’t we about to release a report showing that Iowa, which has the most pig factory farms in the nation, isn’t enforcing the Clean Water Act on those farms?

Official Three: I know, but it’s really the only option right now. So deal with it. We’re going to work with the Association of Clean Water Administrators to get the data on CAFOs from states, and maybe this time around it will be a little better.

It’s not like anyone gives a damn about clean water when they’re about to run out of unemployment insurance anyway. If you don’t like it, move to the Netherlands. They regulated their dairy CAFOs so strict that half of them moved over here.

Official Two: Okay. So let me get this straight. We’re withdrawing our proposal to collect information about addresses, contact details, animal numbers, and manure management on 20,000 of the nation’s most polluting farms, even though we have a legal agreement with three major environmental groups saying we will do this?

Official Three: Yes. But maybe we’ll release the withdrawal notice late on a Friday, after everyone’s left the office.

Well, it’s 4 o’clock. Want to hit up Harry’s? I’m buying.

The Washington Post says that the current drought is the worst in a half-century and the corn harvest will likely be even smaller than the USDA’s recently downsized estimates. The wacky weather in the heart of commodity agriculture country reminds me of something Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), said a few years ago in a Newsweek interview about farmers’ attitudes toward climate change. It read:

Stallman says most farmers aren’t worried. “We are used to dealing with extreme weather variation,” he says, pointing out that his Texas farm has seen 20 inches of rain in a single day, in the middle of a drought. “We’ve learned to roll with those extremes. If it gets a little more extreme down the road, we can deal with it.”

Yeah. Well, I don’t know how many farmers want to “roll with” this drought. Mr. Stallman, would you like to revise those remarks?

I’m guessing no. After all, the AFBF was instrumental in exempting agriculture from the ill-fated climate bill back in 2009 and Stallman has shown no interest in revisiting the issue. There remains no mention of climate change on the AFBF website.

But Stallman’s climate change denialism is really a sideshow for the AFBF. A new investigative report by Ian Shearn for the Nation (produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network*), explores the full reach of the federation. It’s one that encompasses political activities like lobbying and grooming state legislators sympathetic to its interests as well as vast business interests that have turned what was once a support network for family farmers into large industry players’ most potent ally.

As Shearn details, it’s a much more complex organization than most people realize. A key to understanding the AFBF and its state-level incarnations is the fact that the federation has 6 million members in a nation with only 2 million farmers. But Shearn explains that the federation isn’t entirely what it seems:

It’s not just a non-profit “farmers organization” but a multi-billion dollar network of for-profit insurance companies, the third-largest insurance group in the United States. Its premiums generated more than $11 billion last year alone, on top of assets worth more than $22 billion. In many states, Missouri among them, members of the Farm Bureau board and the board of its affiliated insurance company are one and the same, sharing office buildings and support staff.

And those 6 million farmers it claims as members? In many states, anyone who signs up for Farm Bureau insurance becomes a member of the Farm Bureau automatically … In Missouri, less than a third of its members are farmers. Nonetheless, all of its 113,000 members pay annual dues, as they do throughout the country, which fuels a potent political machine.

I should point out that the various farm bureau insurance companies sell all kinds of policies — not just crop insurance. But they do sell crop insurance — and lots of it. Shearn reports that, nationwide, the various farm bureau insurance companies made a combined $300 million in premium revenue in 2011. That number puts the AFBF’s vigorous support of the current farm bill, which radically expands the federally subsidized crop insurance program, in a different light.

Keep in mind that the government doesn’t just subsidize farmers’ premiums, thus making insurance more affordable to them. The federal government also provides “reinsurance,” or insurance for insurance companies, thus minimizing the companies’ exposure to losses — such as you might see during a devastating drought. And thanks to the feds’ financial support, there’s not much incentive in there for the farm bureaus to reassess the financial risks of planting drought-sensitive commodity crops in a changing climate. It’s either a virtuous or a vicious circle, depending on your perspective.

Shearn also spoke with an actual small farmer named Rolf Christen who tried to enlist the aid of the Missouri Farm Bureau in challenging a nearby 80,000-head confined hog operation that was polluting the air and water in his backyard. Rather than help the farmer, the farm bureau sided with the big operation — owned by pork industry giant Smithfield — and went so far as to get state laws changed to keep farmers like Christen at bay.

In the end Christen went to court and won a settlement — but he claims little has changed at the offending farm. And now there’s another 140,000-head hog operation just a few miles away from him. For decades, the AFBF and its state-level brethren have undertaken a dedicated effort to make supersized livestock operations legal and welcome in states such as Missouri. And as Grist recently reported, despite all of their literal and figurative issues, the numbers of new concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the Midwest are once more on the rise.

While you can’t give the AFBF all the credit, it’s been instrumental in laying the groundwork for the growth of these massive (and massively polluting) operations. It claims to be the “unified national voice of agriculture” but when pressed to choose between industry giants like Smithfield and small farmers like Christen, the AFBF backed the big guys. And it hasn’t looked back.

*Full disclosure: I’m FERN’s executive director.

The Guardian reports on two competing efforts to generate lab-grown meat — all of the tastiness, none of the nastiness. The intent isn’t to make a niche product for vegans, but to formulate something that’s indistinguishable from real meat — and to thereby end meat production as we know it.

Winston Churchill actually predicted the rise of this industry in 1932, saying, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” He was off by a few decades, but scientists and entrepreneurs are working hard to make up for lost time.

Mark Post heads up a Dutch team that’s trying to grow animal muscle tissue without the animal — sometimes called in-vitro meat, or shmeat:

Post envisages a future where huge quantities of high-quality meat are gown in vats, incorporating not only muscle fibres but layers of real fat and even synthetic bone. “In 25 years,” he says, “real meat will come in a packet labelled, ‘An animal has suffered in the production of this product’ and it will carry a big eco tax. I think in 50-60 years it may be forbidden to grow meat from livestock.”

An animal does need to be killed to kick off the in-vitro process, but “in theory, a single specimen could provide the seed material for hundreds of tonnes of meat.” The process of making shmeat is not yet cost effective, however. A single burger made with the stuff will be served for the first time this October and will cost an estimated $331,000 to make.

In a separate effort, Patrick Brown leads a secretive, well-funded Silicon Valley startup, Sand Hill Foods, that’s working to develop synthesized meat and dairy products. His approach is “to manipulate plant material to create a meat-facsimile” — no animals involved at all.

If either venture succeeds, the meat industry will be on the defensive.

This is a disruptive technology — one that threatens to overturn a powerful and established order. The global meat industry, which is populated by some very ruthless people, is going to fight this hard. “I think the meat industry will be an adversary, and maybe a dangerous one,” Post says.

Another challenge will be overcoming the “yuck” factor. But today’s meat eaters already avert their eyes from the factory farms and other unsavory systems that currently bring meat to our tables, so will eating meat from a lab really be that much of a stretch? As reporter Michael Hanlon puts it, “In terms of yuckiness, real meat is at the top of the scale.”

When the Des Moines Register ran a front-page story last week calling into question the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the state, it wasn’t environmentalists or animal rights activists who went on record against the facilities. No, the article featured ex-hog farmers who have been vocal in opposing new factory farms, as well as several Iowans who don’t want to see huge facilities — nor the “poo lagoons” that go along with them — take over the landscape.

Some 19.7 million pigs are raised in Iowa CAFOs every year, and that number is likely to keep climbing. A chart of livestock construction permits that ran with the Register story certainly projects growth. It reads:

2006……………310
2007………….. 252
2008………….. 218
2009……………. 60
2010…………….. 62
2011……………. 132
2012 (by 6/07).. 91

That’s right, after a “slump” in 2009 and 2010, the industry is back to its CAFO-building ways, with 91 permits issued so far this year. And remember, these are not small facilities; according to the Register, each facility contains around 4,400 hogs in two buildings.

Click to embiggen.

Looking at these numbers, it’s easy to wonder: How much longer can the state (or the region for that matter) handle this kind of growth? When the nonprofit advocacy group Food and Water Watch created this Factory Farm Map back in 2007, Iowa was already one of the states most saturated with CAFOs (see image). According to the chart above, over 500 CAFOs may have been built since then. Of course not all that growth has to mean new operations — some permits may be for the expansion of preexisting buildings — but if even half that number resulted in new facilities, it’s a cause for concern.

Some of the manure created in these facilities gets spread on farm fields, which do absorb a portion of the nitrogen (while the rest erodes into waterways, leaches into the groundwater, and — ultimately — adds nitrous oxide (N2O), a dangerous greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere). I won’t even get into the number of antibiotics and other drugs each CAFO requires — both to boost the animals’ growth and to keep them from getting sick in crowded facilities. The bottom line is that the more CAFOs are built, the further out of balance the ratio of manure-to-farm-field becomes. In addition, the Register article points out that “such large-scale spreading of liquid manure is vulnerable to spills and tank ruptures.”

Eyes on the prize

Why exactly do we need so many new CAFOs if American meat consumption has gone down? The answer — as it is with so much economic growth these days — is China. Apparently, they’ve gone a little pork-crazy over there. And China just surpassed us as the nation with the biggest meat-tooth in the world (we’re still ahead of them on a per capita basis, but they have a lot more people than we do).

Another recent article in the Iowa Farm Journal reports on new free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, but zeroes in on China as the ultimate target of U.S. pork industry expansion. It quotes Laurie Hueneke, U.S. director of international trade policy, saying, “The biggest prize is China.”

Of course, there’s a catch-22 at work here. Along with antibiotics, the American pork industry relies heavily on ractopamine, or “paylean,” a controversial drug that promotes leanness in pigs. And, as Helena Bottemiller reported on MSNBC earlier this year, as part of an investigation for the Food and Environment Reporting Network, China wants nothing to do with ractopamine. The drug was shown to lead to an increase in the number of “downer pigs” — lame animals unable to walk in slaughter plants — and the company that makes the drug has apparently received hundreds of complaints from farmers about sick livestock. Chinese health officials, however, seem most worried about the traces of the ractopamine found in meat, which Bottemiller reported “can still be detected in animals more than a week after they’ve consumed the drug.”

Nonetheless, it’s hard to see how the pork industry isn’t expanding with China in mind. In fact, Hueneke told the Iowa Farm Journal the nation had “been encouraged to reassess the ractopamine issue.”

The sacrifice generation

The presence of more and more CAFOs isn’t the only way the highly consolidated meat industry has changed the Midwest in recent years. A Reuters article that ran on Friday told the story of a small Illinois town that’s home to a giant Cargill meatpacking plant. The (oddly upbeat) article details the way the town has been flooded with an influx of people from Africa and Latin America — some on a legal “diversity visa lottery.”

If you’ve read any of the recent coverage of the meatpacking industry’s treatment of its workers — such as last year’s groundbreaking coverage of a Minnesota-based Hormel factory, or my recent post about workers throughout the food chain — you know that it’s a brutal, often inhumane industry. But it does tend to pay better than much of the other work that new immigrants can find. For that reason, Cargill plants like the one in the article, which is described as “a 430,000-square-foot concrete slaughterhouse that turns almost 20,000 hogs a day into meat,” are more or less changing the face of immigration in this country. The plant and the surrounding community it employs are described as emblematic of the way job-seeking immigrants have begun moving to rural and suburban areas, rather than big cities like Chicago and New York.

And despite the Reuters article’s somewhat cheerful description of the new ethnic population of this Illinois town, it also admits to the grim reality:

Many immigrants at meatpacking plants are “the sacrifice generation” — people who know they’ll have to work at hard, menial jobs so their children can rise to something else.

And really, the scale of this shift probably shouldn’t surprise us. There’s been much coverage of the way rural America has essentially been emptying out in recent years. So, on the face of it, I can see why some residents may be encouraged to see some form — heck, any form — of industry return.

But taken alongside the expansion of CAFOs in states like Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, the expansion of meatpacking plants in the same states suggests that companies like Cargill — “the biggest private company in the United States and the third-largest U.S. meatpacker” — might just be gearing up to rebuild vast swaths of the middle of the nation as the source of the world’s cheap meat. I can see the signs now: “You are now entering the Meatwest.”

Despite a high-profile lawsuit, a recent court order, and a much-hyped set of voluntary rules, it’s still not clear that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to do anything of substance to stop meat producers from using antibiotics on a massive — and massively destructive — scale. It has been three decades since the FDA first identified the use of these drugs in livestock production as a problem. But they’re still mulling it over, apparently. Thinking long and hard.

While they think, 80 percent of all the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are being used on animals to spur growth and compensate for crowded, dirty conditions. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria or “superbugs” continue to show up in food and cause infections in tens of thousands of people every year (99,000 people died of hospital-acquired infections in 2002, the most recent year for which data are available).

It’s no coincidence then that Meat Without Drugs, the campaign launched today by Consumers Union, doesn’t target the FDA or any government agency, for that matter. Instead, the advocacy group, which has been pushing for a ban on antibiotics in agriculture since the late 1970s, is targeting grocery stores.

After all, grocery chains are a little like small nations, aren’t they? (Maybe that’s why the checker at Kroger always wants to see your passport.) And — truth be told — even if half of those chains were to stop carrying antibiotic-laden meat, the thinking goes, most producers would be motivated (read: forced) to change their practices.

“After three decades, you could say we’re a little frustrated with the rate of change at FDA,” says Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union. “It’s discouraging to see that the industry lobbies have prevented the agency from acting.” (And by that she means both the meat industry and the pharmaceutical industry. After all, sales of so-called “animal health products” to agricultural operations were already worth a total of $3.3 billion a year by 1995.) And so, Halloran says, they’re trying another entry point — supermarkets.

In a companion report released today called “Meat On Drugs: The overuse of antibiotics in food animals and what supermarkets and consumers can do to stop it” [PDF], the Consumers Union looked at the cost, labeling, and availability of antibiotic-free meat in grocery stores and combined that data with a consumer survey.

The group’s “secret shoppers” recorded information about 1,100 products (including 200 organic ones) and identified Whole Foods as the only grocery store that currently carries solely antibiotic-free meat. Trader Joe’s ranked second, with a fairly wide selection of options. Now, with the Meat Without Drugs campaign, the Consumers Union is channeling online signatures to Trader Joe’s asking them to follow in Whole Foods’ footsteps and go cold turkey with their turkey. (And pork, beef, and chicken.)

“It could make a huge a difference,” says Halloran. “They’re a national chain with stores in 30 states. People already look to them for some sensitivity on social concerns.”

The price is right

“Farmers say they have to feed the drugs to animals to keep them healthy and meet America’s growing appetite for cheap meat,” a recent USA Today article reads.

Conventional producers are fond of talking about how taking the antibiotics out of the equation will cause the retail price of meat to skyrocket. And while having less cheap meat may not be such a bad thing (many would rather eat less meat and eat better meat, as author and rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman likes to suggest), the Consumers Union found that most consumers don’t actually have to choose between antibiotic-free and affordable.

The report points a 2001 study funded in part by the National Pork Producers Council. It found that “if antibiotics were no longer added to feed for hogs in the U.S., the cost of producing a 250-pound hog would most likely rise by $5.24. The increased cost to the consumer would be around 5 cents per pound. Given average pork consumption, that amounts to $2.75 per person per year.” They also found that antibiotic-free poultry farming was just as likely to cost the farmers less than farming with antibiotics does.

The prices they recorded in grocery stores suggested a similar reality. The report reads:

The Consumer Reports shoppers gathered data on the prices of “no antibiotics” products, including organic meat and poultry, at the 119 stores that carried them. Based on this data, it appears that “no antibiotics” meat and poultry is not as costly as many might assume. While shoppers found beef products priced up to $19.99 per pound for organic steak, virtually all of the “no antibiotics” chicken, turkey, and pork products found in the stores were priced under $10 per pound. Such chicken could be had at three chains — Trader Joe’s, Jewel-Osco, and Publix — for as little as $1.29 per pound. Moderately priced “no antibiotics” products (under $5 per pound) were available at almost every chain that carried such meat.

This is good news for eaters, many of whom want better access to this meat. Around one-quarter of the people Consumers Union surveyed said meat raised without antibiotics was not available at their supermarket, while 82 percent of those said they would buy it if it were. And a full 86 percent of the shoppers they talked to think it should be available in supermarkets.

Consumers Union also found a huge range of labels, from “natural” to “grass-fed” to “no antibiotic residue” and “never given antibiotics.” Halloran thinks that inconsistency might pose an obstacle down the road when it comes to clear demands from consumers.

“We think the USDA should have one term and post the definition. And then have some mechanism for enforcing it,” she says.

Of course, ever since the FDA suggested this April that antibiotics should not be used to enhance growth or improve feed efficiency in livestock, but rather to “prevent, control or treat illnesses in food-producing animals under the supervision of a veterinarian,” there has been much more gray area in terms of exactly what practices should warrant a label.

“What we hear is that most antibiotics are now used to ‘prevent disease,’” says Halloran. “But preventative use, wholesale, in the water for a thousand chickens at once … well, it still needs to stop. Often in the past antibiotic use has served both purposes. They can easily say that they’re using it for disease prevention. And then — oh, by the way — as a nice side effect it also helps the animals grow bigger.”

But to truly phase out antibiotics, Halloran adds, farmers have to change their other husbandry practices. “What we know from farms in Europe, where they have scaled back on the drugs considerably, is that you have to pay much more attention to sanitation; you clean the facilities thoroughly, and do a lot more to keep disease from entering.” In other words, the kinds of changes to animal agriculture that most consumers would like to see anyway.

Here’s a related video from Robert Kenner, director of Food, Inc., and co-founder of the website, FixFood. (And yes, that’s Bill Paxton narrating.)

I’ve noticed that quite a few Grist readers have been struck by our coverage of shockingly high food prices in Inuit communities in Canada’s far north. It’s less a story of life in extreme lands than the culmination of a historical destruction of indigenous peoples’ traditional foodways combined with a conservative government’s unwillingness to help them adapt.

How appropriate then that NPR’s Planet Money, as part of its Graphing America series, should look at how America’s food spending has changed over the last 30 years. The headline figure — the one Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack is proudest of — is that we spend just under 9 percent of our income on food, about 30 percent less than we did in 1982.

Image courtesy of NPR.

Despite the drop, our shopping baskets have stayed more or less the same — with one notable exception. Processed foods now take the lion’s share of our collective food spending — their share has doubled in the last 30 years. On a percentage basis, we’re spending about the same as we did back then on fruits and vegetables, dairy, bread, and even beverages. Spending on meat, however, has dropped by a third — some of that savings goes to other kinds of spending, of course, since overall food spending is down, but clearly some of the money formerly spent on meat has shifted to processed snacks, treats, and packaged foods.

In fact, while fruit and vegetable prices overall have increased faster than inflation (though Planet Money points out that certain items like apples, lettuce, and even tomatoes have defied that trend, at great cost to farm laborers) — it’s those meat prices that demonstrate the most shocking price drop.

Thank you, Smithfield, Tyson, and Cargill! Many will argue that this is a very positive development. Meat used to be a luxury good and is now readily available to many more people at more income levels. The problem, of course, is that the drop in retail price also represents a massive cost shift. As the meat industry consolidated, industrialized, and specialized, labor costs dropped — but rural unemployment soared.

Meanwhile, the environmental costs of livestock farming, which were manageable when fewer animals in smaller farms were distributed over larger areas, were shifted, too. And in ways that are both difficult to ignore and to address — we’ve polluted rivers with runoff from pork, dairy, and chicken operations, and created massive dead zones in bays and gulfs around the country.

There’s a human cost, too. Workers in the giant slaughterhouses that now dominate the meat industry labor in some of the worst workplace conditions in the country and are prone to illness and injury. Workers in the facilities where the animals are raised have also been pushed to the limit — mistreatment of animals appears to be all too common. Oh, and let’s not forget the human cost to consumers, as the tragedy that results from antibiotic-resistant infections and mass distribution of meat contaminated with deadly pathogens represents far more than unwelcome statistics.

And then there are the animals themselves. Animal welfare went out the window with industrialization; when animals are seen as widgets in a factory, they get treated as such. From the way the animals are bred — such as chickens with oversized breasts that are unable to walk — to the need to pump them full of antibiotics simply so they can survive the disease-ridden, stressful facilities in which they live, most farm animals’ lives are nasty, brutish, and short. (The philosophers among you might note the irony that these animals exist in the Hobbesian “state of nature” while at the same time in a completely artificial environment.)

I’d also feel better about this reduction in food spending if it didn’t coincide with the shift toward processed food and the onset of the obesity epidemic. We’re spending less for food, but we’re also clearly eating far worse. Researchers estimate that obesity now adds thousands of dollars to all Americans’ insurance premiums whether they’re obese or not. Kinda ruins the benefit of cheap food, doesn’t it? And as The New York Times reports, it’s an epidemic that hits low-income communities hardest and remains especially difficult to address.

And then there’s the fact that despite low prices, there are still so many damn hungry people in this country. Almost 50 million Americans are considered “food insecure” by the USDA, and food stamp use is higher than ever. In fact, the relentless focus on lowering food spending obscures the much larger problem — that middle class wages have stagnated over the same period. At the same time, health-care spending has increased radically — although that comes mostly in the form of companies paying more for workers’ insurance premiums rather than giving them raises.

So the next time you hear a government official or a corporate executive touting the benefits of an industrialized food system that allows Americans to spend less than ever on food, just remember: You get what you pay for.

People in Alabama love to gather and, when they do, it’s usually around football or religion and it is always fortified with plenty of food and drink. What would happen, the organizers of a recent event called the Alabama All-Star Food Festival wondered, if you gathered people just for the eating and drinking — and elevated the discussion of local food in the region while you were at it?

Yes, there was pulled pork and white bread drowning in sauce, but the convention center where the recent All-Star Food Festival was held on account of rain was also full of Gulf shrimp and grits, local gumbo, crab cakes, and of course cold cans from Good People and Back Forty, two of the state’s three microbreweries. The building filled up with farmers, chefs, and food pioneers celebrating a new wave of Alabama food, and wafting over the sterile convention center air was the smell of a place regaining its culinary roots.

As agriculturally rich as Alabama is — both in soil and tradition — the state produces less than 5 percent of the food consumed there. In recent decades Alabama has moved far away from its small-scale farming roots toward concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), raising large numbers of chickens and hogs, and families indentured to corporate agriculture. In fact, just this year, Gov. Robert Bentley (R) cut state funding to Alabama’s Farmers Market Authority, which runs 30 markets throughout the state (another 45 are outside of state control).

Edible revival

Panelists at a discussion of the local food economy at the recent Alabama All-Star Food Festival.

Just 10 years ago it would have been impossible to draw 500 participants and over 30 food vendors and producers to an event focused on local, sustainable food. And the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network (ASAN) has a lot to do with the grassroots movement behind the change. For a decade the nonprofit has been gathering small-scale farmers and ranchers throughout the state in an effort to organize, educate, and network producers and consumers.

“Most of us are contrary farmers. We like to work independently,” says Tom Simpson, executive director of ASAN. “So asking them to participate in an association is difficult. We recognize that and we don’t want to be making edicts to farmers out of Montgomery.”

ASAN has created a food guide (soon to be available online) to connect people to healthy food in the Huntsville, Birmingham, and Mobile areas. They’ve also recently turned their efforts toward policy in the state capital of Montgomery.

“We’re trying to pass a bill that offers restaurants a 4 percent sales tax rebate when they buy food locally,” says Simpson. “We’d like Alabama to follow North Carolina and incentivize state institutions to buy 10 percent of their produce from state farmers.”

Measures like that could keep millions of dollars in the local economy, rather than sending them to food distributors elsewhere. The bill, however, could hit a big, red wall in the state capital.

The energy and excitement in Alabama, for now, lives on the ground level. There are over 1,000 farmers in the ASAN network, and another new organization, Front Porch Revival (FPR), launched recently with the goal of identifying, celebrating, and promoting local artisans throughout the state.

Rob McDaniel, executive chef at Spring House Restaurant and a founding member of FPR, says he hopes to connect producers to restaurants with questions like: “I need [local] eggs, where can I get them?”

“Quality and commitment to sourcing locally are the key factors to this alliance,” McDaniel added, while speaking on a panel at the All-Star Food Festival. “We want beer makers, cheese makers, dairy farmers, beef producers. We’d love to have an artisan and urban farmer in every county.”

The panel made for an illuminating cross-section of the state’s new food revolutionaries. Opposite McDaniel sat Andy Grace, a young documentary filmmaker who grew up in Alabama and recently settled back in his home state, where he is now a film professor at the University of Alabama and the director of the new documentary, Eating Alabama. Grace recognized that in the largely rural, deeply conservative state, the “notion that local food is an elitist, urban luxury is an obstacle.”

Next to Grace sat Frank Randle, a barrel-chested, deep-voiced rancher reminiscent of John Wayne. He and his sons raise cows on pasture at Randle Farms. He emphasized the word “commitment” on the part of the farmer and the consumer in order to propel the state out of its industrial agriculture malaise. Beside him sat Mark Bowen, the education director at Hampstead Institute, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable growth through education, agriculture, and design in Montgomery. Bowen noted the if Alabamans consumed just 15 percent of their food from local Alabama sources they’d keep $980 million dollars in the state, and ultimately enable the farmers there to lower their prices with increased demand — a win-win.

A food hero

Hampstead Institute’s Director Edwin Marty was also a key organizer of the festival. Marty returned to his hometown of Birmingham after learning to farm sustainably on the West Coast and abroad. He founded Jones Valley Urban Farm (now Jones Valley Teaching Farm) on an abandoned lot near downtown Birmingham in 2001. That kind of tenure places Edwin alongside the state’s renowned chefs and farm-to-plate pioneers Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings, as Alabama’s original local-food revolutionaries.

Marty appreciates that others are following in his footsteps, seeing beyond the commodity crops and CAFO-heavy agriculture in the region and recognizing opportunity in the untapped market.

If Marty has his way, he’ll also find a way to lure other former Alabama residents back to rebuild the food system with him. “We’re a tight-knit community with a few local heroes,” he says. “But it’s wide-open territory. There are so few CSAs, so little competition, and so much opportunity to move back here and fill that void.”

Thanks, Thomas Keller. Now we know where you stand. When you joined forces with Andoni Luis Aduriz and came out publicly in The New York Times this week as a chef who does not feel any obligation to the environment, we heard you.“With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint?” you asked.

You think it’s not your place, as reporter Julia Moskin puts it, “to provide a livelihood for farmers near [your] restaurants, to preserve traditional culinary arts or to stop the spread of global warming.”

Yep, you’re just here to “create great, brilliant food.”

And you know what? That might make sense — if we lived in the 19th century. Then you could just focus on making your brilliant food (it would probably be served to royalty) and someone else would do the driving, someone else the laundry, and so forth. While the farmers — out in the countryside — would do nothing but farm. Of course, no one would dream of writing about you in a national publication, either. You wouldn’t have to be a global citizen of an information age.

And indeed — even in this day and age — you do have a choice. As a celebrity chef with an international following at whose restaurant a reservation may only be acquired with help of a skilled expert, you can opt out of caring about the impact the producers of your food have on the soil, water, and the atmosphere. You can downplay the role of the local food economy your restaurant supports and tell the “ambitious young chefs around the world hanging on [your] every word” that flavor comes first. You can also, by all means, call on “the world’s governments” to worry about climate change (and for all I know, you might even think they have the political will to do that). You absolutely can.

But you should know just how irresponsible this statement is. Not just irresponsible — destructive.

We’re at a turning point, globally, and food production — especially in its current, ultra-industrial form — is a huge part of the problem. We’re running out of land and water and, yes, the atmosphere is filling up with methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide. In fact, agriculture is a larger contributor of greenhouse gases than the transportation sector. (This TEDx video gives a good, brief overview of the problem.) Meanwhile, our broken food system asks that its producers plow under native forests and grasslands to grow soybeans that feed pigs in China and over-fertilize their crops even when they know it will contribute to a giant dead zone in the nation’s most important fishery.

The famous garden at the French Laundry. (Photo by Ernest Bludger.)

Meanwhile — as you know, Mr. Keller — there are a number of small-scale farmers, ranchers, and artisans willing to live on next to nothing because they believe there’s a better way. Many of today’s most sustainable farmers live without insurance, buy almost nothing, and find ways — by hook or by crook — to live on what they could otherwise earn driving buses or cleaning offices. And — thanks in part to the chefs and eaters who support them — they’ve succeeded at maintaining a small but growing front against monocropping and factory farms. And not coincidentally, the food they’re producing is some of the best; you and I absolutely agree on that fact.

Moskin calls your decision to undercut the role these producers are playing as stewards of the land at a crucial moment “radical.” She points out: “While their restaurants may be accessible only to the world’s 0.1 percent, chefs at top restaurants influence the entire global food community with the way they think, write, tweet and talk about food — not just the way they cook it.”

And indeed, some in the food world have responded critically, if subtly, which speaks to power chefs like you wield. In a wrap-up of Twitter responses on The New York Times‘ The Diner’s Journal blog, one of the harshest criticisms was, “Not sure this is the best strategy for ensuring history will treat you kindly.” Meanwhile, Chefs Collaborative — an organization dedicated to making the culinary industry more sustainable — has also begun collecting responses to the article.

I asked Laurie David — one well-known environmentalist who has recently turned her attention to food — what she thought about the chef’s statement, and, true to form for this producer of An Inconvenient Truth, she cut straight to the heart of what many in the food world are likely feeling. “The chef’s lack of concern for the serious challenges facing the world is anything but courageous. It’s really quite shocking. Why check your citizenship at the kitchen door?”

Buenos Aires, Argentina: It’s no secret the people here love beef.

In 1958, the average Argentine consumed 216 pounds of it per year. (For context: U.S. beef consumption peaked in 1975 at 89 pounds per person.) Argentina was once the world’s fifth largest economy, due largely to the strength of its global dominance in the beef trade. Because of a grand confluence of factors including climate and natural grass diversity, Argentina was long known as a hungry cow’s heaven — and the arbiter of the world’s best beef.

But today, much of the country’s famous grasslands have been turned over to crops. Beef consumption and exports are way down. And lest you think it’s because overall meat consumption is down, irony would have it that Argentina is now the world’s No. 1 exporter of soymeal, No. 2 of corn, and No. 3 of soybeans, increasingly used as animal feed in China, where meat-eating is through the roof.

Images of cows on pasture are still common in Argentina’s guidebooks and on postcards and butcher shop windows, but cattle production now largely relies on the feedlot. As a result, a small but growing movement of consumers, providers, and environmentalists is beginning to demand the beef of days past.

The “grass” was always implied

Many scientists agree that meat consumption is intrinsically tied to climate change. And beef, lamb, and other methane-emitting ruminant animals are said to be responsible for a large portion of the greenhouse gases caused by food production. One recent study also concluded that people in the developed world must cut the amount of meat they eat in half to reduce emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas.

But in Argentina, conservationists argue that raising beef on natural grasslands is a sustainable tradition, and much better suited to the biodiversity of the grassland, called “the Pampas,” than industrial row-crop agriculture and feedlots.

Just 20 years ago, virtually all of Argentina’s cows still grazed freely. But as global agriculture markets boomed, it became harder for cattle farmers to resist the quick profit from soy, wheat, and corn. Hastened by a major financial crisis in 2001, many cattle ranchers sold their cows and turned over their land. Whereas grass-fed cows may take three to five years to be ready to sell, a farmer can turn around a soy or corn crop in a matter of months.

“Basically, cow production got pushed out of the Argentine Pampas,” says Ricardo Sager, director of scientific and technological development at Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA).

To keep beef prices low on less land, the Argentine government developed legislation in the late 1990s that provided subsidies for the corn-fed to feedlot cows. Both INTA and the Argentine Beef Promotion Institute touted use of the feedlot for quick, effective production. Now, much of the country’s beef — up to 80 percent by some estimates — has been through a feedlot.

Argentine cultural ties to beef remain strong. And by most standards, Argentines still eat an enormous amount of it — an average 118 pounds per person in 2011.

“Meat in Argentina is a strategic food,” Sager says. “Like rice in Asia and corn in Mexico, everyone has to have access and it has to be cheap.”

A gaucho, or Argentinian cowboy.

Not everyone sees it that way. At one farm in Entre Rios, Argentina, ranchers are trying to turn Sager’s argument on its head, by contributing to the creation of a premium for beef for the first time ever in Argentina’s history.

There, on 65,000 acres alongside the Paraná River, 20,000 cows graze without being bothered by humans. The herd, owned by Estancia Grass Fed Beef, is one of the largest pasture-raised herds of steer in the world.

“We’re essentially working in the traditional Argentine model,” says J.P. Thieriot, the co-founder of Estancia, “which not long ago was a model for sustainable farming.”

That model, he explains, involves grazing and fertilizing by free-range cattle for five to seven years, until the ground is primed for a short (one- to two-year) crop cycle.

“Such a system is essentially eternally sustainable,” he says.

Thieriot grew up on cattle farms in Argentina and California. He says Argentina and Uruguay are really the only places in the world where it’s possible to raise such a high volume of top quality cows year round, due to the temperate climate, access to water sources, and expansive, rich grasslands. Estancia’s animals are never given antibiotics nor hormones; the soil never sees pesticides or fertilizer. The company employs local ranchers and uses innovative animal welfare techniques.

Next he’s working on branding the product. “Creating recognition will eventually create a demand, which will create a price premium,” Thieriot says, “which will make it more compelling for Argentine ranchers to keep or add cattle — instead of getting rid of them to plant wall-to-wall soy.”

Estancia sells three main, prime cuts to high-end markets and restaurants overseas: tenderloin, rib eye, and New York strip. The rest of the cow (the majority of it) enters Argentina’s domestic market, where it is sold alongside beef from a feedlot, for the same price. But there is no labeling, grading or certification infrastructure in place for meat. All farmers sell in the same market.

“So basically, customers at a grocery store in Buenos Aires are buying Estancia’s beef without knowing it,” Thieriot says. “It’s completely unlabeled.”

Some Buenos Aires chefs intentionally serve grass-fed beef, however. And customers in good relation with their butchers may be able to get it, too. But the vast majority of consumers pay no attention to the overall tenderness or distribution or color of fat, for instance, which are telltale ways to distinguish feedlot versus grass-fed. In Argentina, grass-fed beef has never needed a title or a label — the “grass” was always implied — and it’s unlikely that many consumers are aware of the difference.

Many acres of the Pampas, a traditional grassland, have been cultivated to grow industrial-scale soy.

A threatened ecosystem

Plans are in the works for the first-ever label for grass-fed beef in Argentina, which will be available this year in select towns, starting with certification of 35 farms. It’s being spearheaded by Aves Argentinas (Argentine Birds), a wildlife organization that is part of an alliance to save Argentina’s grasslands, in partnership with Fundación Vida Silvestre (The Wildlife Foundation of Argentina).

“The label will signify what we like to call ‘grassland beef,’” says conservationist Gustavo Marino, who works with Aves Argentinas. “This means meat from farms that conserve grasslands and their biodiversity.”

Cows must be fed and raised on native grasslands, with feedlot usage prohibited. To receive certification, farms will have to be registered with the Alliance and adhere to a variety of protocols.

“The idea is to offer consumers the option for a product that contributes to saving a threatened ecosystem,” Marino says.

The Pampas is one of the richest areas of grassland biodiversity in the world, with up to 200 species of grass per hectare. Historically, these grasses have attracted hundreds of species of birds and other wildlife unique to the area. But with the intensification of agriculture, this biodiversity is disappearing, Marino says.

The alliance is also working with 18 ranchers throughout the country to introduce best practices for maximizing production while promoting biodiversity, in a project funded by the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank. A pocket-sized guide to the birds and grasses of the Pampas is distributed to farmers, so that “rural producers can recognize the animals and nature of their environments.”

The challenge ahead: creating demand

Some say the creation of a premium product faces a steep uphill battle.

“For farmers, once land is converted to grain, it is a difficult proposition to revert back to pasture,” says Mike Skowronek, an American rancher in Buenos Aires.

“A soy farmer, for example, would have to skip a harvest payday to buy new cows and wait for his grass to re-grow.”

Skowronek says he’s perhaps the only rancher still committed to the grass-fed method in Tapalqué, in the middle of Buenos Aires province and once the heartland of free-range cattle. He blogs extensively about the challenges that come with grass-fed farming in modern-day Argentina.

But Marino says he is confident demand will grow the more people learn.

“Of course we’re going to have to get them interested because of the flavor first,” he says, “and then educate them about the other reasons to choose grass-fed.”