Fast Food Nation

TO REACH THE J. R. SIMPLOT PLANT in Aberdeen, Idaho, you drive through downtown Aberdeen, population 2,000, and keep heading north, past the half dozen shops on Main Street. Then turn right at the Tiger Hut, an old hamburger stand named after a local high school team, cross the railroad tracks where freight cars are loaded with sugar beets, drive another quarter of a mile, and you’re there. It smells like someone’s cooking potatoes. The Simplot plant is low and square, clean and neat. The employee parking lot is filled with pickup trucks, and there’s a big American flag flying out front. Aberdeen sits in the heart of Bingham County, which grows more potatoes than any other county in Idaho. The Simplot plant runs twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and ten days a year, turning potatoes into french fries. It’s a small facility, by industry standards, built in the late 1950s. It processes about a million pounds of potatoes a day.

Inside the building, a maze of red conveyer belts crisscrosses in and out of machines that wash, sort, peel, slice, blanch, blow-dry, fry, and flash-freeze potatoes. Workers in white coats and hard hats keep everything running smoothly, monitoring the controls, checking the fries for imperfections. Streams of sliced potatoes pour from machines. The place has a cheerful, humble, Eisenhower-era feeling, as though someone’s dream of technological progress, of better living through frozen food, has been fulfilled. Looming over the whole enterprise is the spirit of one man: John Richard Simplot, America’s great potato baron, whose seemingly inexhaustible energy and willingness to take risks built an empire based on french fries. By far the most important figure in one of the nation’s most conservative states, Simplot displays the contradictory traits that have guided the economic development of the American West, the odd mixture of rugged individualism and a dependence upon public land and resources. In a portrait that hangs above the reception desk at the Aberdeen plant, J. R. Simplot has the sly grin of a gambler who’s scored big.

Simplot was born in 1909. His family left Dubuque, Iowa, the following year and eventually settled in Idaho. The Snake River Reclamation Project was offering cheap water for irrigation, funded by the U.S. government, that would convert the desert of southern Idaho into lush farmland. Simplot’s father became a homesteader, obtaining land for free and clearing it with a steel rail dragged between two teams of horses. Simplot grew up working hard on the farm. He rebelled against his domineering father, dropped out of school at the age of fifteen, and left home. He found work at a potato warehouse in the small town of Declo, Idaho. He sorted potatoes with a “shaker sorter,” a hand-held device, nine to ten hours a day for 30 cents an hour. At the boarding house where he rented a room, Simplot met a group of schoolteachers who were being paid not in cash but in interest-bearing scrip. Simplot bought the scrip from the teachers for 50 cents on the dollar — and then sold the scrip to a local bank for 90 cents on the dollar. With his earnings, Simplot bought a rifle, an old truck, and 600 hogs for $1 a head. He built a cooker in the desert, stoked it with sagebrush, shot wild horses, skinned them, sold their hides for $2 each, cooked their meat, and fed the horse meat to his hogs through the winter. That spring, J. R. Simplot sold the hogs for $12.50 a head and, at the age of sixteen, became a potato farmer.

The Idaho potato industry was just getting started in the 1920s. The state’s altitude, warm days, cool nights, light volcanic soil, and abundance of irrigation water made it an ideal setting for growing Russet Burbank potatoes. Simplot leased 160 acres, then bought farm equipment and a team of horses. He learned how to grow potatoes from his landlord, Lindsay Maggart, who raised yields by planting fresh seed every year. In 1928, Simplot and Maggart purchased an electric potato sorter; it seemed a remarkable invention. Simplot began sorting potatoes for his friends and neighbors, but Maggart did not want to share the new device with anyone else. The two men fought over the potato sorter and then agreed to settle who owned it with the flip of a coin. J. R. Simplot won the coin toss, got the sorter, sold all his farm equipment, and started his own business in a potato cellar in Declo. He traveled the Idaho countryside, plugging the rudimentary machine into the nearest available light socket and sorting potatoes for farmers. Soon he was buying and selling potatoes, opening warehouses, forming relationships with commodities brokers nationwide. When J. R. Simplot needed timber for a new warehouse, he and his men would just head down to Yellowstone and chop down some trees. Within a decade, Simplot was the largest shipper of potatoes in the West, operating thirty-three warehouses in Oregon and Idaho.

Simplot also shipped onions. In 1941, he started to wonder why the Burbank Corporation, an outfit in California, was ordering so many of his onions. Simplot went to California and followed one of the company’s trucks to a prune orchard in Vacaville, where the Burbank Corporation was using prune dryers to make dehydrated onions. Simplot immediately bought a six-tunnel prune dryer and set up his own dehydration plant in Caldwell, Idaho. The plant opened on October 8, 1941. Two months later, the United States entered World War II, and Simplot began selling dehydrated onions to the U.S. Army. It was a profitable arrangement. The dehydrated onion powder, he later recalled, was like “gold dust.”

The J. R. Simplot Dehydrating Company soon perfected a new method for drying potatoes and became one of the principal suppliers of food to the American military during World War II. In 1942, the company had a hundred workers at the Caldwell plant; by 1944, it had about twelve hundred. The Caldwell facility became the largest dehydrating plant in the world. J. R. Simplot used the profits earned as a military contractor to buy potato farms and cattle ranches, to build fertilizer plants and lumber mills, to stake mining claims and open a huge phosphate mine on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation. By the end of World War II, Simplot was growing his own potatoes, fertilizing them with his own phosphate, processing them at his factories, shipping them in boxes from his lumber yards, and feeding the leftover potato scraps to his cattle. He was thirty-six years old.

After the war, Simplot invested heavily in frozen food technology, betting that it would provide the meals of the future. Clarence Birds-eye had patented a number of techniques for flash-freezing in the 1920s. But sales of Birdseye’s new products were hampered, among other things, by the fact that few American grocery stores, and even fewer households, owned a freezer. The sales of refrigerators, freezers, and other kitchen appliances soared after World War II. The 1950s soon became “the Golden Age of Food Processing,” in the words of historian Harvey Levenstein, a decade in which one marvelous innovation after another promised to simplify the lives of American housewives: frozen orange juice, frozen TV dinners, the Chicken-of-Tomorrow, “Potato salad from a package!”, Cheese Whiz, Jell-O salads, Jet-Puffed Marshmallows, Miracle Whip. Depression-era scarcity gave way to a cornucopia of new foods on the shelves of new suburban supermarkets. Ad campaigns made processed foods seem better than fresh ones, more space-age and up to date. According to Levenstein, many restaurants proudly displayed their canned soups, and a chain called Tad’s 30 Varieties of Meals featured frozen dinners on its menu. Customers at Tad’s cooked the frozen meals at tableside microwave ovens.

Postwar refrigerators came with freezer compartments, and J. R. Simplot thought about the foods that housewives might want to put in them. He assembled a team of chemists, led by Ray Dunlap, to develop a product that seemed to have enormous potential: the frozen french fry. Americans were eating more fries than ever before, and the Russet Burbank, with its large size and high starch content, was the perfect potato for frying. Simplot wanted to create an inexpensive frozen fry that tasted just as good as a fresh one. Although Thomas Jefferson had brought the Parisian recipe for pommes frites to the United States in 1802, french fries did not become well known in this country until the 1920s. Americans traditionally ate their potatoes boiled, mashed, or baked. French fries were popularized in the United States by World War I veterans who’d enjoyed them in Europe and by the drive-in restaurants that subsequently arose in the 1930s and 1940s. Fries could be served without a fork or a knife, and they were easy to eat behind the wheel. But they were extremely time-consuming to prepare. Simplot’s chemists experimented with various methods for the mass production of french fries, enduring a number of setbacks, learning the hard way that fries will sink to the bottom of a potato chip fryer and then burn. One day Dunlap walked into J. R. Simplot’s office with some frozen fries that had just been reheated. Simplot tasted them, realized the manufacturing problems had been solved, and said, “That’s a helluva thing.”

J. R. Simplot started selling frozen french fries in 1953. Sales were initially disappointing. Although the frozen fries were precooked and could be baked in an oven, they tasted best when heated in hot oil, limiting their appeal to busy homemakers. Simplot needed to find institutional customers, restaurant owners who’d recognize the tremendous labor-saving benefits of his frozen fries.

“The french fry [was]… almost sacrosanct for me,” Ray Kroc wrote in his memoir, “its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously.” The success of Richard and Mac McDonald’s hamburger stand had been based as much on the quality of their fries as on the taste of their burgers. The McDonald brothers had devised an elaborate system for making crisp french fries, one that was later improved by the restaurant chain. McDonald’s cooked thinly sliced Russet Burbanks in special fryers to keep the oil temperature above 325 degrees. As the chain expanded, it became more difficult — and yet all the more important — to maintain the consistency and quality of the fries. J. R. Simplot met with Ray Kroc in 1965. The idea of switching to frozen french fries appealed to Kroc, as a means of ensuring uniformity and cutting labor costs. McDonald’s obtained its fresh potatoes from about 175 different local suppliers, and crew members spent a great deal of time peeling and slicing potatoes. Simplot offered to build a new factory solely for the manufacture of McDonald’s french fries. Kroc agreed to try Simplot’s fries, but made no long-term commitment. The deal was sealed with a handshake.

McDonald’s began to sell J. R. Simplot’s frozen french fries the following year. Customers didn’t notice any difference in taste. And the reduced cost of using a frozen product made french fries one of the most profitable items on the menu — far more profitable than hamburgers. Simplot quickly became the main supplier of french fries to McDonald’s. At the time, McDonald’s had about 725 restaurants in the United States. Within a decade, it had more than 3,000. Simplot sold his frozen fries to other restaurant chains, accelerating the growth of the fast food industry and changing the nation’s eating habits. Americans have long consumed more potatoes than any other food except dairy products and wheat flour. In 1960, the typical American ate eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and about four pounds of frozen french fries. Today the typical American eats about forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes every year — and more than thirty pounds of frozen french fries. Ninety percent of those fries are purchased at fast food restaurants. Indeed, french fries have become the most widely sold foodservice item in the United States.

J. R. Simplot, an eighth-grade dropout, is now one of the richest men in the United States. His privately held company grows and processes corn, peas, broccoli, avocados, and carrots, as well as potatoes; feeds and processes cattle; manufactures and distributes fertilizer; mines phosphate and silica; produces oil, ethanol, and natural gas. In 1980, Simplot provided $1 million in start-up funds to a couple of engineers working in the basement of a dentist’s office in Boise, Idaho. Twenty years later, his investment in Micron Technology — a manufacturer of computer memory chips and the largest private employer in Idaho — was worth about $1.5 billion. Simplot is also one of the nation’s biggest landowners. “I’ve been a land hog all my life,” Simplot told me, laughing. While still in his teens, he bought 18,000 acres along the Snake River, paying 50 cents an acre for it with borrowed money. His company now has 85,000 acres of irrigated farmland, and Simplot personally owns more than twice that amount of ranchland. He owns much of downtown Boise and a big hillside home overlooking the city. At home he flies a gigantic American flag on a pole that’s ten stories high. In addition to what he owns, Simplot leases more than 2 million acres of land from the federal government. His ZX Ranch in southern Oregon is the largest cattle ranch in the United States, measuring 65 miles wide and 163 miles long. Altogether, Simplot controls a bloc of North American land that’s bigger than the state of Delaware.

Despite being a multibillionaire, J. R. Simplot has few pretensions. He wears cowboy boots and blue jeans, eats at McDonald’s, and drives his own car, a Lincoln Continental with license plates that say “MR. SPUD.” He seems to have little patience for abstractions, viewing religion as a bunch of “hocus-pocus” and describing his potato empire matter-of-factly: “It’s big and it’s real, it ain’t bullshit.” Recently Simplot has been slowing down. A bad fall made him give up horseback riding at the age of eighty; in 1999 he turned ninety and quit skiing. He stepped down as the chief executive of his company in 1994, but keeps buying more land and scouting new factories. “Hell, fellow, I’m just an old farmer got some luck,” Simplot said, when I asked about the key to his success. “The only thing I did smart, and just remember this — ninety-nine percent of people would have sold out when they got their first twenty-five or thirty million. I didn’t sell out. I just hung on.”

the mistake of standing alone

THE PRODUCTION OF frozen french fries has become an intensely competitive business. Although the J. R. Simplot Company supplies the majority of the french fries that McDonald’s sells in the United States, two other fry companies are now larger: Lamb Weston, the nation’s leading producer of fries, and McCain, a Canadian firm that became the number-two fry company after buying Ore-Ida in 1997. Simplot, Lamb Weston, and McCain now control about 80 percent of the American market for frozen french fries, having eliminated or acquired most of their smaller rivals. The three french fry giants compete for valuable contracts to supply the fast food chains. Frozen french fries have become a bulk commodity, manufactured in high volumes at a low profit margin. Price differences of just a few pennies a pound can mean the difference between winning or losing a major contract. All of this has greatly benefited the fast food chains, lowering their wholesale costs and making their retail sales of french fries even more profitable. Burger King’s assault on the supremacy of the McDonald’s french fry, launched in 1997 with a $70 million advertising campaign, was driven in large part by the huge markups that are possible with fries. The fast food companies purchase frozen fries for about 30 cents a pound, reheat them in oil, then sell them for about $6 a pound.

Idaho’s potato output surpassed Maine’s in the late 1950s, owing to the rise of the french fry industry and the productivity gains made by Idaho farmers. Since 1980, the tonnage of potatoes grown in Idaho has almost doubled, while the average yield per acre has risen by nearly 30 percent. But the extraordinary profits being made from the sale of french fries have barely trickled down to the farmers. Paul Patterson, an extension professor of agricultural economics at the University of Idaho, describes the current market for potatoes as an “oligopsony” — a market in which a small number of buyers exert power over a large number of sellers. The giant processing companies do their best to drive down the prices offered to potato farmers. The increased productivity of Idaho farmers has lowered prices even further, shifting more of the profits to the processors and the fast food chains. Out of every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries at a fast food restaurant, perhaps 2 cents goes to the farmer who grew the potatoes.

Idaho’s potato farmers now face enormous pressure to get bigger — or get out of the business. Adding more acreage increases total revenues and allows more capital investment; but the risks get bigger, too. The latest potato harvesting equipment — bright red, beautiful machines manufactured in Idaho by a company called Spudnik — can set a farmer back hundreds of thousands of dollars. It costs about $1,500 an acre to grow potatoes in Bingham County. The average potato farmer there, who plants about four hundred acres, is more than half a million dollars in the hole before selling a single potato. In order to break even, the farmer needs to receive about $5 per hundredweight of potatoes. During the 1996–97 season, potato prices fell as low as $1.50 per hundredweight. That year was a disaster for Idaho potato farmers, perhaps the worst in history. Record harvests nationwide and a flood of cheap imports from Canada created an enormous glut of potatoes. For many farmers, letting potatoes rot in the field would have been more profitable than selling them at such low prices. That was not a viable option, however; rotting potatoes can damage the land. Prices have recovered since then, but remain unusually low. An Idaho potato farmer’s annual income is now largely determined by the weather, the world market, and the whims of the giant processors. “The only thing I can really control,” one farmer told me, “is what time I get out of bed in the morning.”

Over the past twenty-five years, Idaho has lost about half of its potato farmers. During the same period, the amount of land devoted to potatoes has increased. Family farms are giving way to corporate farms that stretch for thousands of acres. These immense corporate farms are divided into smaller holdings for administrative purposes, and farmers who’ve been driven off the land are often hired to manage them. The patterns of land ownership in the American West more and more resemble those of rural England. “We’ve come full circle,” says Paul Patterson. “You increasingly find two classes of people in rural Idaho: the people who run the farms and the people who own them.”

The headquarters of the Potato Growers of Idaho (PGI) is a strip-mall office suite, not far from a potato museum in Blackfoot. The PGI is a nonprofit organization that supplies market information to farmers and helps them negotiate contracts with processors. Bert Moulton, a longtime PGI staff member, is a big man with a crew cut who looks like a Goldwater Republican but sounds like an old-fashioned populist. Moulton thinks forming some sort of co-op, an association to coordinate marketing and production levels, may be the last hope for Idaho’s potato farmers. At the moment, most farmers live in areas where there are only one or two processors buying potatoes — and oddly enough, those processors never seem to be bidding for potatoes on the same day. “Legally, the processors aren’t supposed to be talking to one another,” Moulton says. “But you know that they do.” Not long ago, the major french fry companies in Idaho were owned by people with strong ties to the local community. J. R. Simplot was highly regarded by most Idaho farmers; he always seemed willing to help carry them through a lean year. Moulton says the fry companies now tend to be run by outsiders, by “MBA’s from Harvard who don’t know if a potato grows on a tree or underground.” The multinational food companies operate french fry plants in a number of different regions, constantly shifting production to take advantage of the lowest potato prices. The economic fortunes of individual farmers or local communities matter little in the grand scheme.

A few years ago, the PGI tried to create a formal alliance with potato farmers in Oregon and Washington, an effort that would have linked producers in the three states that grow most of the nation’s potatoes. The alliance was undermined by one of the big processors, which cut lucrative deals with a core group of potato farmers. Moulton believes that Idaho’s farmers deserve some of the blame for their own predicament. Long regarded as the aristocrats of rural Idaho, potato farmers remain stubbornly independent and unwilling to join forces. “Some of them are independent to the point of poverty,” he says. Today there are roughly 1,100 potato farmers left in Idaho — few enough to fit in a high school auditorium. About half of them belong to the PGI, but the organization needs at least three-quarters of them as members to gain real bargaining power. The “joint ventures” now being offered by processing companies provide farmers with the potato seed and financing for their crop, an arrangement that should dispel any lingering illusions about their independence. “If potato farmers don’t band together,” Bert Moulton warns, “they’ll wind up sharecroppers.”

The behavior of Idaho’s potato growers often betrays a type of faulty reasoning described in most college-level economics textbooks. “The fallacy of composition” is a logical error — a mistaken belief that what seems good for an individual will still be good when others do the same thing. For example, someone who stands at a crowded concert may get a better view of the stage. But if everyone at the concert stands up, nobody’s view is improved. Since the end of World War II, farmers in the United States have been persuaded to adopt one new technology after another, hoping to improve their yields, reduce their costs, and outsell their neighbors. By embracing this industrial model of agriculture — one that focuses narrowly on the level of inputs and outputs, that encourages specialization in just one crop, that relies heavily on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, advanced harvesting and irrigation equipment — American farmers have become the most productive farmers on earth. Every increase in productivity, however, has driven more American farmers off the land. And it has left those who remain beholden to the companies that supply the inputs and the processors that buy the outputs. William Heffernan, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri, says that America’s agricultural economy now resembles an hourglass. At the top there are about 2 million ranchers and farmers; at the bottom there are 275 million consumers; and at the narrow portion in the middle, there are a dozen or so multinational corporations earning a profit from every transaction.

food product design

THE TASTE OF McDonald’s french fries has long been praised by customers, competitors, and even food critics. James Beard loved McDonald’s fries. Their distinctive taste does not stem from the type of potatoes that McDonald’s buys, the technology that processes them, or the restaurant equipment that fries them. Other chains buy their french fries from the same large processing companies, use Russet Burbanks, and have similar fryers in their restaurant kitchens. The taste of a fast food fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades, McDonald’s cooked its french fries in a mixture of about 7 percent cottonseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow. The mix gave the fries their unique flavor — and more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald’s hamburger.

Amid a barrage of criticism over the amount of cholesterol in their fries, McDonald’s switched to pure vegetable oil in 1990. The switch presented the company with an enormous challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef without cooking them in tallow. A look at the ingredients now used in the preparation of McDonald’s french fries suggests how the problem was solved. Toward the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous, yet oddly mysterious phrase: “natural flavor”. That ingredient helps to explain not only why the fries taste so good, but also why most fast food — indeed, most of the food Americans eat today — tastes the way it does.

Open your refrigerator, your freezer, your kitchen cupboards, and look at the labels on your food. You’ll find “natural flavor” or “artificial flavor” in just about every list of ingredients. The similarities between these two broad categories of flavor are far more significant than their differences. Both are man-made additives that give most processed food most of its taste. The initial purchase of a food item may be driven by its packaging or appearance, but subsequent purchases are determined mainly by its taste. About 90 percent of the money that Americans spend on food is used to buy processed food. But the canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques used to process food destroy most of its flavor. Since the end of World War II, a vast industry has arisen in the United States to make processed food palatable. Without this flavor industry, today’s fast food industry could not exist. The names of the leading American fast food chains and the bestselling menu items have become famous worldwide, embedded in our popular culture. Few people, however, can name the companies that manufacture fast food’s taste.

The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies will not divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the identities of clients. The secrecy is deemed essential for protecting the reputation of beloved brands. The fast food chains, understandably, would like the public to believe that the flavors of their food somehow originate in their restaurant kitchens, not in distant factories run by other firms.

The New Jersey Turnpike runs through the heart of the flavor industry, an industrial corridor dotted with refineries and chemical plants. International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), the world’s largest flavor company, has a manufacturing facility off Exit 8A in Dayton, New Jersey; Givaudan, the world’s second-largest flavor company, has a plant in East Hanover. Haarmann & Reimer, the largest German flavor company, has a plant in Teterboro, as does Takasago, the largest Japanese flavor company. Flavor Dynamics has a plant in South Plainfield; Frutarom is in North Bergen; Elan Chemical is in Newark. Dozens of companies manufacture flavors in the corridor between Teaneck and South Brunswick. Indeed, the area produces about two-thirds of the flavor additives sold in the United States.

The IFF plant in Dayton is a huge pale blue building with a modern office complex attached to the front. It sits in an industrial park, not far from a BASF plastics factory, a Jolly French Toast factory, and a plant that manufactures Liz Claiborne cosmetics. Dozens of tractor-trailers were parked at the IFF loading dock the afternoon I visited, and a thin cloud of steam floated from the chimney. Before entering the plant, I signed a nondisclosure form, promising not to reveal the brand names of products that contain IFF flavors. The place reminded me of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Wonderful smells drifted through the hallways, men and women in neat white lab coats cheerfully went about their work, and hundreds of little glass bottles sat on laboratory tables and shelves. The bottles contained powerful but fragile flavor chemicals, shielded from light by the brown glass and the round plastic caps shut tight. The long chemical names on the little white labels were as mystifying to me as medieval Latin. They were the odd-sounding names of things that would be mixed and poured and turned into new substances, like magic potions.

I was not invited to see the manufacturing areas of the IFF plant, where it was thought I might discover trade secrets. Instead, I toured various laboratories and pilot kitchens, where the flavors of well-established brands are tested or adjusted, and where whole new flavors are created. IFF’s snack and savory lab is responsible for the flavor of potato chips, corn chips, breads, crackers, breakfast cereals, and pet food. The confectionery lab devises the flavor for ice cream, cookies, candies, toothpastes, mouthwashes, and antacids. Everywhere I looked, I saw famous, widely advertised products sitting on laboratory desks and tables. The beverage lab is full of brightly colored liquids in clear bottles. It comes up with the flavor for popular soft drinks, sport drinks, bottled teas, and wine coolers, for all-natural juice drinks, organic soy drinks, beers, and malt liquors. In one pilot kitchen I saw a dapper food technologist, a middle-aged man with an elegant tie beneath his lab coat, carefully preparing a batch of cookies with white frosting and pink-and-white sprinkles. In another pilot kitchen I saw a pizza oven, a grill, a milk-shake machine, and a french fryer identical to those I’d seen behind the counter at countless fast food restaurants.

In addition to being the world’s largest flavor company, IFF manufactures the smell of six of the ten best-selling fine perfumes in the United States, including Estée Lauder’s Beautiful, Clinique’s Happy, Lancôme’s Trésor, and Calvin Klein’s Eternity, It also makes the smell of household products such as deodorant, dishwashing detergent, bath soap, shampoo, furniture polish, and floor wax. All of these aromas are made through the same basic process: the manipulation of volatile chemicals to create a particular smell. The basic science behind the scent of your shaving cream is the same as that governing the flavor of your TV dinner.

The aroma of a food can be responsible for as much as 90 percent of its flavor. Scientists now believe that human beings acquired the sense of taste as a way to avoid being poisoned. Edible plants generally taste sweet; deadly ones, bitter. Taste is supposed to help us differentiate food that’s good for us from food that’s not. The taste buds on our tongues can detect the presence of half a dozen or so basic tastes, including: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, astringent, and umami (a taste discovered by Japanese researchers, a rich and full sense of deliciousness triggered by amino acids in foods such as shellfish, mushrooms, potatoes, and seaweed). Taste buds offer a relatively limited means of detection, however, compared to the human olfactory system, which can perceive thousands of different chemical aromas. Indeed “flavor” is primarily the smell of gases being released by the chemicals you’ve just put in your mouth.

The act of drinking, sucking, or chewing a substance releases its volatile gases. They flow out of the mouth and up the nostrils, or up the passageway in the back of the mouth, to a thin layer of nerve cells called the olfactory epithelium, located at the base of the nose, right between the eyes. The brain combines the complex smell signals from the epithelium with the simple taste signals from the tongue, assigns a flavor to what’s in your mouth, and decides if it’s something you want to eat.

Babies like sweet tastes and reject bitter ones; we know this because scientists have rubbed various flavors inside the mouths of infants and then recorded their facial reactions. A person’s food preferences, like his or her personality, are formed during the first few years of life, through a process of socialization. Toddlers can learn to enjoy hot and spicy food, bland health food, or fast food, depending upon what the people around them eat. The human sense of smell is still not fully understood and can be greatly affected by psychological factors and expectations. The mind filters out the overwhelming majority of chemical aromas that surround us, focusing intently on some, ignoring others. People can grow accustomed to bad smells or good smells; they stop noticing what once seemed overpowering. Aroma and memory are somehow inextricably linked. A smell can suddenly evoke a long-forgotten moment. The flavors of childhood foods seem to leave an indelible mark, and adults often return to them, without always knowing why. These “comfort foods” become a source of pleasure and reassurance, a fact that fast food chains work hard to promote. Childhood memories of Happy Meals can translate into frequent adult visits to McDonald’s, like those of the chain’s “heavy users,” the customers who eat there four or five times a week.

The human craving for flavor has been a largely unacknowledged and unexamined force in history. Royal empires have been built, unexplored lands have been traversed, great religions and philosophies have been forever changed by the spice trade. In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail to find seasoning. Today the influence of flavor in the world marketplace is no less decisive. The rise and fall of corporate empires — of soft drink companies, snack food companies, and fast food chains — is frequently determined by how their products taste.

The flavor industry emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, as processed foods began to be manufactured on a large scale. Recognizing the need for flavor additives, the early food processors turned to perfume companies that had years of experience working with essential oils and volatile aromas. The great perfume houses of England, France, and the Netherlands produced many of the first flavor compounds. In the early part of the twentieth century, Germany’s powerful chemical industry assumed the technological lead in flavor production. Legend has it that a German scientist discovered methyl anthranilate, one of the first artificial flavors, by accident while mixing chemicals in his laboratory. Suddenly the lab was filled with the sweet smell of grapes. Methyl anthranilate later became the chief flavoring compound of grape Kool-Aid. After World War II, much of the perfume industry shifted from Europe to the United States, settling in New York City near the garment district and the fashion houses. The flavor industry came with it, subsequently moving to New Jersey to gain more plant capacity. Man-made flavor additives were used mainly in baked goods, candies, and sodas until the 1950s, when sales of processed food began to soar. The invention of gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers — machines capable of detecting volatile gases at low levels — vastly increased the number of flavors that could be synthesized. By the mid-1960s the American flavor industry was churning out compounds to supply the taste of Pop Tarts, Bac-Os, Tab, Tang, Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and literally thousands of other new foods.

The American flavor industry now has annual revenues of about $1.4 billion. Approximately ten thousand new processed food products are introduced every year in the United States. Almost all of them require flavor additives. And about nine out of every ten of these new food products fail. The latest flavor innovations and corporate realignments are heralded in publications such as Food Chemical News, Food Engineering, Chemical Market Reporter, and Food Product Design. The growth of IFF has mirrored that of the flavour industry as a whole. IFF was formed in 1958, through the merger of two small companies. Its annual revenues have grown almost fifteenfold since the early 1970s, and it now has manufacturing facilities in twenty countries.

The quality that people seek most of all in a food, its flavor, is usually present in a quantity too infinitesimal to be measured by any traditional culinary terms such as ounces or teaspoons. Today’s sophisticated spectrometers, gas chromatographs, and headspace vapor analyzers provide a detailed map of a food’s flavor components, detecting chemical aromas in amounts as low as one part per billion. The human nose, however, is still more sensitive than any machine yet invented. A nose can detect aromas present in quantities of a few parts per trillion — an amount equivalent to 0.000000000003 percent. Complex aromas, like those of coffee or roasted meat, may be composed of volatile gases from nearly a thousand different chemicals. The smell of a strawberry arises from the interaction of at least 350 different chemicals that are present in minute amounts. The chemical that provides the dominant flavor of bell pepper can be tasted in amounts as low as .02 parts per billion; one drop is sufficient to add flavor to five average size swimming pools. The flavor additive usually comes last, or second to last, in a processed food’s list of ingredients (chemicals that add color are frequently used in even smaller amounts). As a result, the flavor of a processed food often costs less than its packaging. Soft drinks contain a larger proportion of flavor additives than most products. The flavor in a twelve-ounce can of Coke costs about half a cent.

The Food and Drug Administration does not require flavor companies to disclose the ingredients of their additives, so long as all the chemicals are considered by the agency to be GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe). This lack of public disclosure enables the companies to maintain the secrecy of their formulas. It also hides the fact that flavor compounds sometimes contain more ingredients than the foods being given their taste. The ubiquitous phrase “artificial strawberry flavor” gives little hint of the chemical wizardry and manufacturing skill that can make a highly processed food taste like a strawberry.

A typical artificial strawberry flavor, like the kind found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenyl-glycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), α-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, γ-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

Although flavors usually arise from a mixture of many different volatile chemicals, a single compound often supplies the dominant aroma. Smelled alone, that chemical provides an unmistakable sense of the food. Ethyl-2-methyl butyrate, for example, smells just like an apple. Today’s highly processed foods offer a blank palette: whatever chemicals you add to them will give them specific tastes. Adding methyl-2-peridylketone makes something taste like popcorn. Adding ethyl-3-hydroxybutanoate makes it taste like marshmallow. The possibilities are now almost limitless. Without affecting the appearance or nutritional value, processed foods could even be made with aroma chemicals such as hexanal (the smell of freshly cut grass) or 3-methyl butanoic acid (the smell of body odor).

The 1960s were the heyday of artificial flavors. The synthetic versions of flavor compounds were not subtle, but they did not need to be, given the nature of most processed food. For the past twenty years food processors have tried hard to use only “natural flavors” in their products. According to the FDA, these must be derived entirely from natural sources — from herbs, spices, fruits, vegetables, beef, chicken, yeast, bark, roots, etc. Consumers prefer to see natural flavors on a label, out of a belief that they are healthier. The distinction between artificial and natural flavors can be somewhat arbitrary and absurd, based more on how the flavor has been made than on what it actually contains. “A natural flavor,” says Terry Acree, a professor of food science at Cornell University, “is a flavor that’s been derived with an out-of-date technology.” Natural flavors and artificial flavors sometimes contain exactly the same chemicals, produced through different methods. Amyl acetate, for example, provides the dominant note of banana flavor. When you distill it from bananas with a solvent, amyl acetate is a natural flavor. When you produce it by mixing vinegar with amyl alcohol, adding sulfuric acid as a catalyst, amyl acetate is an artificial flavor. Either way it smells and tastes the same. The phrase “natural flavor” is now listed among the ingredients of everything from Stonyfield Farm Organic Strawberry Yogurt to Taco Bell Hot Taco Sauce.

A natural flavor is not necessarily healthier or purer than an artificial one. When almond flavor (benzaldehyde) is derived from natural sources, such as peach and apricot pits, it contains traces of hydrogen cyanide, a deadly poison. Benzaldehyde derived through a different process — by mixing oil of clove and the banana flavor, amyl acetate — does not contain any cyanide. Nevertheless, it is legally considered an artificial flavor and sells at a much lower price. Natural and artificial flavors are now manufactured at the same chemical plants, places that few people would associate with Mother Nature. Calling any of these flavors “natural” requires a flexible attitude toward the English language and a fair amount of irony.

The small and elite group of scientists who create most of the flavor in most of the food now consumed in the United States are called “flavorists.” They draw upon a number of disciplines in their work: biology, psychology, physiology, and organic chemistry. A flavorist is a chemist with a trained nose and a poetic sensibility. Flavors are created by blending scores of different chemicals in tiny amounts, a process governed by scientific principles but demanding a fair amount of art. In an age when delicate aromas, subtle flavors, and microwave ovens do not easily coexist, the job of the flavorist is to conjure illusions about processed food and, in the words of one flavor company’s literature, to ensure “consumer likeability.” The flavorists with whom I spoke were charming, cosmopolitan, and ironic. They were also discreet, in keeping with the dictates of their trade. They were the sort of scientist who not only enjoyed fine wine, but could also tell you the chemicals that gave each vintage its unique aroma. One flavorist compared his work to composing music. A well-made flavor compound will have a “top note,” followed by a “dry-down,” and a “leveling-off,” with different chemicals responsible for each stage. The taste of a food can be radically altered by minute changes in the flavoring mix. “A little odor goes a long way,” one flavorist said.

In order to give a processed food the proper taste, a flavorist must always consider the food’s “mouthfeel” — the unique combination of textures and chemical interactions that affects how the flavor is perceived. The mouthfeel can be adjusted through the use of various fats, gums, starches, emulsifiers, and stabilizers. The aroma chemicals of a food can be precisely analyzed, but mouthfeel is much harder to measure. How does one quantify a french fry’s crispness? Food technologists are now conducting basic research in rheology, a branch of physics that examines the flow and deformation of materials. A number of companies sell sophisticated devices that attempt to measure mouthfeel. The TA.XT2i Texture Analyzer, produced by the Texture Technologies Corporation, performs calculations based on data derived from as many as 250 separate probes. It is essentially a mechanical mouth. It gauges the most important rheological properties of a food — the bounce, creep, breaking point, density, crunchiness, chewiness, gumminess, lumpiness, rubberiness, springiness, slipperiness, smoothness, softness, wetness, juiciness, spreadability, spring-back, and tackiness.

Some of the most important advances in flavor manufacturing are now occurring in the field of biotechnology. Complex flavors are being made through fermentation, enzyme reactions, fungal cultures, and tissue cultures. All of the flavors being created through these methods — including the ones being synthesized by funguses — are considered natural flavors by the FDA. The new enzyme-based processes are responsible for extremely lifelike dairy flavors. One company now offers not just butter flavor, but also fresh creamy butter, cheesy butter, milky butter, savory melted butter, and super-concentrated butter flavor, in liquid or powder form. The development of new fermentation techniques, as well as new techniques for heating mixtures of sugar and amino acids, have led to the creation of much more realistic meat flavors. The McDonald’s Corporation will not reveal the exact origin of the natural flavor added to its french fries. In response to inquiries from Vegetarian Journal, however, McDonald’s did acknowledge that its fries derive some of their characteristic flavor from “animal products.”

Other popular fast foods derive their flavor from unexpected sources. Wendy’s Grilled Chicken Sandwich, for example, contains beef extracts. Burger King’s BK Broiler Chicken Breast Patty contains “natural smoke flavor.” A firm called Red Arrow Products Company specializes in smoke flavor, which is added to barbecue sauces and processed meats. Red Arrow manufactures natural smoke flavor by charring sawdust and capturing the aroma chemicals released into the air. The smoke is captured in water and then bottled, so that other companies can sell food which seems to have been cooked over a fire.

In a meeting room at IFF, Brian Grainger let me sample some of the company’s flavors. It was an unusual taste test; there wasn’t any food to taste. Grainger is a senior flavorist at IFF, a soft-spoken chemist with graying hair, an English accent, and a fondness for understatement. He could easily be mistaken for a British diplomat or the owner of a West End brasserie with two Michelin stars. Like many in the flavor industry, he has an Old World, old-fashioned sensibility which seems out of step with our brand-conscious, egocentric age. When I suggested that IFF should put its own logo on the products that contain its flavors — instead of allowing other brands to enjoy the consumer loyalty and affection inspired by those flavors — Grainger politely disagreed, assuring me such a thing would never be done. In the absence of public credit or acclaim, the small and secretive fraternity of flavor chemists praises one another’s work. Grainger can often tell, by analyzing the flavor formula of a product, which of his counterparts at a rival firm devised it. And he enjoys walking down supermarket aisles, looking at the many products that contain his flavors, even if no one else knows it.

Grainger had brought a dozen small glass bottles from the lab. After he opened each bottle, I dipped a fragrance testing filter into it. The filters were long white strips of paper designed to absorb aroma chemicals without producing off-notes. Before placing the strips of paper before my nose, I closed my eyes. Then I inhaled deeply, and one food after another was conjured from the glass bottles. I smelled fresh cherries, black olives, sautéed onions, and shrimp. Grainger’s most remarkable creation took me by surprise. After closing my eyes, I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. The aroma was uncanny, almost miraculous. It smelled like someone in the room was flipping burgers on a hot grill. But when I opened my eyes, there was just a narrow strip of white paper and a smiling flavorist.

millions and millions of fries

AT THE HEIGHT OF the potato harvest, I visited the Lamb Weston plant in American Falls, Idaho. It’s one of the biggest fry factories in the world and makes french fries for McDonald’s. It has a production capacity more than three times larger than that of the Simplot plant in Aberdeen. It is a state-of-the-art processing facility where raw commodities and man-made additives are combined to make America’s most popular food.

Lamb Weston was founded in 1950 by F. Gilbert Lamb, the inventor of a crucial piece of french fry-making technology. The Lamb Water Gun Knife uses a high-pressure hose to shoot potatoes at a speed of 117 feet per second through a grid of sharpened steel blades, thereby creating perfectly sliced french fries. After coming up with the idea, Gil Lamb tested the first Water Gun Knife in a company parking lot, shooting potatoes out of a fire hose. Lamb sold his company to ConAgra in 1988. Lamb Weston now manufactures more than 130 different types of french fries, including: Steak House Fries, CrissCut Fries, Hi-Fries, Mor-Fries, Burger Fries, Taterbabies, Taterboy Curley QQQ Fries, and Rus-Ettes Special Dry Fry Shoestrings.

Bud Mandeville, the plant manager, led me up a narrow, wooden staircase inside one of the plant’s storage buildings. On the top floor, the staircase led to a catwalk, and beneath my feet I saw a mound of potatoes that was twenty feet deep and a hundred feet wide and almost as long as two football fields. The building was cool and dark, kept year-round at a steady 46 degrees. In the dim light the potatoes looked like grains of sand on a beach. This was one of seven storage buildings on the property.

Outside, tractor-trailers arrived from the fields, carrying potatoes that had just been harvested. The trucks dumped their loads onto spinning rods that brought the larger potatoes into the building and let the small potatoes, dirt, and rocks fall to the ground. The rods led to a rock trap, a tank of water in which the potatoes floated and the rocks sank to the bottom. The plant used water systems to float potatoes gently this way and that way, guiding different sizes out of different holding bays, then flushing them into a three-foot-deep stream that ran beneath the cement floor. The interior of the processing plant was gray, massive, and well-lit, with huge pipes running along the walls, steel catwalks, workers in hardhats, and plenty of loud machinery. If there weren’t potatoes bobbing and floating past, you might think the place was an oil refinery.

Conveyer belts took the wet, clean potatoes into a machine that blasted them with steam for twelve seconds, boiled the water under their skins, and exploded their skins off. Then the potatoes were pumped into a preheat tank and shot through a Lamb Water Gun Knife. They emerged as shoestring fries. Four video cameras scrutinized them from different angles, looking for flaws. When a french fry with a blemish was detected, an optical sorting machine time-sequenced a single burst of compressed air that knocked the bad fry off the production line and onto a separate conveyer belt, which carried it to a machine with tiny automated knives that precisely removed the blemish. And then the fry was returned to the main production line.

Sprays of hot water blanched the fries, gusts of hot air dried them, and 25,000 pounds of boiling oil fried them to a slight crisp. Air cooled by compressed ammonia gas quickly froze them, a computerized sorter divided them into six-pound batches, and a device that spun like an out-of-control lazy Susan used centrifugal force to align the french fries so that they all pointed in the same direction. The fries were sealed in brown bags, then the bags were loaded by robots into cardboard boxes, and the boxes were stacked by robots onto wooden pallets. Forklifts driven by human beings took the pallets to a freezer for storage. Inside that freezer I saw 20 million pounds of french fries, most of them destined for McDonald’s, the boxes of fries stacked thirty feet high, the stacks extending for roughly forty yards. And the freezer was half empty. Every day about a dozen railroad cars and about two dozen tractor-trailers pulled up to the freezer, loaded up with french fries, and departed for McDonald’s restaurants in Boise, Pocatello, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver, Colorado Springs, and points in between.

Near the freezer was a laboratory where women in white coats analyzed french fries day and night, measuring their sugar content, their starch content, their color. During the fall, Lamb Weston added sugar to the fries; in the spring it leached sugar out of them; the goal was to maintain a uniform taste and appearance throughout the year. Every half hour, a new batch of fries was cooked in fryers identical to those used in fast food kitchens. A middle-aged woman in a lab coat handed me a paper plate full of premium extra longs, the type of french fries sold at McDonald’s, and a salt shaker, and some ketchup. The fries on the plate looked wildly out of place in this laboratory setting, this surreal food factory with its computer screens, digital readouts, shiny steel platforms, and evacuation plans in case of ammonia gas leaks. The french fries were delicious — crisp and golden brown, made from potatoes that had been in the ground that morning. I finished them and asked for more.

HANK WAS THE FIRST PERSON I met in Colorado Springs. He was a prominent local rancher, and I’d called him to learn how development pressures and the dictates of the fast food industry were affecting the area’s cattle business. In July of 1997, he offered to give me a tour of the new subdivisions that were rising on land where cattle once roamed. We met in the lobby of my hotel. Hank was forty-two years old and handsome enough to be a Hollywood cowboy, tall and rugged, wearing blue jeans, old boots, and a big white hat. But the Dodge minivan he drove didn’t quite go with that image, and he was too smart to fit any stereotype. Hank proved to be good company from the first handshake. He had strong opinions, but didn’t take himself too seriously. We spent hours driving around Colorado Springs, looking at how the New West was burying the Old.

As we drove through neighborhoods like Broadmoor Oaks and Broadmoor Bluffs, amid the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain, Hank pointed out that all these big new houses on small lots sat on land that every few generations burned. The houses were surrounded by lovely pale brown grasses, tumbleweed, and scrub oak — ideal kindling. As in southern California, these hillsides could erupt in flames with the slightest spark, a cigarette tossed from a car window. The homes looked solid and prosperous, gave no hint of their vulnerability, and had wonderful views.

Hank’s ranch was about twenty miles south of town. As we headed there, the landscape opened up and began to show glimpses of the true West — the wide-open countryside that draws its beauty from the absence of people, attracts people, and then slowly loses its appeal. Through leadership positions in a variety of local and statewide groups, Hank was trying to bridge the gap between ranchers and environmentalists, to establish some common ground between longtime enemies. He was not a wealthy, New Age type playing at being a cowboy. His income came from the roughly four hundred head of cattle on his ranch. He didn’t care what was politically correct and had little patience for urban environmentalists who vilified the cattle industry. In his view, good ranchers did far less damage to the land than city-dwellers. “Nature isn’t an abstraction for me,” he said. “My family lives with it every day.”

When we got to the ranch, Hank’s wife, Susan, was leading her horse out of a ring. She was blond and attractive, but no pushover: tall, fit, and strong. Their daughters, Allie and Kris, aged six and eight, ran over to greet us, full of excitement that their dad was home and had brought a visitor. They scrambled into the minivan and joined us for a drive around the property. Hank wanted me to see the difference between his form of ranching and “raping the land.” As we took off onto a dirt road, I looked back at his house and thought about how small it looked amid this landscape. On acreage hundreds if not thousands of times larger than the front lawns and back yards surrounding the mansions of Colorado Springs, the family lived in a modest log cabin.

Hank was practicing a form of range management inspired by the grazing patterns of elk and buffalo herds, animals who’d lived for millennia on this short-grass prairie. His ranch was divided into thirty-five separate pastures. His cattle spent ten or eleven days in one pasture, then were moved to the next, allowing the native plants, the blue grama and buffalo grass, time to recover. Hank stopped the minivan to show me a nearby stream. On land that has been overgrazed, the stream banks are usually destroyed first, as cattle gather in the cool shade beside the water, eating everything in sight. Hank’s stream was fenced off with barbed wire, and the banks were lush and green. Then he took me to see Fountain Creek, which ran straight through the ranch, and I realized that he’d given other guests the same tour. It had a proper sequence and a point.

Fountain Creek was a long, ugly gash about twenty yards wide and fifteen feet deep. The banks were collapsing from erosion, fallen trees and branches littered the creek bed, and a small trickle of water ran down the middle. “This was done by storm runoff from Colorado Springs,” Hank said. The contrast between his impact on the land and the city’s impact was hard to miss. The rapid growth of Colorado Springs had occurred without much official planning, zoning, or spending on drainage projects. As more pavement covered land within the city limits, more water flowed straight into Fountain Creek instead of being absorbed into the ground. The runoff from Colorado Springs eroded the land beside the creek, carrying silt and debris downstream all the way to Kansas. Hank literally lost part of his ranch every year. It got washed away by the city’s rainwater. A nearby rancher once lost ten acres of land in a single day, thanks to runoff from a fierce storm in Colorado Springs. While Hank stood on the crumbling bank, giving an impassioned speech about the watershed protection group that he’d helped to organize, telling me about holding ponds, landscaped greenways, and the virtues of permeable parking lots covered in gravel, I lost track of his words. And I thought: “This guy’s going to be governor of Colorado someday.”

Toward sunset we spotted a herd of antelope and roared after them. That damn minivan bounced over the prairie like a horse at full gallop, Hank wild behind the wheel, Allie and Kris squealing in the back seat. We had a Chrysler engine, power steering, and disk brakes, but the antelope had a much superior grace, making sharp and unexpected turns, about two dozen of them, bounding effortlessly, butts held high. After a futile chase, Hank let the herd go on its way, then veered right and guided the minivan up a low hill. There was something else he wanted to show me. The girls looked intently out the window, faces flushed, searching for more wildlife. When we reached the crest of the hill, I looked down and saw an immense oval structure, shiny and brand-new. For an instant, I couldn’t figure out what it was. It looked like a structure created by some alien civilization and plopped in the middle of nowhere. “Stock car racing,” Hank said matter-of-factly. The grandstands around the track were enormous, and so was the parking lot. Acres of black asphalt and white lines now spread across the prairie, thousands of empty spaces waiting for cars.

The speedway was new, and races were being held there every weekend in the summer. You could hear the engines and the crowd from Hank’s house. The races weren’t the main problem, though. It was the practice runs that bothered Hank and Susan most. In the middle of the day, in one of America’s most beautiful landscapes, they would suddenly hear the drone of stock cars going round and round. For a moment, we sat quietly on top of the hill, staring at the speedway bathed in twilight, at this oval strip of pavement, this unsettling omen. Hank stopped there long enough for me to ponder what it meant, the threat now coming his way, then drove back down the hill. The speedway was gone again, out of sight, and the girls were still happy in the back seat, chatting away, oblivious, as the sun dropped behind the mountains.

a new trust

RANCHERS AND COWBOYS HAVE long been the central icons of the American West. Traditionalists have revered them as symbols of freedom and self-reliance. Revisionists have condemned them as racists, economic parasites, and despoilers of the land. The powerful feelings evoked by cattlemen reflect opposing views of our national identity, attempts to sustain old myths or create new ones. There is one indisputable fact, however, about American ranchers: they are rapidly disappearing. Over the last twenty years, about half a million ranchers sold off their cattle and quit the business. Many of the nation’s remaining eight hundred thousand ranchers are faring poorly. They’re taking second jobs. They’re selling cattle at break-even prices or at a loss. The ranchers who are faring the worst run three to four hundred head of cattle, manage the ranch themselves, and live solely off the proceeds. The sort of hard-working ranchers long idealized in cowboy myths are the ones most likely to go broke today. Without receiving a fraction of the public attention given to the northwestern spotted owl, America’s independent cattlemen have truly become an endangered species.

Ranchers currently face a host of economic problems: rising land prices, stagnant beef prices, oversupplies of cattle, increased shipments of live cattle from Canada and Mexico, development pressures, inheritance taxes, health scares about beef. On top of all that, the growth of the fast food chains has encouraged consolidation in the meatpacking industry. McDonald’s is the nation’s largest purchaser of beef. In 1968, McDonald’s bought ground beef from 175 local suppliers. A few years later, seeking to achieve greater product uniformity as it expanded, McDonald’s reduced the number of beef suppliers to five. Much like the french fry industry, the meatpacking industry has been transformed by mergers and acquisitions over the last twenty years. Many ranchers now argue that a few large corporations have gained a stranglehold on the market, using unfair tactics to drive down the price of cattle. Anger toward the large meatpackers is growing, and a new range war threatens to erupt, one that will determine the social and economic structure of the rural West.

A century ago, American ranchers found themselves in a similar predicament. The leading sectors of the nation’s economy were controlled by corporate alliances known as “trusts.” There was a Sugar Trust, a Steel Trust, a Tobacco Trust — and a Beef Trust. It set the prices offered for cattle. Ranchers who spoke out against this monopoly power were often blackballed, unable to sell their cattle at any price. In 1917, at the height of the Beef Trust, the five largest meatpacking companies — Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson, and Cudahy — controlled about 55 percent of the market. The early twentieth century had trusts, but it also had “trustbusters,” progressive government officials who believed that concentrated economic power posed a grave threat to American democracy. The Sherman Antitrust Act had been passed in 1890 after a congressional investigation of price fixing in the meatpacking industry, and for the next two decades the federal government tried to break up the Beef Trust, with little success. In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the industry. The FTC inquiry concluded that the five major meatpacking firms had secretly fixed prices for years, had colluded to divide up markets, and had shared livestock information to guarantee that ranchers received the lowest possible price for their cattle. Afraid that an antitrust trial might end with an unfavorable verdict, the five meatpacking companies signed a consent decree in 1920 that forced them to sell off their stockyards, retail meat stores, railway interests, and livestock journals. A year later Congress created the Packers and Stockyards Administration (P&SA), a federal agency with a broad authority to prevent price-fixing and monopolistic behavior in the beef industry.

For the next fifty years, ranchers sold their cattle in a relatively competitive marketplace. The price of cattle was set through open bidding at auctions. The large meatpackers competed with hundreds of small regional firms. In 1970 the top four meatpacking firms slaughtered only 21 percent of the nation’s cattle. A decade later, the Reagan administration allowed these firms to merge and combine without fear of antitrust enforcement. The Justice Department and the P&SA’s successor, the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA), stood aside as the large meatpackers gained control of one local cattle market after another. Today the top four meatpacking firms — ConAgra, IBP, Excel, and National Beef— slaughter about 84 percent of the nation’s cattle. Market concentration in the beef industry is now at the highest level since record-keeping began in the early twentieth century.

Today’s unprecedented degree of meatpacking concentration has helped depress the prices that independent ranchers get for their cattle. Over the last twenty years, the rancher’s share of every retail dollar spent on beef has fallen from 63 cents to 46 cents. The four major meatpacking companies now control about 20 percent of the live cattle in the United States through “captive supplies” — cattle that are either maintained in company-owned feedlots or purchased in advance through forward contracts. When cattle prices start to rise, the large meatpackers can flood the market with their own captive supplies, driving prices back down. They can also obtain cattle through confidential agreements with wealthy ranchers, never revealing the true price being paid. ConAgra and Excel operate their own gigantic feedlots, while IBP has private arrangements with some of America’s biggest ranchers and feeders, including the Bass brothers, Paul Engler, and J. R. Simplot. Independent ranchers and feedlots now have a hard time figuring out what their cattle are actually worth, let alone finding a buyer for them at the right price. On any given day in the nation’s regional cattle markets, as much as 80 percent of the cattle being exchanged are captive supplies. The prices being paid for these cattle are never disclosed.

To get a sense of what an independent rancher now faces, imagine how the New York Stock Exchange would function if large investors could keep the terms of all their stock trades secret. Ordinary investors would have no idea what their own stocks were really worth — a fact that wealthy traders could easily exploit. “A free market requires many buyers as well as many sellers, all with equal access to accurate information, all entitled to trade on the same terms, and none with a big enough share of the market to influence price,” said a report by Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs. “Nothing close to these conditions now exists in the cattle market.”

The large meatpacking firms have thus far shown little interest in buying their own cattle ranches. “Why would they want the hassle?” Lee Pitts, the editor of Livestock Market Digest, told me. “Raising cattle is a business with a high overhead, and most of the capital’s tied up in the land.” Instead of buying their own ranches, the meatpacking companies have been financing a handful of large feedlot owners who lease ranches and run cattle for them. “It’s just another way of controlling prices through captive supply,” Pitts explained. “The packers now own some of these big feeders lock, stock, and barrel, and tell them exactly what to do.”

the breasts of mr. mcdonald

MANY RANCHERS NOW FEAR that the beef industry is deliberately being restructured along the lines of the poultry industry. They do not want to wind up like chicken growers — who in recent years have become virtually powerless, trapped by debt and by onerous contracts written by the large processors. The poultry industry was also transformed by a wave of mergers in the 1980s. Eight chicken processors now control about two-thirds of the American market. These processors have shifted almost all of their production to the rural South, where the weather tends to be mild, the workforce is poor, unions are weak, and farmers are desperate to find some way of staying on their land. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi now produce more than half the chicken raised in the United States. Although many factors helped revolutionize the poultry industry and increase the power of the large processors, one innovation played an especially important role. The Chicken McNugget turned a bird that once had to be carved at a table into something that could easily be eaten behind the wheel of a car. It turned a bulk agricultural commodity into a manufactured, value-added product. And it encouraged a system of production that has turned many chicken farmers into little more than serfs.

“I have an idea,” Fred Turner, the chairman of McDonald’s, told one of his suppliers in 1979. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” The supplier, an executive at Keystone Foods, ordered a group of technicians to get to work in the lab, where they were soon joined by food scientists from McDonald’s. Poultry consumption in the United States was growing, a trend with alarming implications for a fast food chain that only sold hamburgers. The nation’s chicken meat had traditionally been provided by hens that were too old to lay eggs; after World War II a new poultry industry based in Delaware and Virginia lowered the cost of raising chicken, while medical research touted the health benefits of eating it. Fred Turner wanted McDonald’s to sell a chicken dish that wouldn’t clash with the chain’s sensibility. After six months of intensive research, the Keystone lab developed new technology for the manufacture of McNuggets — small pieces of reconstituted chicken, composed mainly of white meat, that were held together by stabilizers, breaded, fried, frozen, then reheated. The initial test-marketing of McNuggets was so successful that McDonald’s enlisted another company, Tyson Foods, to guarantee an adequate supply. Based in Arkansas, Tyson was one of the nation’s leading chicken processors, and it soon developed a new breed of chicken to facilitate the production of McNuggets. Dubbed “Mr. McDonald,” the new breed had unusually large breasts.

Chicken McNuggets were introduced nationwide in 1983. Within one month of their launch, the McDonald’s Corporation had become the second-largest purchaser of chicken in the United States, surpassed only by KFC. McNuggets tasted good, they were easy to chew, and they appeared to be healthier than other items on the menu at McDonald’s. After all, they were made out of chicken. But their health benefits were illusory. A chemical analysis of McNuggets by a researcher at Harvard Medical School found that their “fatty acid profile” more closely resembled beef than poultry. They were cooked in beef tallow, like McDonald’s fries. The chain soon switched to vegetable oil, adding “beef extract” to McNuggets during the manufacturing process in order to retain their familiar taste. Today Chicken McNuggets are wildly popular among young children — and contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.

The McNugget helped change not only the American diet but also its system for raising and processing poultry. “The impact of McNuggets was so huge that it changed the industry,” the president of ConAgra Poultry, the nation’s third-largest chicken processor, later acknowledged. Twenty years ago, most chicken was sold whole; today about 90 percent of the chicken sold in the United States has been cut into pieces, cutlets, or nuggets. In 1992 American consumption of chicken for the first time surpassed the consumption of beef. Gaining the McNugget contract helped turn Tyson Foods into the world’s largest chicken processor. Tyson now manufactures about half of the nation’s McNuggets and sells chicken to ninety of the one hundred largest restaurant chains. It is a vertically integrated company that breeds, slaughters, and processes chicken. It does not, however, raise the birds. It leaves the capital expenditures and the financial risks of that task to thousands of “independent contractors.”

A Tyson chicken grower never owns the birds in his or her poultry houses. Like most of the other leading processors, Tyson supplies its growers with one-day-old chicks. Between the day they are born and the day they are killed, the birds spend their entire lives on the grower’s property. But they belong to Tyson. The company supplies the feed, veterinary services, and technical support. It determines feeding schedules, demands equipment upgrades, and employs “flock supervisors” to make sure that corporate directives are being followed. It hires the trucks that drop off the baby chicks and return seven weeks later to pick up full-grown chickens ready for slaughter. At the processing plant, Tyson employees count and weigh the birds. A grower’s income is determined by a formula based upon that count, that weight, and the amount of feed used.

The chicken grower provides the land, the labor, the poultry houses, and the fuel. Most growers must borrow money to build the houses, which cost about $150,000 each and hold about 25,000 birds. A 1995 survey by Louisiana Tech University found that the typical grower had been raising chicken for fifteen years, owned three poultry houses, remained deeply in debt, and earned perhaps $12,000 a year. About half of the nation’s chicken growers leave the business after just three years, either selling out or losing everything. The back roads of rural Arkansas are now littered with abandoned poultry houses.

Most chicken growers cannot obtain a bank loan without already having a signed contract from a major processor. “We get the check first,” a loan officer told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. A chicken grower who is unhappy with his or her processor has little power to do anything about it. Poultry contracts are short-term. Growers who complain may soon find themselves with empty poultry houses and debts that still need to be paid. Twenty-five years ago, when the United States had dozens of poultry firms, a grower stood a much better chance of finding a new processor and of striking a better deal. Today growers who are labeled “difficult” often have no choice but to find a new line of work. A processor can terminate a contract with a grower whenever it likes. It owns the birds. Short of that punishment, a processor can prolong the interval between the departure of one flock and the arrival of another. Every day that poultry houses sit empty, the grower loses money.

The large processors won’t publicly disclose the terms of their contracts. In the past, such contracts have not only required that growers surrender all rights to file a lawsuit against the company, but have also forbidden them from joining any association that might link growers in a strong bargaining unit. The processors do not like the idea of chicken growers joining forces to protect their interests. “Our relationship with our growers is a one-on-one contractual relationship…,” a Tyson executive told a reporter in 1998. “We want to see that it remains that way.”

captives

THE FOUR LARGE meatpacking firms claim that an oversupply of beef, not any corporate behavior, is responsible for the low prices that American ranchers are paid for their cattle. A number of studies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have reached the same conclusion. Annual beef consumption in the United States peaked in 1976, at about ninety-four pounds per person. Today the typical American eats about sixty-eight pounds of beef every year. Although the nation’s population has grown since the 1970s, it has not grown fast enough to compensate for the decline in beef consumption. Ranchers trying to stabilize their incomes fell victim to their own fallacy of composition. They followed the advice of agribusiness firms and gave their cattle growth hormones. As a result, cattle are much bigger today; fewer cattle are sold; and most American beef cannot be exported to the European Union, where the use of bovine growth hormones has been banned.

The meatpacking companies claim that captive supplies and formula pricing systems are means of achieving greater efficiency, not of controlling cattle prices. Their slaughterhouses require a large and steady volume of cattle to operate profitably; captive supplies are one reliable way of sustaining that volume. The large meatpacking companies say that they’ve become a convenient scapegoat for ranchers, when the real problem is low poultry prices. A pound of chicken costs about half as much as a pound of beef. The long-term deals now being offered to cattlemen are portrayed as innovations that will save, not destroy, the beef industry. Responding in 1998 to a USDA investigation of captive supplies in Kansas, IBP defended such “alternative methods for selling fed cattle.” The company argued that these practices were “similar to changes that have already occurred… for selling other agricultural commodities,” such as poultry.

Many independent ranchers are convinced that captive supplies are used primarily to control the market, not to achieve greater slaughterhouse efficiency. They do not oppose large-scale transactions or long-term contracts; they oppose cattle prices that are kept secret. Most of all, they do not trust the meatpacking giants. The belief that agribusiness executives secretly talk on the phone with their competitors, set prices, and divide up the worldwide market for commodities — a belief widely held among independent ranchers and farmers — may seem like a paranoid fantasy. But that is precisely what executives at Archer Daniels Midland, “supermarket to the world,” did for years.

Three of Archer Daniels Midland’s top officials, including Michael Andreas, its vice chairman, were sent to federal prison in 1999 for conspiring with foreign rivals to control the international market for lysine (an important feed additive). The Justice Department’s investigation of this massive price-fixing scheme focused on the period between August of 1992 and December of 1995. Within that roughly three-and-a-half-year stretch, Archer Daniels Midland and its coconspirators may have overcharged farmers by as much as $180 million. During the same period, Archer Daniels Midland executives also met with their overseas rivals to set the worldwide price for citric acid (a common food additive). At a meeting with Japanese executives that was secretly recorded, the president of Archer Daniels Midland preached the virtues of collaboration. “We have a saying at this company,” he said. “Our competitors are our friends, and our customers are our enemies.” Archer Daniels Midland remains the world’s largest producer of lysine, as well as the world’s largest processor of soybeans and corn. It is also one of the largest shareholders of IBP.

A 1996 USDA investigation of concentration in the beef industry found that many ranchers were afraid to testify against the large meatpacking companies, fearing retaliation and “economic ruin.” That year Mike Callicrate, a cattleman from St. Francis, Kansas, decided to speak out against corporate behavior he thought was not just improper but criminal. “I was driving down the road one day,” Callicrate told me, “and I kept thinking, when is someone going to do something about this? And I suddenly realized that maybe nobody’s going to do it, and I had to give it a try.” He claims that after his testimony before the USDA committee, the large meatpackers promptly stopped bidding on his cattle. “I couldn’t sell my cattle,” he said. “They’d drive right past my feed yard and buy cattle from a guy two hundred miles further away.” His business has recovered somewhat; ConAgra and Excel now bid on his cattle. The experience has turned him into an activist. He refuses to “make the transition to slavery quietly.” He has spoken at congressional hearings and has joined a dozen other cattlemen in a class-action lawsuit against IBP. The lawsuit claims that IBP has for many years violated the Packers and Stockyards Act through a wide variety of anticompetitive tactics. According to Callicrate, the suit will demonstrate that the company’s purported efficiency in production is really “an efficiency in stealing.” IBP denies the charges. “It makes no sense for us to do anything to hurt cattle producers,” a top IBP executive told a reporter, “when we depend upon them to supply our plants.”

the threat of wealthy neighbors

THE COLORADO CATTLEMEN’S ASSOCIATION filed an amicus brief in Mike Callicrate’s lawsuit against IBP, demanding a competitive marketplace for cattle and a halt to any illegal buying practices being used by the large meatpacking firms. Ranchers in Colorado today, however, face threats to their livelihood that are unrelated to fluctuations in cattle prices. During the past twenty years, Colorado has lost roughly 1.5 million acres of ranchland to development. Population growth and the booming market for vacation homes have greatly driven up land costs. Some ranchland that sold for less than $200 an acre in the 1960s now sells for hundreds of times that amount. The new land prices make it impossible for ordinary ranchers to expand their operations. Each head of cattle needs about thirty acres of pasture for grazing, and until cattle start producing solid gold nuggets instead of sirloin, it’s hard to sustain beef production on such expensive land. Ranching families in Colorado tend to be land-rich and cash-poor. Inheritance taxes can claim more than half of a cattle ranch’s land value. Even if a family manages to operate its ranch profitably, handing it down to the next generation may require selling off large chunks of land, thereby diminishing its productive capacity.

Along with the ranches, Colorado is quickly losing its ranching culture. Among the students at Harrison High you see a variety of fashion statements: gangsta wannabes, skaters, stoners, goths, and punks. What you don’t see — in the shadow of Pikes Peak, in the heart of the Rocky Mountain West — is anyone dressed even remotely like a cowboy. Nobody’s wearing shirts with snaps or Justin boots. In 1959, eight of the nation’s top ten TV shows were Westerns. The networks ran thirty-five Westerns in prime time every week, and places like Colorado, where real cowboys lived, were the stuff of youthful daydreams. That America now seems as dead and distant as the England of King Arthur. I saw hundreds of high school students in Colorado Springs, and only one of them wore a cowboy hat. His name was Philly Favorite, he played guitar in a band called the Deadites, and his cowboy hat was made out of fake zebra fur.

The median age of Colorado’s ranchers and farmers is about fifty-five, and roughly half of the state’s open land will change hands during the next two decades — a potential boon for real estate developers. A number of Colorado land trusts are now working to help ranchers obtain conservation easements. In return for donating future development rights to one of these trusts, a rancher receives an immediate tax break and the prospect of lower inheritance taxes. The land remains private property, but by law can never be turned into golf courses, shopping malls, or subdivisions. In 1995 the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association formed the first land trust in the United States that is devoted solely to the preservation of ranchland. It has thus far protected almost 40,000 acres, a significant achievement. But ranchland in Colorado is now vanishing at the rate of about 90,000 acres a year.

Conservation easements are usually of greatest benefit to wealthy gentleman ranchers who earn large incomes from other sources. The doctors, lawyers, and stockbrokers now running cattle on some of Colorado’s most beautiful land can own big ranches, preserve open space with easements, and enjoy the big tax deductions. Ranchers whose annual income comes entirely from selling cattle usually don’t earn enough to benefit from that sort of tax break. And the value of their land, along with the pressure to sell it, often increases when a wealthy neighbor obtains a conservation easement, since the views in the area are more likely to remain unspoiled.

The Colorado ranchers who now face the greatest economic difficulty are the ones who run a few hundred head of cattle, who work their own land, who don’t have any outside income, and who don’t stand to gain anything from a big tax write-off. They have to compete with gentleman ranchers whose operations don’t have to earn a profit and with part-time ranchers whose operations are kept afloat by second jobs. Indeed, the ranchers most likely to be in financial trouble today are the ones who live the life and embody the values supposedly at the heart of the American West. They are independent and self-sufficient, cherish their freedom, believe in hard work — and as a result are now paying the price.

a broken link

HANK DIED IN 1998. He took his own life the week before Christmas. He was forty-three.

When I heard the news, it made no sense to me, none at all. The man that I knew was full of fire and ready to go, the kind of person who seemed always to be throwing himself into the middle of things. He did not hide away. He got involved in the community, served on countless boards and committees. He had a fine sense of humor. He loved his family. The way he died seemed to contradict everything else about his life.

It would be wrong to say that Hank’s death was caused by the consolidating and homogenizing influence of the fast food chains, by monopoly power in the meatpacking industry, by depressed prices in the cattle market, by the economic forces bankrupting independent ranchers, by the tax laws that favor wealthy ranchers, by the unrelenting push of Colorado’s real estate developers. But it would not be entirely wrong. Hank was under enormous pressure at the time of his death. He was trying to find a way of gaining conservation easements that would protect his land but not sacrifice the financial security of his family. Cattle prices had fallen to their lowest point in more than a decade. And El Paso County was planning to build a new highway right through the heart of his ranch. The stress of these things and others led to sleepless nights, then to a depression that spiraled downward fast, and before long he was gone.

The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the United States is now about three times higher than the national average. The issue briefly received attention during the 1980s farm crisis, but has been pretty much ignored ever since. Meanwhile, across rural America, a slow and steady death toll mounts. As the rancher’s traditional way of life is destroyed, so are many of the beliefs that go with it. The code of the rancher could hardly be more out of step with America’s current state of mind. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists regard failure as just a first step toward success. After three failed Internet start-ups, there’s still a chance that the fourth one will succeed. What’s being sold ultimately matters less than how well it sells. In ranching, a failure is much more likely to be final. The land that has been lost is not just a commodity. It has meaning that cannot be measured in dollars and cents. It is a tangible connection with the past, something that was meant to be handed down to children and never sold. As Osha Gray Davidson observes in his book Broken Heartland (1996), “To fail several generations of relatives… to see yourself as the one weak link in a strong chain… is a terrible, and for some, an unbearable burden.”

When Hank was eight years old, he was the subject of a children’s book. It combined text with photographs and told the story of a boy’s first roundup. Young Hank wears blue jeans and a black hat in the book, rides a white horse, tags along with real cowboys, stares down a herd of cattle in a corral. You can see in these pictures why Hank was chosen for the part. His face is lively and expressive; he can ride; he can lasso; and he looks game, willing to jump a fence or chase after a steer ten times his size. The boy in the story starts out afraid of animals on the ranch, but in the end conquers his fear of cattle, snakes, and coyotes. There’s a happy ending, and the final image echoes the last scene of a classic Hollywood Western, affirming the spirit of freedom and independence. Accompanied by an older cowhand and surrounded by a herd of cattle, young Hank rides his white horse across a vast, wide-open prairie, heading toward the horizon.

In life he did not get that sort of ending. He was buried at his ranch, in a simple wooden coffin made by friends.

YOU CAN SMELL Greeley, Colorado, long before you can see it. The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food. The smell is worst during the summer months, blanketing Greeley day and night like an invisible fog. Many people who live there no longer notice the smell; it recedes into the background, present but not present, like the sound of traffic for New Yorkers. Others can’t stop thinking about the smell, even after years; it permeates everything, gives them headaches, makes them nauseous, interferes with their sleep. Greeley is a modern-day factory town where cattle are the main units of production, where workers and machines turn large steer into small, vacuum-sealed packages of meat. The billions of fast food hamburgers that Americans now eat every year come from places like Greeley. The industrialization of cattle-raising and meatpacking over the past two decades has completely altered how beef is produced — and the towns that produce it. Responding to the demands of the fast food and supermarket chains, the meatpacking giants have cut costs by cutting wages. They have turned one of the nation’s best-paying manufacturing jobs into one of the lowest-paying, created a migrant industrial workforce of poor immigrants, tolerated high injury rates, and spawned rural ghettos in the American heartland. Crime, poverty, drug abuse, and homelessness have lately taken root in towns where you’d least expect to find them. The effects of this new meatpacking regime have become as inescapable as the odors that drift from its feedlots, rendering plants, and pools of slaughterhouse waste.

The ConAgra Beef Company runs the nation’s biggest meatpacking complex just a few miles north of downtown Greeley. Weld County, which includes Greeley, earns more money every year from livestock products than any other county in the United States. ConAgra is the largest private employer in Weld County, running a beef slaughterhouse and a sheep slaughterhouse, as well as rendering and processing facilities.

To supply the beef slaughterhouse, ConAgra operates a pair of enormous feedlots. Each of them can hold up to one hundred thousand head of cattle. At times the animals are crowded so closely together it looks like a sea of cattle, a mooing, moving mass of brown and white fur that goes on for acres. These cattle don’t eat blue grama and buffalo grass off the prairie. During the three months before slaughter, they eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway dividers. The grain fattens the cattle quickly, aided by the anabolic steroids implanted in their ear. A typical steer will consume more than three thousand pounds of grain during its stay at a feedlot, just to gain four hundred pounds in weight. The process involves a fair amount of waste. Each steer deposits about fifty pounds of urine and manure every day. Unlike human waste, the manure is not sent to a treatment plant. It is dumped into pits, huge pools of excrement that the industry calls “lagoons.” The amount of waste left by the cattle that pass through Weld County is staggering. The two Monfort feedlots outside Greeley produce more excrement than the cities of Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and St. Louis — combined.

Before Greeley became a meatpacking town, it was a utopian community of small farmers. It was founded in 1870 by Nathan Meeker, a newspaper editor from New York City who wanted to create a city in the American West dedicated to agriculture, education, mutual aid, and high moral values. Meeker named the idealistic new settlement after his boss at the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, who had given some career advice that proved legendary: “Go west, young man.” The town of Greeley, Colorado, eventually thrived, becoming a major producer of beans and sugar beets. But Nathan Meeker did not live long enough to enjoy its success. In 1879, Meeker got into a dispute with a group of Ute Indians, who killed him and then scalped him.

For many years the farmers of Greeley held themselves apart from local ranchers, at one point building a wooden fence around the town to keep cattle out — a fence fifty miles long. During the Depression, when commodity prices hit rock bottom, a Greeley schoolteacher named Warren Monfort started to buy grain from local farmers and feed it to his cattle. At the time, American cattle were mainly grass-fed, not grain-fed. They roamed the range, eating native grasses, or they lived on farms and ate hay. Monfort soon became one of the nation’s first large-scale cattle feeders, buying cheap corn, sugar beets, and alfalfa from his neighbors. His feedlot business greatly expanded after World War II. By feeding cattle year-round, Monfort could control the timing of his livestock sales and wait for the best prices at the Chicago stockyards. The meat of grain-fed beef was fatty and tender; unlike grass-fed beef, it did not need to be aged for a few weeks; it could be eaten within days of the slaughter. Feedlots began to open throughout the rural Midwest. American grain surpluses, largely fueled by government price supports, provided inexpensive food for livestock and made cattle-feeding a standard practice in the beef industry. Warren Monfort started his business in the 1930s with eighteen head of cattle. By the late 1950s he was feeding about twenty thousand.

In 1960 Monfort and his son Kenneth opened a small slaughterhouse in Greeley near his feedlots. They signed a generous union contract with the Amalgamated Butcher Workmen, granting benefits like seniority rights and pay bonuses for work on the late shift. Jobs at the Monfort slaughterhouse were among the highest paying in Greeley, and there was a long waiting list of people seeking work at the plant. Greeley became a company town, dominated by the Monfort family and ruled with a compassionate paternalism. Ken Monfort was a familiar presence at the slaughterhouse. Workers felt comfortable approaching him with suggestions and complaints. He had an unusual background for a meatpacking executive. He was a liberal Democrat who had served two terms in the state legislature. He was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war, one of the two people from Colorado to earn a place on President Nixon’s “enemies list.” Appearing on that list, in Monfort’s view, was a great honor. After a union vote at the Greeley slaughterhouse in 1970, Ken Monfort sent the newly elected steward a warm personal letter. “If I can ever be of help to you,” he wrote, “my door is open.” The prosperity and labor peace in Greeley, however, were soon threatened by fundamental changes sweeping through the meatpacking industry — an upheaval that came to be known as “the IBP revolution.”

go west

WHEN THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE IN Greeley first opened, its rural location was unusual. Meatpacking plants were much more likely to be found in urban areas. Most large American cities had a meatpacking district with its own stockyards and slaughterhouses. Cattle were shipped there by rail, slaughtered, carved into sides of beef, then sold to local butchers and wholesalers. Omaha and Kansas City were prominent meatpacking towns, and the United Nations building now stands on land once occupied by New York City’s stockyards. For more than a century, however, Chicago reigned as the meatpacking capital of the world. The Beef Trust was born there, the major meatpacking firms were headquartered there, and roughly forty thousand people were employed there in a square-mile meat district anchored by the Union Stockyards. Refrigerated sides of beef were shipped from Chicago not only throughout the United States, but also throughout Europe. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Upton Sinclair considered Chicago’s Packingtown to be “the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place.” It was in his view the supreme achievement of American capitalism, as well as its greatest disgrace.

The old Chicago slaughterhouses were usually brick buildings, four or five stories high. Cattle were herded up wooden ramps to the top floor, where they were struck on the head with a sledgehammer, slaughtered, then disassembled by skilled workers. The animals eventually left the building on the ground floor, coming out as sides of beef, cans of beef, or boxes of sausage ready to be loaded into railcars.

The working conditions in these meatpacking plants were brutal. In The Jungle (1906) Upton Sinclair described a litany of horrors: severe back and shoulder injuries, lacerations, amputations, exposure to dangerous chemicals, and memorably, a workplace accident in which a man fell into a vat and got turned into lard. The plant kept running, and the lard was sold to unsuspecting consumers. Human beings, Sinclair argued, had been made “cogs in the great packing machine,” easily replaced and entirely disposable. President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an independent investigation of The Jungle’s sensational details. The accuracy of the book was confirmed by federal investigators, who found that Chicago’s meatpacking workers labored “under conditions that are entirely unnecessary and unpardonable, and which are a constant menace not only to their own health, but to the health of those who use the food products prepared by them.”

The popular outrage inspired by The Jungle led Congress to enact food safety legislation in 1906. Little was done, however, to improve the lives of packinghouse workers, whose misfortune had inspired Upton Sinclair to write the book. “I aimed for the public’s heart,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” For the next thirty years, unions battled to gain representation among Chicago’s stockyard and slaughterhouse workers, who were mainly eastern European immigrants. The large meatpacking firms used company spies, blacklists, and African-American strikebreakers to thwart organizing efforts. Nevertheless, most of Chicago’s packinghouse workers had gained union representation by the end of the Depression. After World War II, their wages greatly improved, soon exceeding the national average for workers in manufacturing. Meatpacking was still a backbreaking, dangerous job, but for many it was also a well-paid and desirable one. It provided a stable, middle-class income. Swift & Company, the largest firm in the industry until the early 1960s, was also the last of the big five meatpackers to remain privately controlled. Much like Ken Monfort, Harold Swift ran the company founded by his father with a paternalistic concern for workers. Swift & Company paid the industry’s highest wages, guaranteed long-term job security, worked closely with union officials to address worker grievances, and provided bonuses, pensions, and other benefits.

In 1960 Currier J. Holman and A. D. Anderson, two former Swift executives, decided to start their own meatpacking company, convinced that by slashing costs they could compete with the industry giants. The following year Iowa Beef Packers opened its first slaughterhouse — a meat factory that in its own way proved as influential as the first Speedee Service McDonald’s in San Bernardino. Applying the same labor principles to meatpacking that the McDonald brothers had applied to making hamburgers, Holman and Anderson designed a production system for their slaughterhouse in Denison, Iowa, that eliminated the need for skilled workers. The new IBP plant was a one-story structure with a disassembly line. Each worker stood in one spot along the line, performing the same simple task over and over again, making the same knife cut thousands of times during an eight-hour shift. The gains that meatpacking workers had made since the days of The Jungle stood in the way of IBP’s new system, whose success depended upon access to a cheap and powerless workforce. At the dawn of the fast food era, IBP became a meatpacking company with a fast food mentality, obsessed with throughput, efficiency, centralization, and control. “We’ve tried to take the skill out of every step,” A. D. Anderson later boasted.

In addition to creating a mass production system that employed a de-skilled workforce, IBP put its new slaughterhouses in rural areas close to the feedlots — and far away from the urban strongholds of the nation’s labor unions. The new interstate highway system made it possible to rely upon trucks, instead of railroads, to ship meat. In 1967 IBP opened a large plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, that not only slaughtered cattle but also “fabricated” them into smaller cuts of meat — into primals (chucks, loins, ribs, rounds) and subprimals (such as chuck rolls). Instead of shipping whole sides of beef, IBP shipped these smaller cuts, vacuum-sealed and plastic-wrapped, as “boxed beef.” This new way of marketing beef enabled supermarkets to fire most of their skilled, unionized butchers. It also left IBP with a great deal of leftover bones, blood, and scraps of meat that could be rendered into profitable byproducts such as dog food. IBP soon added “grinders” to its plants, machinery that made hamburger meat in enormous quantities, driving small processors and wholesalers out of business. The company’s low wages and new production techniques transformed the entire beef industry, from the feedlot to the butcher counter.

The IBP revolution was guided by a hard, unsentimental view of the world. Amid a packinghouse culture that valued toughness, Currier J. Holman took pride in being tougher than anyone else. He didn’t like unions and didn’t hesitate to do whatever seemed necessary to break them. IBP should always conduct business, Holman argued, as though it were waging war. When workers at the IBP plant in Dakota City went on strike in 1969, Holman hired scabs to replace them. The striking workers responded by firing a bullet through Holman’s office window, killing a suspected company spy, and bombing the home of IBP’s general counsel. Confronted with a real war, Holman sought assistance from an unusually powerful ally.

In the spring of 1970 Holman and three other top IBP executives held secret meetings in New York City with Moe Steinman, a “labor consultant” who had close ties with La Cosa Nostra. Unionized butchers in New York were blocking the sale of IBP’s boxed beef, out of solidarity with the striking workers and fear for their own jobs. IBP was eager to ship its products to the New York metropolitan area, the nation’s largest market for beef. Moe Steinman offered to help end the butchers’ boycott and in return demanded a five-cent “commission” on every ten pounds of beef that IBP sold in New York. IBP planned to ship hundreds of millions of pounds of beef to New York City every year. Currier J. Holman agreed to pay the mob its five-cent commission, and the leaders of New York’s butcher union promptly withdrew their objections to IBP’s boxed beef. Shipments of IBP meat were soon being unloaded in Manhattan.

After a lengthy investigation of mob involvement in the New York City meat business, Currier J. Holman and IBP were tried and convicted in 1974 for bribing union leaders and meat wholesalers. Judge Burton Roberts fined IBP $7,000, but did not punish Holman with any prison term or fine, noting that bribes were sometimes part of the cost of doing business in New York City. Holman’s links to organized crime, however, extended far beyond the sort of payments that honest New York businessmen were often forced to make. He appointed one of Moe Steinman’s friends to the board of IBP (a man who a decade earlier had been imprisoned for bribing meat inspectors and for selling tainted meat to the U.S. Army) and made Steinman’s son-in-law a group vice president of IBP, head of the company’s processing division (even though the son-in-law, in Judge Roberts’s words, “knew virtually nothing about the meat business”). And Holman forced out four top IBP executives who opposed dealing with organized crime figures. Subsequent investigations by Forbes and the Wall Street Journal cited IBP as a prime example of how a mainstream corporation could be infiltrated by the mob.

The relentless low-cost competition from IBP presented old-line Chicago meatpackers with a stark choice: go west or go out of business. Instead of symbolizing democracy and freedom, going west meant getting cheap labor. One by one, the packinghouses in Chicago closed down, and slaughterhouses were built in rural states hostile toward labor unions. The new meatpacking plants in Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and Nebraska followed IBP’s example, paying wages that were sometimes more than 50 percent lower than what union workers earned in Chicago.

I recently drove through Chicago’s Packingtown with Ruben Ramirez, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Local 100A, the city’s meatpacking union. Ramirez is in his early sixties, but still looks fit enough to work in a packing plant, with broad shoulders, a thick neck, and strong hands. His smoothly shaved head adds to his formidable appearance. When Ramirez arrived at the Chicago stockyards in 1956, cowboys on horseback still herded cattle from their pens to the slaughterhouses. He was seventeen years old at the time and did not speak any English. He’d just come from Guanajuato, Mexico, and found a job at an old processing plant operated by Swift & Company. He was one of the few Mexicans employed there; the other workers were Polish, Lithuanian, and African-American. They looked down at Mexicans, and so Ramirez was not allowed to use a knife or perform any skilled tasks. Supervisors gave him the lowest menial jobs in the plant. He carried heavy boxes and barrels of meat, getting soaked in blood that hardened and froze to his clothing during the winter. After a few years he went to work for a nearby processing company, Glenn & Anderson, where he worked in sanitation. Three years later Ramirez was finally promoted and allowed to cut meat. He saw friends get badly injured on the job, lost the middle finger on his right hand while using a saw, got knocked unconscious when a side of beef fell off a hook and struck him in the head. He married a young woman he met in church, and they later had six children. He woke up at four o’clock in the morning, worked eight hours a day at Glenn & Anderson, then took college courses at night. Life was far from easy, but his salary was good enough to let his wife stay home and look after the kids. All òf their children went to college.

Ruben Ramirez became active in the union, first as a shop steward, then as an executive. He became an American citizen, loved this country, felt grateful for the opportunities it had given him, and took great pride in the accomplishments of his children. In 1993 he became the first Latino to head a local UFCW meatpacking union in the United States. But as Ramirez climbed to the top of Packingtown, the whole thing was crumbling right before his eyes. Any enjoyment of his own success had to be tempered by a hard, cold reality. While listening to Ruben Ramirez’s life story, I looked out the car window at one poignant scene after another, at abandoned warehouses and slaughterhouses, at junkyards, slums, and parking lots where Chicago’s stockyards once stood.

The world’s biggest aggregation of labor and capital in one place has largely disappeared, with bits and pieces of its history lurking amid brick housing projects. The local meatpacking industry that once employed 40,000 people now employs about 2,000. Ninety-five percent of its jobs have moved elsewhere. The last of the Chicago stockyards closed in 1971. Today there’s only one slaughterhouse left in Packingtown, an old hog plant. There’s just a handful of meat processors: firms that make bacon, sausage, hamburger patties, and kosher products. When the large meatpackers departed, the soul of the place fled with them.

We got out of the car at the entrance to the Union Stockyards, built in 1875, a grand archway with two Victorian turrets on either side. Millions of men, horses, and cattle had passed through it over the years. A spot that had for generations been at the center of tumult and loud commotion now was desolate and quiet, except for an occasional car driving past to a nearby industrial park. The sculpted head of a steer gazed down from the center of the arch. Broken glass and an old sneaker lay on the ground beneath it. Weeds grew between the crumbling brick paving stones, and the pale beige surface of the arch was marred with cracks. The place felt like an archeological site, the ruins of a lost American civilization.

bags of money

DURING THE 1970s THE cordial relationship between Monfort executives and workers at the Greeley slaughterhouse came to an end. The underlying source of conflict was straightforward. Monfort wanted to reduce labor costs, but its workers thought that wages should not be cut at a time when the company was earning profits and the nation’s annual inflation rate had reached double digits. In the midst of contract talks with Greeley workers in 1979, who were now represented by the UFCW, Ken Monfort purchased a slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, from Swift & Company. Before handing over the plant, Swift shut it down and fired all of the workers, who also belonged to the UFCW. When Monfort took control of the slaughterhouse a few weeks later, he signed a sweetheart deal with the National Maritime Union — a group that had never before represented meatpacking workers and that quickly agreed to a large pay cut.

In November of 1979 the workers in Greeley went on strike. Monfort refused to meet their demands, and the dispute became ugly. The company began to hire scabs. Ken Monfort received death threats. Eight weeks after going on strike, the workers decided to return to their jobs without a contract, but riot police prevented them from entering the slaughterhouse. When the company allowed workers back into the plant, many of them disobeyed supervisors and committed acts of sabotage. After a few months of industrial anarchy, Monfort closed the Greeley slaughterhouse and fired all its workers. The days of paternalism were over in Greeley. Ken Monfort was no longer a liberal Democrat. He had become a pro-business Republican.

In 1982 the slaughterhouse in Greeley reopened without a union, paying wages that had been cut by 40 percent. Former workers were not offered jobs. Instead Monfort transferred some employees from its Grand Island plant and hired new ones. Although Ken Monfort decided to follow IBP’s tough policy on labor unions, he strongly resisted the increasing consolidation of the meatpacking industry. During the early 1980s one independent meatpacker after another either went out of business or was purchased by a large corporate rival. In 1983, Monfort sued Excel — the nation’s second-largest beef processor — to prevent it from acquiring Spencer Beef, the nation’s third-largest beef processor. Monfort argued that the proposed acquisition would allow Excel to engage in predatory pricing and to reduce competition. A panel of federal judges ruled in favor of Monfort, but Excel appealed their decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. President Reagan’s Justice Department submitted a brief in the case — and argued on behalf of Excel, claiming it had every right to buy a rival company.

The Reagan administration did not oppose the disappearance of hundreds of small meatpacking firms. On the contrary, it opposed using antitrust laws to stop the giant meatpackers. In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the earlier ruling and approved the merger of America’s second- and third-largest meatpacking companies. The following year, Monfort agreed to a friendly takeover by ConAgra. “It seemed to me that if the industry was going to be concentrated,” Ken Monfort explained, “there should be at least three large players instead of just two.” As part of the deal, he became a top executive at the company, head of the ConAgra Red Meat division, and his family received about $270 million in ConAgra stock.

By purchasing Monfort, ConAgra became the biggest meatpacker in the world. Today it is the largest foodservice supplier in North America. In addition to being the number-one producer of french fries (through its Lamb Weston subsidiary), ConAgra is also the nation’s largest sheep and turkey processor, the largest distributor of agricultural chemicals, the second-largest manufacturer of frozen food, the second-largest flour miller, the third-largest chicken and pork processor, as well as a leading seed producer, feed producer, and commodity futures trader. The company sells its food under about one hundred consumer brand names, including Hunt’s, Armour, La Choy, Country Pride, Swiss Miss, Orville Redenbacher’s, Reddi-Wip, Taste O’Sea, Knott’s Berry Farm, Hebrew National, and Healthy Choice. Although few Americans have heard of ConAgra, they are likely to eat at least one of its products every day.

Twenty years ago, ConAgra — a combination of two Latin words whose intended meaning is “partnership with the land” — was an obscure Nebraska company with annual revenues of about $500 million. Last year ConAgra’s revenues exceeded $25 billion. The company’s phenomenal growth over the past two decades was driven by the entrepreneurial spirit of its longtime chief executive, Charles “Mike” Harper. When Harper took over ConAgra in 1974, it was losing money, the market value of its stock was $10 million, and the value of its debt was $156 million. According to the company’s official history, ConAgra Who? (1989), Harper promptly instituted a new corporate philosophy. “Harper told each general manager that he’d been given a bag of money,” the company history explains, “and that at the end of the year he’d be expected to return it — plus a little extra.” He gave each of his top executives a personalized, inspirational plaque. On it was a cartoon of two vultures sitting in a tree. “Patience, my ass,” one vulture says to the other. “I’m gonna go kill somebody.”

The intense pressure to return a bigger bag of money every year has prompted a number of ConAgra employees to break the law. In 1989, ConAgra was found guilty in federal court of having systematically cheated chicken growers in Alabama. During an eight-year period, 45,256 truckloads of full-grown birds were deliberately misweighed at a ConAgra processing plant in the state. ConAgra employees tampered with trucks and scales to make the birds seem lighter. The company was forced to pay $17.2 million in damages for the fraud.

In 1995, ConAgra agreed to pay $13.6 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of having conspired with seven other firms to fix prices in the catfish industry. For more than a decade, ConAgra executives allegedly spoke on the phone to, or met at motels with, their ostensible rivals to set catfish prices nationwide. According to the plaintiffs in the case, ConAgra’s price-fixing scheme gouged independent wholesalers, small retailers, and consumers.

In 1997, ConAgra paid $8.3 million in fines and pleaded guilty in federal court to charges involving wire fraud, the misgrading of crops, and the addition of water to grain. According to the Justice Department, ConAgra cheated farmers in Indiana for at least three years by doctoring samples of their crops, making the grain seem of lower quality in order to pay less for it. After buying the grain at an unfair price, ConAgra employees sprayed water on it and thereby fraudulently increased its weight, then sold it and cheated customers.

the new industrial migrants

HAVING BROKEN THE UNION at the Greeley slaughterhouse, Monfort began to employ a different sort of worker there: recent immigrants, many of them illegals. In the 1980s large numbers of young men and women from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia started traveling to rural Colorado. Meatpacking jobs that had once provided a middle-class American life now offered little more than poverty wages. Instead of a waiting list, the slaughterhouse seemed to acquire a revolving door, as Monfort plowed through new hires to fill the roughly nine hundred jobs. During one eighteen-month period, more than five thousand different people were employed at the Greeley beef plant — an annual turnover rate of about 400 percent. The average worker quit or was fired every three months.

Today, roughly two-thirds of the workers at the beef plant in Greeley cannot speak English. Most of them are Mexican immigrants who live in places like the River Park Mobile Court, a collection of battered old trailers a quarter-mile down the road from the slaughterhouse. They share rooms in old motels, sleeping on mattresses that cover the floor. The basic pay at the slaughterhouse is now $9.25 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, today’s hourly wage is more than a third lower than what Monfort paid forty years ago when the plant opened. Health insurance is now offered to workers after six months on the job; vacation pay, after a year. But most of the workers will never get that vacation. A spokesman for ConAgra recently acknowledged that the turnover rate at the Greeley slaughterhouse is about 80 percent a year. That figure actually represents a decline from the early 1990s.

Mike Coan candidly discussed the whole subject during a 1994 interview with Business Insurance, an industry trade journal. At the time, he was the corporate safety director of ConAgra Red Meat. “There is a 100 percent turnover rate annually,” Coan said, in an article that applauded Monfort’s skill at keeping its insurance costs low. Another ConAgra meat executive agreed with Coan, noting that “turnover in our business is just astronomical.” While Monfort did keep some long-term employees, many slaughterhouse jobs needed to be filled several times every year. “We’re at the bottom of the literacy scale,” Coan added, “…in some plants maybe a third of the people cannot read or write in any language.”

During a federal hearing in the 1980s, Arden Walker, the head of labor relations at IBP for the company’s first two decades, explained some of the advantages of having a high turnover rate:

Far from being a liability, a high turnover rate in the meatpacking industry — as in the fast food industry — also helps maintain a workforce that is harder to unionize and much easier to control.

For more than a century, California agriculture has been dependent on migrant workers, on young men and women from rural villages in Mexico who travel north to pick by hand most of the state’s fruits and vegetables. Migrant workers have long played an important role in the agricultural economy of other states, picking berries in Oregon, apples in Washington, and tomatoes in Florida. Today, the United States, for the first time in its history, has begun to rely on a migrant industrial workforce. Thousands of new migrants now travel north to work in the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants of the High Plains. Some of these new migrants save their earnings, then return home. Some try to establish roots and settle in meatpacking communities. And others wander the country, briefly employed in one state after another, looking for a meatpacking plant that treats its workers well. These migrants come mainly from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many were once farm workers in California, where steady jobs in the fields are now difficult to find. To farm workers who’ve labored outdoors, ten hours a day, for the nation’s lowest wages, meatpacking jobs often sound too good to be true. Picking strawberries in California pays about $5.50 an hour, while cutting meat in a Colorado or Nebraska slaughterhouse can pay almost twice that amount. In many parts of rural Mexico and Guatemala, workers earn about $5 a day.

As in so many other aspects of meatpacking, IBP was a trailblazer in recruiting migrant labor. The company was among the first to recognize that recent immigrants would work for lower wages than American citizens — and would be more reluctant to join unions. To sustain the flow of new workers into IBP slaughterhouses, the company has for years dispatched recruiting teams to poor communities throughout the United States. It has recruited refugees and asylum-seekers from Laos and Bosnia. It has recruited homeless people living at shelters in New York, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. It has hired buses to import these workers from thousands of miles away. IBP now maintains a labor office in Mexico City, runs ads on Mexican radio stations offering jobs in the United States, and operates a bus service from rural Mexico to the heartland of America.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that about one-quarter of all meatpacking workers in Iowa and Nebraska are illegal immigrants. The proportion at some slaughterhouses can be much higher. Spokesmen for IBP and the ConAgra Beef Company adamantly deny that they in any way seek illegal immigrants. “We do not knowingly hire undocumented workers,” an IBP executive told me. “IBP supports INS efforts to enforce the law and do[es] not want to employ people who are not authorized to work in the United States.” Nevertheless, the recruiting efforts of the American meatpacking industry now target some of the most impoverished and most vulnerable groups in the Western Hemisphere. “If they’ve got a pulse,” one meatpacking executive joked to the Omaha World-Herald in 1998, “we’ll take an application.”

The real costs of this migrant industrial workforce are being borne not by the large meatpacking firms, but by the nation’s meatpacking communities. Poor workers without health insurance drive up local medical costs. Drug dealers prey on recent immigrants, and the large, transient population usually brings more crime. At times, the meatpacking firms have been especially brazen in assuming that public funds will cover their routine business costs. In September of 1994, GFI America, Inc. — a leading supplier of frozen hamburger patties to Dairy Queen, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, and the federal school lunch program — needed workers for a plant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It sent recruiters to Eagle Pass, Texas, near the Mexican border, promising steady work and housing. The recruiters hired thirty-nine people, rented a bus, drove the new workers from Texas to Minnesota, and then dropped them off across the street from People Serving People, a homeless shelter in downtown Minneapolis. Because the workers had no money, the shelter agreed to house them. GFI America offered to pay the facility $17 for each worker and to donate some free hamburgers, but the offer was declined. The company’s plan to use a homeless shelter as worker housing soon backfired. Most of the new recruits refused to stay at the shelter; they had been promised rental apartments and now felt tricked and misled. The story was soon picked up by the local media. Advocates for the homeless were especially angry about GFI America’s attempt to misuse the largest homeless shelter in Minneapolis. “Our job is not to provide subsidies to corporations that are importing low-cost labor,” said a county official.

The high turnover rate in meatpacking is driven by the low pay and the poor working conditions. Workers quit one meatpacking job and float from town to town in the High Plains, looking for something better. Moving constantly is hard on their personal lives and their families. Most of these new industrial migrants would gladly stay in one job and settle in one spot, if the wages and the working conditions were good. The nation’s meatpacking firms, on the other hand, have proven themselves to be far less committed to remaining in a particular community. They have successfully pitted one economically depressed region against another, using the threat of plant closures and the promise of future investment to obtain lucrative government subsidies. No longer locally owned, they feel no allegiance to any one place.

In January of 1987, Mike Harper told the newly elected governor of Nebraska, Kay Orr, that ConAgra wanted a number of tax breaks — or would move its headquarters out of Omaha. The company had been based in the state for almost seventy years, and Nebraska’s tax rates were among the lowest in the United States. Nevertheless, a small group of ConAgra executives soon gathered on a Saturday morning at Harper’s house, sat around his kitchen table, and came up with the basis for legislation that rewrote Nebraska’s tax code. The bills, drafted largely by ConAgra, sought to lower the state taxes paid not only by large corporations, but also by wealthy executives. Mike Harper personally stood to gain about $295,000 from the proposed 30 percent reduction in the maximum tax rate on personal income. He was an avid pilot, and the new legislation also provided tax deductions for ConAgra’s corporate jets. A number of state legislators called Harper’s demands “blackmail.” But the legislature granted the tax breaks, afraid that Nebraska might lose one of its largest private employers. Harper later described how easy it would have been for ConAgra to move elsewhere: “Some Friday night, we turn out the lights — click, click, click — back up the trucks and be gone by Monday morning.”

IBP also benefited enormously from the legislation. Its corporate headquarters was located in Dakota City, Nebraska. One study has suggested that after the revision of the state’s tax code every new job that ConAgra and IBP created there was backed by a taxpayer subsidy of between $13,000 and $23,000. Thanks to the 1987 legislation, IBP paid no corporate taxes in Nebraska for the next decade. Its executives paid state income taxes at a maximum rate of 7 percent. Despite all these financial benefits, IBP moved its headquarters out of Nebraska in 1997, relocating in South Dakota, a state with no corporate taxes — and no personal income tax. Robert L. Peterson, the chairman of IBP, said that moving to South Dakota was like giving his employees a 7 percent raise. “The move shows you how ungrateful corporate tax-break beneficiaries are,” Don Weseley, a Nebraska state senator, told the Omaha World-Herald. “They take whatever you give them and then, if there’s a better offer, leave you hanging and move on to the next best deal.”

IBP had been based in Nebraska since 1967. From its inception, the company that started the revolution in meatpacking — by crushing labor unions and championing the ruthless efficiency of the market — has made ample use of government subsidies. In 1960, Currier J. Holman and A. D. Anderson launched Iowa Beef Packers with a $300,000 loan from the federal Small Business Administration.

the sweet smell

THE CHANGES THAT HAVE swept through Greeley, Colorado, have also occurred throughout the High Plains, wherever large meatpacking plants operate. Towns like Garden City, Kansas, Grand Island, Nebraska, and Storm Lake, Iowa, now have their own rural ghettos, drugs, poverty, rootlessness, and crime. Some of the most dramatic changes have occurred in Lexington, Nebraska, a small town about three hours west of Omaha. Lexington looks like the sort of place that Norman Rockwell liked to paint: shade trees, picket fences, modest Victorian homes, comfy chairs on front porches. The appearance is deceiving.

In 1990, IBP opened a slaughterhouse in Lexington. A year later, the town, with a population of roughly seven thousand, had the highest crime rate in the state of Nebraska. Within a decade, the number of serious crimes doubled; the number of Medicaid cases nearly doubled; Lexington became a major distribution center for illegal drugs; gang members appeared in town and committed drive-by shootings; the majority of Lexington’s white inhabitants moved elsewhere; and the proportion of Latino inhabitants increased more than tenfold, climbing to over 50 percent. “Mexington” — as it is now called, affectionately by some, disparagingly by others — is an entirely new kind of American town, one that has been transfigured to meet the needs of a modern slaughterhouse. You would never think, driving past the IBP plant in Lexington, with its colorful children’s playground out front, with Wal-Mart and Burger King across the street, that a single, innocuous-looking building could be responsible for so much sudden change, hardship, and despair.

In Lexington I met a cross-section of IBP workers. I met Guatemalan Indians who spoke no English and barely spoke Spanish, living in a dark basement strewn with garbage and used diapers. I met Mexican farm workers struggling to get used to the long Nebraska winters. I met one IBP worker who’d recently been a housekeeper in Santa Monica and another whose previous job was collecting manure from fields in rural Mexico and selling it as fertilizer. I met hard-working, illiterate, religious people willing to risk injury and endure pain for the benefit of their families.

The smell that permeates Lexington is even worse than the smell of Greeley. “We have three odors,” a Lexington resident told a reporter: “burning hair and blood, that greasy smell, and the odor of rotten eggs.” Hydrogen sulfide is the gas responsible for the rotten egg smell. It rises from slaughterhouse wastewater lagoons, causes respiratory problems and headaches, and at high levels can cause permanent damage to the nervous system. In January of 2000, the Justice Department sued IBP for violations of the Clean Air Act at its Dakota City plant, where as much as a ton of hydrogen sulfide was being released into the air every day. As part of a consent decree, IBP agreed to cover its wastewater lagoons there. “This agreement means that Nebraskans will no longer be forced to inhale IBP’s toxic emissions,” said a Justice Department official. As of this writing, IBP is also preparing to cover its Lexington wastewater lagoons.

On July 7, 1988, IBP held a public forum at a junior high school in Lexington, giving local citizens an opportunity to ask questions about the company’s proposal to build a slaughterhouse there. The transcript of this meeting says a lot about how IBP views the rural communities where it operates. Would there be much turnover among workers at the new IBP plant, someone asked. Once the slaughterhouse was running, an IBP executive replied, it would have a stable workforce. “Ninety percent of our people,” he said, “or 80 percent will be fairly stable.” Would local people be hired for these jobs, someone else asked. “We will not bring in an hourly workforce,” the IBP executive promised. A local IBP booster, who had just returned from a visit to the company’s slaughterhouse in Emporia, Kansas, suggested there was little reason to worry about the “type of people” the plant might attract or the potential for increased crime. He said that in Emporia, apparently, “they work them so hard at IBP that they’re tired and they go home and go to bed.” An IBP executive, a vice president of public relations, confirmed that assessment. “And people who work on our lines work hard,” he told the gathering. “As the chief of police [in Emporia] said, they go home at night and go to bed rather than carouse around town.” Another IBP executive, a vice president of engineering, assured the audience that the new plant in Lexington would not foul the air. No odor would be noticeable, he promised, even “a few feet away” from the plant. In any event, the smell emitted by slaughterhouse lagoons would be “sweet,” not objectionable. And the smell from the slaughterhouse itself, the IBP vice president said, would be “no different than that which you produce in your kitchen when you cook.”

ONE NIGHT I VISIT a slaughterhouse somewhere in the High Plains. The slaughterhouse is one of the nation’s largest. About five thousand head of cattle enter it every day, single file, and leave in a different form. Someone who has access to the plant, who’s upset by its working conditions, offers to give me a tour. The slaughterhouse is an immense building, gray and square, about three stories high, with no windows on the front and no architectural clues to what’s happening inside. My friend gives me a chain-mail apron and gloves, suggesting I try them on. Workers on the line wear about eight pounds of chain mail beneath their white coats, shiny steel armor that covers their hands, wrists, stomach, and back. The chain mail’s designed to protect workers from cutting themselves and from being cut by other workers. But knives somehow manage to get past it. My host hands me some Wellingtons, the kind of knee-high rubber boots that English gentlemen wear in the countryside. “Tuck your pants into the boots,” he says. “We’ll be walking through some blood.”

I put on a hardhat and climb a stairway. The sounds get louder, factory sounds, the noise of power tools and machinery, bursts of compressed air. We start at the end of the line, the fabricating room. Workers call it “fab.” When we step inside, fab seems familiar: steel catwalks, pipes along the walls, a vast room, a maze of conveyer belts. This could be the Lamb Weston plant in Idaho, except hunks of red meat ride the belts instead of french fries. Some machines assemble cardboard boxes, others vacuum-seal subprimals of beef in clear plastic. The workers look extremely busy, but there’s nothing unsettling about this part of the plant. You see meat like this all the time in the back of your local supermarket.

The fab room is cooled to about 40 degrees, and as you head up the line, the feel of the place starts to change. The pieces of meat get bigger. Workers — about half of them women, almost all of them young and Latino — slice meat with long slender knives. They stand at a table that’s chest high, grab meat off a conveyer belt, trim away fat, throw meat back on the belt, toss the scraps onto a conveyer belt above them, and then grab more meat, all in a matter of seconds. I’m now struck by how many workers there are, hundreds of them, pressed close together, constantly moving, slicing. You see hardhats, white coats, flashes of steel. Nobody is smiling or chatting, they’re too busy, anxiously trying not to fall behind. An old man walks past me, pushing a blue plastic barrel filled with scraps. A few workers carve the meat with Whizzards, small electric knives that have spinning round blades. The Whizzards look like the Norelco razors that Santa rides in the TV ads. I notice that a few of the women near me are sweating, even though the place is freezing cold.

Sides of beef suspended from an overhead trolley swing toward a group of men. Each worker has a large knife in one hand and a steel hook in the other. They grab the meat with their hooks and attack it fiercely with their knives. As they hack away, using all their strength, grunting, the place suddenly feels different, primordial. The machinery seems beside the point, and what’s going on before me has been going on for thousands of years — the meat, the hook, the knife, men straining to cut more meat.

On the kill floor, what I see no longer unfolds in a logical manner. It’s one strange image after another. A worker with a power saw slices cattle into halves as though they were two-by-fours, and then the halves swing by me into the cooler. It feels like a slaughterhouse now. Dozens of cattle, stripped of their skins, dangle on chains from their hind legs. My host stops and asks how I feel, if I want to go any further. This is where some people get sick. I feel fine, determined to see the whole process, the world that’s been deliberately hidden. The kill floor is hot and humid. It stinks of manure. Cattle have a body temperature of about 101 degrees, and there are a lot of them in the room. Carcasses swing so fast along the rail that you have to keep an eye on them constantly, dodge them, watch your step, or one will slam you and throw you onto the bloody concrete floor. It happens to workers all the time.

I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him; a stainless steel rack of tongues; Whizzards peeling meat off decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. We wade through blood that’s ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us. As we approach the start of the line, for the first time I hear the steady pop, pop, pop of live animals being stunned.

Now the cattle suspended above me look just like the cattle I’ve seen on ranches for years, but these ones are upside down swinging on hooks. For a moment, the sight seems unreal; there are so many of them, a herd of them, lifeless. And then I see a few hind legs still kicking, a final reflex action, and the reality comes hard and clear.

For eight and a half hours, a worker called a “sticker” does nothing but stand in a river of blood, being drenched in blood, slitting the neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing its carotid artery. He uses a long knife and must hit exactly the right spot to kill the animal humanely. He hits that spot again and again. We walk up a slippery metal stairway and reach a small platform, where the production line begins. A man turns and smiles at me. He wears safety goggles and a hardhat. His face is splattered with gray matter and blood. He is the “knocker,” the man who welcomes cattle to the building. Cattle walk down a narrow chute and pause in front of him, blocked by a gate, and then he shoots them in the head with a captive bolt stunner — a compressed-air gun attached to the ceiling by a long hose — which fires a steel bolt that knocks the cattle unconscious. The animals keep strolling up, oblivious to what comes next, and he stands over them and shoots. For eight and a half hours, he just shoots. As I stand there, he misses a few times and shoots the same animal twice. As soon as the steer falls, a worker grabs one of its hind legs, shackles it to a chain, and the chain lifts the huge animal into the air.

I watch the knocker knock cattle for a couple of minutes. The animals are powerful and imposing one moment and then gone in an instant, suspended from a rail, ready for carving. A steer slips from its chain, falls to the ground, and gets its head caught in one end of a conveyer belt. The production line stops as workers struggle to free the steer, stunned but alive, from the machinery. I’ve seen enough.

I step out of the building into the cool night air and follow the path that leads cattle into the slaughterhouse. They pass me, driven toward the building by workers with long white sticks that seem to glow in the dark. One steer, perhaps sensing instinctively what the other don’t, turns and tries to run. But workers drive him back to join the rest. The cattle lazily walk single-file toward the muffled sounds, pop, pop, pop, coming from the open door.

The path has hairpin turns that prevent cattle from seeing what’s in store and keep them relaxed. As the ramp gently slopes upward, the animals may think they’re headed for another truck, another road trip — and they are, in unexpected ways. The ramp widens as it reaches ground level and then leads to a large cattle pen with wooden fences, a corral that belongs in a meadow, not here. As I walk along the fence, a group of cattle approach me, looking me straight in the eye, like dogs hoping for a treat, and follow me out of some mysterious impulse. I stop and try to absorb the whole scene: the cool breeze, the cattle and their gentle lowing, a cloudless sky, steam rising from the plant in the moonlight. And then I notice that the building does have one window, a small square of light on the second floor. It offers a glimpse of what’s hidden behind this huge blank façade. Through the little window you can see bright red carcasses on hooks, going round and round.

sharp knives

KNOCKER, STICKER, SHACKLER, RUMPER, First Legger, Knuckle Dropper, Navel Boner, Splitter Top/Bottom Butt, Feed Kill Chain — the names of job assignments at a modern slaughterhouse convey some of the brutality inherent in the work. Meatpacking is now the most dangerous job in the United States. The injury rate in a slaughterhouse is about three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory. Every year more than one-quarter of the meatpacking workers in this country — roughly forty thousand men and women — suffer an injury or a work-related illness that requires medical attention beyond first aid. There is strong evidence that these numbers, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, understate the number of meatpacking injuries that occur. Thousands of additional injuries and illnesses most likely go unrecorded.

Despite the use of conveyer belts, forklifts, dehiding machines, and a variety of power tools, most of the work in the nation’s slaughterhouses is still performed by hand. Poultry plants can be largely mechanized, thanks to the breeding of chickens that are uniform in size. The birds in some Tyson factories are killed, plucked, gutted, beheaded, and sliced into cutlets by robots and machines. But cattle still come in all sizes and shapes, varying in weight by hundreds of pounds. The lack of a standardized steer has hindered the mechanization of beef plants. In one crucial respect meatpacking work has changed little in the past hundred years. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, amid an era of extraordinary technological advance, the most important tool in a modern slaughterhouse is a sharp knife.

Lacerations are the most common injuries suffered by meatpackers, who often stab themselves or stab someone working nearby. Tendinitis and cumulative trauma disorders are also quite common. Meatpacking workers routinely develop back problems, shoulder problems, carpal tunnel syndrome, and “trigger finger” (a syndrome in which a finger becomes frozen in a curled position). Indeed, the rate of these cumulative trauma injuries in the meatpacking industry is far higher than the rate in any other American industry. It is roughly thirty-three times higher than the national average in industry. Many slaughterhouse workers make a knife cut every two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight-hour shift. If the knife has become dull, additional pressure is placed on the worker’s tendons, joints, and nerves. A dull knife can cause pain to extend from the cutting hand all the way down the spine.

Workers often bring their knives home and spend at least forty minutes a day keeping the edges smooth, sharp, and sanded, with no pits. One IBP worker, a small Guatemalan woman with graying hair, spoke with me in the cramped kitchen of her mobile home. As a pot of beans cooked on the stove, she sat in a wooden chair, gently rocking, telling the story of her life, of her journey north in search of work, the whole time sharpening big knives in her lap as though she were knitting a sweater.

The “IBP revolution” has been directly responsible for many of the hazards that meatpacking workers now face. One of the leading determinants of the injury rate at a slaughterhouse today is the speed of the disassembly line. The faster it runs, the more likely that workers will get hurt. The old meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 cattle an hour. Twenty years ago, new plants in the High Plains slaughtered about 175 cattle an hour. Today some plants slaughter up to 400 cattle an hour — about half a dozen animals every minute, sent down a single production line, carved by workers desperate not to fall be-hind. While trying to keep up with the flow of meat, workers often neglect to resharpen their knives and thereby place more stress on their bodies. As the pace increases, so does the risk of accidental cuts and stabbings. “I could always tell the line speed,” a former Monfort nurse told me, “by the number of people with lacerations coming into my office.” People usually cut themselves; nevertheless, everyone on the line tries to stay alert. Meatpackers often work within inches of each other, wielding large knives. A simple mistake can cause a serious injury. A former IBP worker told me about boning knives suddenly flying out of hands and ricocheting off of machinery. “They’re very flexible,” she said, “and they’ll spring on you… zwing, and they’re gone.”

Much like french fry factories, beef slaughterhouses often operate at profit margins as low as a few pennies a pound. The three meatpacking giants — ConAgra, IBP, and Excel — try to increase their earnings by maximizing the volume of production at each plant. Once a slaughterhouse is up and running, fully staffed, the profits it will earn are directly related to the speed of the line. A faster pace means higher profits. Market pressures now exert a perverse influence on the management of beef plants: the same factors that make these slaughterhouses relatively inefficient (the lack of mechanization, the reliance on human labor) encourage companies to make them even more dangerous (by speeding up the pace).

The unrelenting pressure of trying to keep up with the line has encouraged widespread methamphetamine use among meatpackers. Workers taking “crank” feel charged and self-confident, ready for anything. Supervisors have been known to sell crank to their workers or to supply it free in return for certain favors, such as working a second shift. Workers who use methamphetamine may feel energized and invincible, but are actually putting themselves at much greater risk of having an accident. For obvious reasons, a modern slaughterhouse is not a safe place to be high.

In the days when labor unions were strong, workers could complain about excessive line speeds and injury rates without fear of getting fired. Today only one-third of IBP’s workers belong to a union. Most of the nonunion workers are recent immigrants; many are illegals; and they are generally employed “at will.” That means they can be fired without warning, for just about any reason. Such an arrangement does not encourage them to lodge complaints. Workers who have traveled a great distance for this job, who have families to support, who are earning ten times more an hour in a meatpacking plant than they could possibly earn back home, are wary about speaking out and losing everything. The line speeds and labor costs at IBP’s nonunion plants now set the standard for the rest of the industry. Every other company must try to produce beef as quickly and cheaply as IBP does; slowing the pace to protect workers can lead to a competitive disadvantage.

Again and again workers told me that they are under tremendous pressure not to report injuries. The annual bonuses of plant foremen and supervisors are often based in part on the injury rate of their workers. Instead of creating a safer workplace, these bonus schemes encourage slaughterhouse managers to make sure that accidents and injuries go unreported. Missing fingers, broken bones, deep lacerations, and amputated limbs are difficult to conceal from authorities. But the dramatic and catastrophic injuries in a slaughterhouse are greatly outnumbered by less visible, though no less debilitating, ailments: torn muscles, slipped disks, pinched nerves.

If a worker agrees not to report an injury, a supervisor will usually shift him or her to an easier job for a while, providing some time to heal. If the injury seems more serious, a Mexican worker is often given the opportunity to return home for a while, to recuperate there, then come back to his or her slaughterhouse job in the United States. Workers who abide by these unwritten rules are treated respectfully; those who disobey are likely to be punished and made an example. As one former IBP worker explained, “They’re trying to deter you, period, from going to the doctor.”

From a purely economic point of view, injured workers are a drag on profits. They are less productive. Getting rid of them makes a good deal of financial sense, especially when new workers are readily available and inexpensive to train. Injured workers are often given some of the most unpleasant tasks in the slaughterhouse. Their hourly wages are cut. And through a wide variety of unsubtle means they are encouraged to quit.

Not all supervisors in a slaughterhouse behave like Simon Legree, shouting at workers, cursing them, belittling their injuries, always pushing them to move faster. But enough supervisors act that way to warrant the comparison. Production supervisors tend to be men in their late twenties and early thirties. Most are Anglos and don’t speak Spanish, although more and more Latinos are being promoted to the job. They earn about $30,000 a year, plus bonuses and benefits. In many rural communities, being a supervisor at a meatpacking plant is one of the best jobs in town. It comes with a fair amount of pressure: a supervisor must meet production goals, keep the number of recorded injuries low, and most importantly, keep the meat flowing down the line without interruption. The job also brings enormous power. Each supervisor is like a little dictator in his or her section of the plant, largely free to boss, fire, berate, or reassign workers. That sort of power can lead to all sorts of abuses, especially when the hourly workers being supervised are women.

Many women told me stories about being fondled and grabbed on the production line, and the behavior of supervisors sets the tone for the other male workers. In February of 1999, a federal jury in Des Moines awarded $2.4 million to a female employee at an IBP slaughterhouse. According to the woman’s testimony, coworkers had “screamed obscenities and rubbed their bodies against hers while supervisors laughed.” Seven months later, Monfort agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of fourteen female workers in Texas. As part of the settlement, the company paid the women $900,000 and vowed to establish formal procedures for handling sexual harassment complaints. In their lawsuit the women alleged that supervisors at a Monfort plant in Cactus, Texas, pressured them for dates and sex, and that male coworkers groped them, kissed them, and used animal parts in a sexually explicit manner.

The sexual relationships between supervisors and “hourlies” are for the most part consensual. Many female workers optimistically regard sex with their supervisor as a way to gain a secure place in American society, a green card, a husband — or at the very least a transfer to an easier job at the plant. Some supervisors become meatpacking Casanovas, engaging in multiple affairs. Sex, drugs, and slaughterhouses may seem an unlikely combination, but as one former Monfort employee told me: “Inside those walls is a different world that obeys different laws.” Late on the second shift, when it’s dark outside, assignations take place in locker rooms, staff rooms, and parked cars, even on the catwalk over the kill floor.

the worst

SOME OF THE MOST dangerous jobs in meatpacking today are performed by the late-night cleaning crews. A large proportion of these workers are illegal immigrants. They are considered “independent contractors,” employed not by the meatpacking firms but by sanitation companies. They earn hourly wages that are about one-third lower than those of regular production employees. And their work is so hard and so horrendous that words seem inadequate to describe it. The men and women who now clean the nation’s slaughterhouses may arguably have the worst job in the United States. “It takes a really dedicated person,” a former member of a cleaning crew told me, “or a really desperate person to get the job done.”

When a sanitation crew arrives at a meatpacking plant, usually around midnight, it faces a mess of monumental proportions. Three to four thousand cattle, each weighing about a thousand pounds, have been slaughtered there that day. The place has to be clean by sunrise. Some of the workers wear water-resistant clothing; most don’t. Their principal cleaning tool is a high-pressure hose that shoots a mixture of water and chlorine heated to about 180 degrees. As the water is sprayed, the plant fills with a thick, heavy fog. Visibility drops to as little as five feet. The conveyer belts and machinery are running. Workers stand on the belts, spraying them, riding them like moving sidewalks, as high as fifteen feet off the ground. Workers climb ladders with hoses and spray the catwalks. They get under tables and conveyer belts, climbing right into the bloody muck, cleaning out grease, fat, manure, leftover scraps of meat.

Glasses and safety goggles fog up. The inside of the plant heats up; temperatures soon exceed 100 degrees. “It’s hot, and it’s foggy, and you can’t see anything,” a former sanitation worker said. The crew members can’t see or hear each other when the machinery’s running. They routinely spray each other with burning hot, chemical-laden water. They are sickened by the fumes. Jesus, a soft-spoken employee of DCS Sanitation Management, Inc., the company that IBP uses in many of its plants, told me that every night on the job he gets terrible headaches. “You feel it in your head,” he said. “You feel it in your stomach, like you want to throw up.” A friend of his vomits whenever they clean the rendering area. Other workers tease the young man as he retches. Jesus says the stench in rendering is so powerful that it won’t wash off; no matter how much soap you use after a shift, the smell comes home with you, seeps from your pores.

One night while Jesus was cleaning, a coworker forgot to turn off a machine, lost two fingers, and went into shock. An ambulance came and took him away, as everyone else continued to clean. He was back at work the following week. “If one hand is no good,” the supervisor told him, “use the other.” Another sanitation worker lost an arm in a machine. Now he folds towels in the locker room. The scariest job, according to Jesus, is cleaning the vents on the roof of the slaughterhouse. The vents become clogged with grease and dried blood. In the winter, when everything gets icy and the winds pick up, Jesus worries that a sudden gust will blow him off the roof into the darkness.

Although official statistics are not kept, the death rate among slaughterhouse sanitation crews is extraordinarily high. They are the ultimate in disposable workers: illegal, illiterate, impoverished, untrained. The nation’s worst job can end in just about the worst way. Sometimes these workers are literally ground up and reduced to nothing.

A brief description of some cleaning-crew accidents over the past decade says more about the work and the danger than any set of statistics. At the Monfort plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, Richard Skala was beheaded by a dehiding machine. Carlos Vincente — an employee of T and G Service Company, a twenty-eight-year-old Guatemalan who’d been in the United States for only a week — was pulled into the cogs of a conveyer belt at an Excel plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and torn apart. Lorenzo Marin, Sr., an employee of DCS Sanitation, fell from the top of a skinning machine while cleaning it with a high-pressure hose, struck his head on the concrete floor of an IBP plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, and died. Another employee of DCS Sanitation, Salvador Hernandez-Gonzalez, had his head crushed by a pork-loin processing machine at an IBP plant in Madison, Nebraska. The same machine had fatally crushed the head of another worker, Ben Barone, a few years earlier. At a National Beef plant in Liberal, Kansas, Homer Stull climbed into a blood-collection tank to clean it, a filthy tank thirty feet high. Stull was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes. Two coworkers climbed into the tank and tried to rescue him. All three men died. Eight years earlier, Henry Wolf had been overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes while cleaning the very same tank; Gary Sanders had tried to rescue him; both men died; and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) later fined National Beef for its negligence. The fine was $480 for each man’s death.

don’t get caught

DURING THE SAME YEARS when the working conditions at America’s meatpacking plants became more dangerous — when line speeds increased and illegal immigrants replaced skilled workers — the federal government greatly reduced the enforcement of health and safety laws. OSHA had long been despised by the nation’s manufacturers, who considered the agency a source of meddlesome regulations and unnecessary red tape. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, OSHA was already underfunded and understaffed: its 1,300 inspectors were responsible for the safety of more than 5 million workplaces across the country. A typical American employer could expect an OSHA inspection about once every eighty years. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration was determined to reduce OSHA’s authority even further, as part of the push for deregulation. The number of OSHA inspectors was eventually cut by 20 percent, and in 1981 the agency adopted a new policy of “voluntary compliance.” Instead of arriving unannounced at a factory and performing an inspection, OSHA employees were required to look at a company’s injury log before setting foot inside the plant. If the records showed an injury rate at the factory lower than the national average for all manufacturers, the OSHA inspector had to turn around and leave at once — without entering the plant, examining its equipment, or talking to any of its workers. These injury logs were kept and maintained by company officials.

For most of the 1980s OSHA’s relationship with the meatpacking industry was far from adversarial. While the number of serious injuries rose, the number of OSHA inspections fell. The death of a worker on the job was punished with a fine of just a few hundred dollars. At a gathering of meat company executives in October of 1987, OSHA’s safety director, Barry White, promised to change federal safety standards that “appear amazingly stupid to you or overburdening or just not useful.” According to an account of the meeting later published in the Chicago Tribune, the safety director at OSHA — the federal official most responsible for protecting the lives of meatpacking workers — acknowledged his own lack of qualification for the job. “I know very well that you know more about safety and health in the meat industry than I do,” White told the executives. “And you know more about safety and health in the meat industry than any single employee at OSHA.”

OSHA’s voluntary compliance policy did indeed reduce the number of recorded injuries in meatpacking plants. It did not, however, reduce the number of people getting hurt. It merely encouraged companies, in the words of a subsequent congressional investigation, “to understate injuries, to falsify records, and to cover up accidents.” At the IBP beef plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, for example, the company kept two sets of injury logs: one of them recording every injury and illness at the slaughterhouse, the other provided to visiting OSHA inspectors and researchers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. During a three-month period in 1985, the first log recorded 1,800 injuries and illnesses at the plant. The OSHA log recorded only 160 — a discrepancy of more than 1,000 percent.

At congressional hearings on meatpacking in 1987, Robert L. Peterson, the chief executive of IBP, denied under oath that two sets of logs were ever kept and called IBP’s safety record “the best of the best.” Congressional investigators later got hold of both logs — and found that the injury rate at its Dakota City plant was as much as one-third higher than the average rate in the meatpacking industry. Congressional investigators also discovered that IBP had altered injury records at its beef plant in Emporia, Kansas. Another leading meatpacking company, John Morrell, was caught lying about injuries at its plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The congressional investigation concluded that these companies had failed to report “serious injuries such as fractures, concussions, major cuts, hernias, some requiring hospitalization, surgery, even amputation.”

Congressman Tom Lantos, whose subcommittee conducted the meatpacking inquiry, called IBP “one of the most irresponsible and reckless corporations in America.” A Labor Department official called the company’s behavior “the worst example of underreporting injuries and illnesses to workers ever encountered in OSHA’s sixteen-year history.” Nevertheless, Robert L. Peterson was never charged with perjury for his misleading testimony before Congress. Investigators argued that it would be difficult to prove “conclusively” that Peterson had “willfully” lied. In 1987 IBP was fined $2.6 million by OSHA for underreporting injuries and later fined an additional $3.1 million for the high rate of cumulative trauma injuries at the Dakota City plant. After the company introduced a new safety program there, the fines were reduced to $975,000 — a sum that might have appeared large at the time, yet represented about one one-hundredth of a percent of IBP’s annual revenues.

Three years after the OSHA fines, a worker named Kevin Wilson injured his back at an IBP slaughterhouse in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Wilson went to see Diane Arndt, a nurse at the plant, who sent him to a doctor selected by the company. Wilson’s injury was not serious, the doctor said, later assigning him to light duty at the plant. Wilson sought a second opinion; the new doctor said that he had a disk injury that required a period of absence from work. When Wilson stopped reporting for light duty, IBP’s corporate security department began to conduct surveillance of his house. Eleven days after Wilson’s new doctor told IBP that back surgery might be required, Diane Arndt called the doctor and said that IBP had obtained a videotape of Wilson engaging in strenuous physical activities at home. The doctor felt deceived, met with Wilson, accused him of being a liar, refused to provide him with any more treatment, and told him to get back to work. Convinced that no such videotape existed and that IBP had fabricated the entire story in order to deny him medical treatment, Kevin Wilson sued the company for slander.

The lawsuit eventually reached the Iowa Supreme Court. In a decision that received little media attention, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s award of $2 million to Wilson and described some of IBP’s unethical practices. The court found that seriously injured workers were required to show up at the IBP plant briefly each day so that the company could avoid reporting “lost workdays” to OSHA. Some workers were compelled to show up for work on the same day as a surgery or the day after an amputation. “IBP’s management was aware of, and participated in, this practice,” the Iowa Supreme Court noted. IBP nurses regularly entered false information into the plant’s computer system, reclassifying injuries so that they didn’t have to be reported to OSHA. Injured workers who proved uncooperative were assigned to jobs “watching gauges in the rendering plant, where they were subjected to an atrocious smell while hog remains were boiled down into fertilizers and blood was drained into tanks.” According to evidence introduced in court, Diane Arndt had a low opinion of the workers whose injuries she was supposed to be treating. The IBP nurse called them “idiots” and “jerks,” telling doctors that “this guy’s a crybaby” and “this guy’s full of shit.” She later admitted that Wilson’s back injury was legitimate. The Iowa Supreme Court concluded that the lies she told in this medical case, as well as in others, had been partly motivated by IBP’s financial incentive program, which gave staff members bonuses and prizes when the number of lost workdays was kept low. The program, in the court’s opinion, was “somewhat disingenuously called ‘the safety award system.’”

IBP’s attitude toward worker safety was hardly unique in the industry, according to Edward Murphy’s testimony before Congress in 1992. Murphy had served as the safety director of the Monfort beef plant in Grand Island. After two workers were killed there in 1991, Monfort fired him. Murphy claimed that he had battled the company for years over safety issues and that Monfort had unfairly made him the scapegoat for its own illegal behavior. The company later paid him an undisclosed sum of money to settle a civil lawsuit over wrongful termination.

Murphy told Congress that during his tenure at the Grand Island plant, Monfort maintained two sets of injury logs, routinely lied to OSHA, and shredded documents requested by OSHA. He wanted Congress to know that the safety lapses at the plant were not accidental. They stemmed directly from Monfort’s corporate philosophy, which Murphy described in these terms: “The first commandment is that only production counts… The employee’s duty is to follow orders. Period. As I was repeatedly told, ‘Do what I tell you, even if it is illegal… Don’t get caught.”’

A lawsuit filed in May of 1998 suggests that little has changed since IBP was caught keeping two sets of injury logs more than a decade ago. Michael D. Ferrell, a former vice president at IBP, contends that the real blame for the high injury rate at the company lies not with the workers, supervisors, nurses, safety directors, or plant managers, but with IBP’s top executives. Ferrell had ample opportunity to observe their decision-making process. Among other duties, he was in charge of the health and safety programs at IBP.

When Ferrell accepted the job in 1991, after many years as an industrial engineer at other firms, he believed that IBP’s desire to improve worker safety was sincere. According to his legal complaint, Ferrell later discovered that IBP’s safety records were routinely falsified and that the company cared more about production than anything else. Ferrell was fired by IBP in 1997, not long after a series of safety problems at a slaughterhouse in Palestine, Texas. The circumstances surrounding his firing are at the heart of the lawsuit. On December 4, 1996, an OSHA inspection of the Palestine plant found a number of serious violations and imposed a fine of $35,125. Less than a week later, a worker named Clarence Dupree lost an arm in a bone-crushing machine. And two days after that, another worker, Willie Morris, was killed by an ammonia gas explosion. Morris’s body lay on the floor for hours, just ten feet from the door, as toxic gas filled the building. Nobody at the plant had been trained to use hazardous-materials gas masks or protective suits; the equipment sat in a locked storage room. Ferrell flew to Texas and toured the plant after the accidents. He thought the facility was in terrible shape — with a cooling system that violated OSHA standards, faulty wiring that threatened to cause a mass electrocution, and safety mechanisms that had deliberately been disabled with magnets. He wanted the slaughterhouse to be shut down immediately, and it was. Two months later, Ferrell lost his job.

In his lawsuit seeking payment for wrongful termination, Ferrell contends that he was fired for giving the order to close the Palestine plant. He claims that IBP had never before shut down a slaughterhouse purely for safety reasons and that Robert L. Peterson was enraged by the decision. IBP disputes this version of events, contending that Ferrell had never fit into IBP’s corporate culture, that he delegated too much authority, and that he had not, in fact, made the decision to shut down the Palestine plant. According to IBP, the decision to shut it was made after a unanimous vote by its top executives.

IBP’s Palestine slaughterhouse reopened in January of 1997. It was shut down again a year later — this time by the USDA. Federal inspectors cited the plant for “inhumane slaughter” and halted production there for one week, an extremely rare penalty imposed for the mistreatment of cattle. In 1999 IBP closed the plant. As of this writing, it sits empty, awaiting a buyer.

the value of an arm

WHEN I FIRST VISITED Greeley in 1997, Javier Ramirez was president of the UFCW, Local 990, the union representing employees at the Monfort beef plant. The National Labor Relations Board had ruled that Monfort committed “numerous, pervasive, and outrageous” violations of labor law after reopening the Greeley beef plant in 1982, discriminating against former union members at hiring time and intimidating new workers during a union election. Former employees who’d been treated unfairly ultimately received a $10.6 million settlement. After a long and arduous organizing drive, workers at the Monfort beef plant voted to join the UFCW in 1992. Javier Ramirez is thirty-one and knows a fair amount about beef. His father is Ruben Ramirez, the Chicago union leader. Javier grew up around slaughterhouses and watched the meatpacking industry abandon his hometown for the High Plains. Instead of finding another line of work, he followed the industry to Colorado, trying to gain better wages and working conditions for the mainly Latino workforce.

The UFCW has given workers in Greeley the ability to challenge unfair dismissals, file grievances against supervisors, and report safety lapses without fear of reprisal. But the union’s power is limited by the plant’s high turnover rate. Every year a new set of workers must be persuaded to support the UFCW. The plant’s revolving door is not conducive to worker solidarity. At the moment some of the most pressing issues for the UFCW are related to the high injury rate at the slaughterhouse. It is a constant struggle not only to prevent workers from getting hurt, but also to gain them proper medical treatment and benefits once they’ve been hurt.

Colorado was one of the first states to pass a workers’ compensation law. The idea behind the legislation, enacted in 1919, was to provide speedy medical care and a steady income to workers injured on the job. Workers’ comp was meant to function much like no-fault insurance. In return for surrendering the right to sue employers for injuries, workers were supposed to receive immediate benefits. Similar workers’ comp plans were adopted throughout the United States. In 1991, Colorado started another trend, becoming one of the first states to impose harsh restrictions on workers’ comp payments. In addition to reducing the benefits afforded to injured employees, Colorado’s new law granted employers the right to choose the physician who’d determine the severity of any work-related ailment. Enormous power over workers’ comp claims was handed to company doctors.

Many other states subsequently followed Colorado’s lead and cut back their workers’ comp benefits. The Colorado bill, promoted as “workers’ comp reform,” was first introduced in the legislature by Tom Norton, the president of the Colorado State Senate and a conservative Republican. Norton represented Greeley, where his wife, Kay, was the vice president of legal and governmental affairs at ConAgra Red Meat.

In most businesses, a high injury rate would prompt insurance companies to demand changes in the workplace. But ConAgra, IBP, and the other large meatpacking firms are self-insured. They are under no pressure from independent underwriters and have a strong incentive to keep workers’ comp payments to a bare minimum. Every penny spent on workers’ comp is one less penny of corporate revenue.

Javier Ramirez began to educate Monfort workers about their legal right to get workers’ comp benefits after an injury at the plant. Many workers don’t realize that such insurance even exists. The workers’ comp claim forms look intimidating, especially to people who don’t speak any English and can’t read any language: Filing a claim, challenging a powerful meatpacking company, and placing faith in the American legal system requires a good deal of courage, especially for a recent immigrant.

When a workers’ comp claim involves an injury that is nearly impossible to refute (such as an on-the-job amputation), the meatpacking companies generally agree to pay. But when injuries are less visible (such as those stemming from cumulative trauma) the meatpackers often prolong the whole workers’ comp process through litigation, insisting upon hearings and filing seemingly endless appeals. Some of the most painful and debilitating injuries are the hardest to prove.

Today it can take years for an injured worker to receive workers’ comp benefits. During that time, he or she must pay medical bills and find a source of income. Many rely on public assistance. The ability of meatpacking firms to delay payment discourages many injured workers from ever filing workers’ comp claims. It leads others to accept a reduced sum of money as part of a negotiated settlement in order to cover medical bills. The system now leaves countless unskilled and uneducated manual workers poorly compensated for injuries that will forever hamper their ability to earn a living. The few who win in court and receive full benefits are hardly set for life. Under Colorado’s new law, the payment for losing an arm is $36,000. An amputated finger gets you anywhere from $2,200 to $4,500, depending on which one is lost. And “serious permanent disfigurement about the head, face, or parts of the body normally exposed to public view” entitles you to a maximum of $2,000.

As workers’ comp benefits have become more difficult to obtain, the threat to workplace safety has grown more serious. During the first two years of the Clinton administration, OSHA seemed like a revitalized agency. It began to draw up the first ergonomics standards for the nation’s manufacturers, aiming to reduce cumulative trauma disorders. The election of 1994, however, marked a turning point. The Republican majority in Congress that rose to power that year not only impeded the adoption of ergonomics standards but also raised questions about the future of OSHA. Working closely with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, House Republicans have worked hard to limit OSHA’s authority. Congressman Cass Ballenger, a Republican from North Carolina, introduced legislation that would require OSHA to spend at least half of its budget on “consultation” with businesses, instead of enforcement. This new budget requirement would further reduce the number of OSHA inspections, which by the late 1990s had already reached an all-time low. Ballenger has long opposed OSHA inspections, despite the fact that near his own district a fire at a poultry plant killed twenty-five workers in 1991. The plant had never been inspected by OSHA, its emergency exits had been chained shut, and the bodies of workers were found in piles near the locked doors. Congressman Joel Hefley, a Colorado Republican whose district includes Colorado Springs, has introduced a bill that makes Ballenger’s seem moderate. Hefley’s “OSHA Reform Act” would essentially repeal the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. It would forbid OSHA from conducting any workplace inspections or imposing any fines.

kenny

DURING MY TRIPS TO meatpacking towns in the High Plains I met dozens of workers who’d been injured. Each of their stories was different, yet somehow familiar, linked by common elements — the same struggle to receive proper medical care, the same fear of speaking out, the same underlying corporate indifference. We are human beings, more than one person told me, but they treat us like animals. The workers I met wanted their stories to be told. They wanted people to know about what is happening right now. A young woman who’d injured her back and her right hand at the Greeley plant said to me, “I want to get on top of a rooftop and scream my lungs out so that somebody will hear.” The voices and faces of these workers are indelibly with me, as is the sight of their hands, the light brown skin crisscrossed with white scars. Although I cannot tell all of their stories, a few need to be mentioned. Like all lives, they can be used as examples or serve as representative types. But ultimately they are unique, individual, impossible to define or replace — the opposite of how this system has treated them.

Raoul was born in Zapoteca, Mexico, and did construction work in Anaheim before moving to Colorado. He speaks no English. After hearing a Monfort ad on a Spanish-language radio station, he applied for a job at the Greeley plant. One day Raoul reached into a processing machine to remove a piece of meat. The machine accidentally went on. Raoul’s arm got stuck, and it took workers twenty minutes to get it out. The machine had to be taken apart. An ambulance brought Raoul to the hospital, where a deep gash in his shoulder was sewn shut. A tendon had been severed. After getting stitches and a strong prescription painkiller, he was driven back to the slaughterhouse and put back on the production line. Bandaged, groggy, and in pain, one arm tied in a sling, Raoul spent the rest of the day wiping blood off cardboard boxes with his good hand.

Renaldo was another Monfort worker who spoke no English, an older man with graying hair. He developed carpal tunnel syndrome while cutting meat. The injury got so bad that sharp pain shot from his hand all the way up to his shoulder. At night it hurt so much he could not fall asleep in bed. Instead he would fall asleep sitting in a chair beside the bed where his wife lay. For three years he slept in that chair every night.

Kenny Dobbins was a Monfort employee for almost sixteen years. He was born in Keokuk, Iowa, had a tough childhood and an abusive stepfather, left home at the age of thirteen, went in and out of various schools, never learned to read, did various odd jobs, and wound up at the Monfort slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska. He started working there in 1979, right after the company bought it from Swift. He was twenty-four. He worked in the shipping department at first, hauling boxes that weighed as much as 120 pounds. Kenny could handle it, though. He was a big man, muscular and six-foot-five, and nothing in his life had ever been easy.

One day Kenny heard someone yell, “Watch out!” then turned around and saw a ninety-pound box falling from an upper level of the shipping department. Kenny caught the box with one arm, but the momentum threw him against a conveyer belt, and the metal rim of the belt pierced his lower back. The company doctor bandaged Kenny’s back and said the pain was just a pulled muscle. Kenny never filed for workers’ comp, stayed home for a few days, then returned to work. He had a wife and three children to support. For the next few months, he was in terrible pain. “It hurt so fucking bad you wouldn’t believe it,” he told me. He saw another doctor, got a second opinion. The new doctor said Kenny had a pair of severely herniated disks. Kenny had back surgery, spent a month in the hospital, got sent to a pain clinic when the operation didn’t work. His marriage broke up amid the stress and financial difficulty. Fourteen months after the injury, Kenny returned to the slaughterhouse. “GIVE UP AFTER BACK SURGERY? NOT KEN DOBBINS!!” a Monfort newsletter proclaimed. “Ken has learned how to handle the rigors of working in a packing plant and is trying to help others do the same. Thanks, Ken, and keep up the good work.”

Kenny felt a strong loyalty to Monfort. He could not read, possessed few skills other than his strength, and the company had still given him a job. When Monfort decided to reopen its Greeley plant with a nonunion workforce, Kenny volunteered to go there and help. He did not think highly of labor unions. His supervisors told him that unions had been responsible for shutting down meatpacking plants all over the country. When the UFCW tried to organize the Greeley slaughterhouse, Kenny became an active and outspoken member of an anti-union group.

At the Grand Island facility, Kenny had been restricted to light duty after his injury. But his supervisor in Greeley said that old restrictions didn’t apply in this new job. Soon Kenny was doing tough, physical labor once again, wielding a knife and grabbing forty- to fifty-pound pieces of beef off a table. When the pain became unbearable, he was transferred to ground beef, then to rendering. According to a former manager at the Greeley plant, Monfort was trying to get rid of Kenny, trying to make his work so unpleasant that he’d quit. Kenny didn’t realize it. “He still believes in his heart that people are honest and good,” the former manager said about Kenny. “And he’s wrong.”

As part of the job in rendering, Kenny sometimes had to climb into gigantic blood tanks and gut bins, reach to the bottom of them with his long arms, and unclog the drains. One day he was unexpectedly called to work over the weekend. There had been a problem with Salmonella contamination. The plant needed to be disinfected, and some of the maintenance workers had refused to do it. In his street clothes, Kenny began cleaning the place, climbing into tanks and spraying a liquid chlorine mix. Chlorine is a hazardous chemical that can be inhaled or absorbed through the skin, causing a litany of health problems. Workers who spray it need to wear protective gloves, safety goggles, a self-contained respirator, and full coveralls. Kenny’s supervisor gave him a paper dust mask to wear, but it quickly dissolved. After eight hours of working with the chlorine in unventilated areas, Kenny went home and fell ill. He was rushed to the hospital and placed in an oxygen tent. His lungs had been burned by the chemicals. His body was covered in blisters. Kenny spent a month in the hospital.

Kenny eventually recovered from the overexposure to chlorine, but it left his chest feeling raw, made him susceptible to colds and sensitive to chemical aromas. He went back to work at the Greeley plant. He had remarried, didn’t know what other kind of work to do, still felt loyal to the company. He was assigned to an early morning shift. He had to drive an old truck from one part of the slaughterhouse complex to another. The truck was filled with leftover scraps of meat. The headlights and the wipers didn’t work. The windshield was filthy and cracked. One cold, dark morning in the middle of winter, Kenny became disoriented while driving. He stopped the truck, opened the door, got out to see where he was — and was struck by a train. It knocked his glasses off, threw him up in the air, and knocked both of his work boots off. The train was moving slowly, or he would’ve been killed. Kenny somehow made it back to the plant, barefoot and bleeding from deep gashes in his back and his face. He spent two weeks at the hospital, then went back to work.

One day, Kenny was in rendering and saw a worker about to stick his head into a pre-breaker machine, a device that uses hundreds of small hammers to pulverize gristle and bone into a fine powder. The worker had just turned the machine off, but Kenny knew the hammers inside were still spinning. It takes fifteen minutes for the machine to shut down completely. Kenny yelled, “Stop!” but the worker didn’t hear him. And so Kenny ran across the room, grabbed the man by the seat of his pants, and pulled him away from the machine an instant before it would have pulverized him. To honor this act of bravery, Monfort gave Kenny an award for “Outstanding Achievement in CONCERN FOR FELLOW WORKERS.” The award was a paper certificate, signed by his supervisor and the plant safety manager.

Kenny later broke his leg stepping into a hole in the slaughterhouse’s concrete floor. On another occasion he shattered an ankle, an injury that required surgery and the insertion of five steel pins. Now Kenny had to wear a metal brace on one leg in order to walk, an elaborate, spring-loaded brace that cost $2,000. Standing for long periods caused him great pain. He was given a job recycling old knives at the plant. Despite his many injuries, the job required him to climb up and down three flights of narrow stairs carrying garbage bags filled with knives. In December of 1995 Kenny felt a sharp pain in his chest while lifting some boxes. He thought it was a heart attack. His union steward took him to see the nurse, who said it was just a pulled muscle and sent Kenny home. He was indeed having a massive heart attack. A friend rushed Kenny to a nearby hospital. A stent was inserted in his heart, and the doctors told Kenny that he was lucky to be alive.

While Kenny Dobbins was recuperating, Monfort fired him. Despite the fact that Kenny had been with the company for almost sixteen years, despite the fact that he was first in seniority at the Greeley plant, that he’d cleaned blood tanks with his bare hands, fought the union, done whatever the company had asked him to do, suffered injuries that would’ve killed weaker men, nobody from Monfort called him with the news. Nobody even bothered to write him. Kenny learned that he’d been fired when his payments to the company health insurance plan kept being returned by the post office. He called Monfort repeatedly to find out what was going on, and a sympathetic clerk in the claims office finally told Kenny that the checks were being returned because he was no longer a Monfort employee. When I asked company spokesmen to comment on the accuracy of Kenny’s story, they would neither confirm nor deny any of the details.

Today Kenny is in poor health. His heart is permanently damaged. His immune system seems shot. His back hurts, his ankle hurts, and every so often he coughs up blood. He is unable to work at any job. His wife, Clara — who’s half-Latina and half-Cheyenne, and looks like a younger sister of Cher’s — was working as a nursing home attendant when Kenny had the heart attack. Amid the stress of his illness, she developed a serious kidney ailment. She is unemployed and recovering from a kidney transplant.

As I sat in the living room of their Greeley home, its walls decorated with paintings of wolves, Denver Broncos memorabilia, and an American flag, Kenny and Clara told me about their financial condition. After almost sixteen years on the job, Kenny did not get any pension from Monfort. The company challenged his workers’ comp claim and finally agreed — three years after the initial filing — to pay him a settlement of $35,000. Fifteen percent of that money went to Kenny’s lawyer, and the rest is long gone. Some months Kenny has to hock things to get money for Clara’s medicine. They have two teenage children and live on Social Security payments. Kenny’s health insurance, which costs more than $600 a month, is about to run out. His anger at Monfort, his feelings of betrayal, are of truly biblical proportions.

“They used me to the point where I had no body parts left to give,” Kenny said, struggling to maintain his composure. “Then they just tossed me into the trash can.” Once strong and powerfully built, he now walks with difficulty, tires easily, and feels useless, as though his life were over. He is forty-six years old.

ON JULY 11, 1997, Lee Harding ordered soft chicken tacos at a Mexican restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado. Harding was twenty-two years old, a manager at Safeway. His wife Stacey was a manager at Wendy’s. They were out to dinner on a Friday night. When the chicken tacos arrived, Harding thought there was something wrong with them. The meat seemed to have gone bad. The tacos tasted slimy and gross. An hour or so after leaving the restaurant, Harding began to experience severe abdominal cramps. It felt like something was eating away at his stomach. He was fit and healthy, stood six-foot-one, weighed two hundred pounds. He’d never felt pain this intense. The cramps got worse, and Harding lay in bed through the night, tightly curled into a ball. He developed bad diarrhea, then bloody diarrhea. He felt like he was dying, but was afraid to go to the hospital. If I’m going to die, he thought, I want to die at home.

The severe pain and diarrhea lasted through the weekend. On Monday evening Harding decided to seek medical attention; the cramps were getting better, but he was still passing a good deal of blood. He waited three hours in the emergency room at St. Mary-Corwin Hospital in Pueblo, gave a stool sample, and then finally saw a doctor. It’s probably just a “summer flu,” the doctor said. Harding was sent home with a prescription for an antibiotic. Tuesday afternoon, he heard a knock at his front door. When Harding opened it, nobody was there. But he found a note on the door from the Pueblo City–County Health Department. It said that his stool sample had tested positive for Escherichia coli 0157:H7, a virulent and potentially lethal foodborne pathogen.

The next morning Harding called Sandra Gallegos, a nurse with the Pueblo Health Department. She asked him to try and remember what foods he’d eaten during the previous five days. Harding mentioned the dinner at the Mexican restaurant and the foul taste of the chicken tacos. He was sure that was where he had gotten food poisoning. Gallegos disagreed. E. coli 0157:H7 was rarely found in chicken. She asked if Harding had consumed any ground beef lately. Harding recalled having eaten a hamburger a couple of days before visiting the Mexican restaurant. But he doubted that the hamburger could have made him ill. Both his wife and his wife’s sister had eaten the same burgers, during a backyard barbecue, and neither had become sick. He and his wife had also eaten burgers from the same box the week before the barbecue without getting sick. They were frozen hamburgers he’d bought at Safeway. He remembered because it was the first time he’d ever bought frozen hamburgers. Gallegos asked if there were any left. Harding said there just might be, checked the freezer, and found the package. It was a red, white, and blue box that said “Hudson Beef Patties.”

A Pueblo health official went to Harding’s house, took the remaining hamburgers, and sent one to a USDA laboratory for analysis. State health officials had noticed a spike in the number of people suffering from E. coli 0157:H7 infections. At the time Colorado was one of only six states with the capability to perform DNA tests on samples of E. coli 0157:H7. The DNA tests showed that at least ten people had been sickened by the same strain of the bug. Investigators were searching for a common link between scattered cases reported in Pueblo, Brighton, Loveland, Grand Junction, and Colorado Springs. On July 28, the USDA lab notified Gallegos that Lee Harding’s hamburger was contaminated with the same strain of E. coli 0157:H7. Here was the common link.

The lot number on Harding’s package said that the frozen patties had been manufactured on June 5 at the Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, Nebraska. The plant seemed an unlikely source for an outbreak of food poisoning. Only two years old, it had been built primarily to supply hamburgers for the Burger King chain. It used state-of–the-art equipment and appeared to be spotlessly clean. But something had gone wrong. A modern factory designed for the mass production of food had instead become a vector for the spread of a deadly disease. The package of hamburger patties in Lee Harding’s freezer and astute investigative work by Colorado health officials soon led to the largest recall of food in the nation’s history. Roughly 35 million pounds of ground beef produced at the Columbus plant were voluntarily recalled by Hudson Foods in August of 1997. Although public health officials did a fine job of tracing the outbreak to its source, the recall proved less successful. By the time it was announced, about 25 million pounds of the ground beef had already been eaten.

an ideal system for new pathogens

EVERY DAY IN THE United States, roughly 200,000 people are sickened by a foodborne disease, 900 are hospitalized, and fourteen die. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year. Most of these cases are never reported to authorities or properly diagnosed. The widespread outbreaks that are detected and identified represent a small fraction of the number that actually occurs. And there is strong evidence not only that the incidence of food-related illness has risen in the past few decades, but also that the lasting health consequences of such illnesses are far more serious than was previously believed. The acute phase of a food poisoning — the initial few days of diarrhea and gastrointestinal upset — in many cases may simply be the most obvious manifestation of an infectious disease. Recent studies have found that many foodborne pathogens can precipitate long-term ailments, such as heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, neurological problems, autoimmune disorders, and kidney damage.

Although the rise in foodborne illnesses has been caused by many complex factors, much of the increase can be attributed to recent changes in how American food is produced. Robert V. Tauxe, head of the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch at the CDC, believes that entirely new kinds of outbreaks are now occurring. A generation ago, the typical outbreak of food poisoning involved a church supper, a family picnic, a wedding reception. Improper food handling or storage would cause a small group of people in one local area to get sick. Such traditional outbreaks still take place. But the nation’s industrialized and centralized system of food processing has created a whole new sort of outbreak, one that can potentially sicken millions of people. Today a cluster of illnesses in one small town may stem from bad potato salad at a school barbecue — or it may be the first sign of an outbreak that extends statewide, nationwide, or even overseas.

Much like the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) responsible for causing AIDS, the E. coli 0157:H7 bacterium is a newly emerged pathogen whose spread has been facilitated by recent social and technological changes. E. coli 0157:H7 was first isolated in 1982; HIV was discovered the following year. People who are infected with HIV can appear healthy for years, while cattle infected with E. coli 0157:H7 show few signs of illness. Although cases of AIDS date back at least to the late 1950s, the disease did not reach epidemic proportions in the United States until increased air travel and sexual promiscuity helped transmit the virus far and wide. E. coli 0157:H7 was most likely responsible for some human illnesses thirty or forty years ago. But the rise of huge feedlots, slaughterhouses, and hamburger grinders seems to have provided the means for this pathogen to become widely dispersed in the nation’s food supply. American meat production has never before been so centralized: thirteen large packinghouses now slaughter most of the beef consumed in the United States. The meatpacking system that arose to supply the nation’s fast food chains — an industry molded to serve their needs, to provide massive amounts of uniform ground beef so that all of McDonald’s hamburgers would taste the same — has proved to be an extremely efficient system for spreading disease.

Although E. coli 0157:H7 has received a good deal of public attention, over the past two decades scientists have discovered more than a dozen other new foodborne pathogens, including Campylobacter jejuni, Cryptosporidium parvum, Cyclospora cayetanensis, Listeria monocytogenes, and Norwalk-like viruses. The CDC estimates that more than three-quarters of the food-related illnesses and deaths in the United States are caused by infectious agents that have not yet been identified. While medical researchers have gained important insights into the links between modern food processing and the spread of dangerous diseases, the nation’s leading agribusiness firms have resolutely opposed any further regulation of their food safety practices. For years the large meatpacking companies have managed to avoid the sort of liability routinely imposed on the manufacturers of most consumer products. Today the U.S. government can demand the nationwide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves. The unusual power of the large meatpacking firms has been sustained by their close ties and sizable donations to Republican members of Congress. It has also been made possible by a widespread lack of awareness about how many Americans suffer from food poisoning every year and how these illnesses actually spread.

The newly recognized foodborne pathogens tend to be carried and shed by apparently healthy animals. Food tainted by these organisms has most likely come in contact with an infected animal’s stomach contents or manure, during slaughter or subsequent processing. A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples taken at processing plants were contaminated with Salmonella, 11.7 percent were contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, 30 percent were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus, and 53.3 percent were contaminated with Clostridium perfringens. All of these pathogens can make people sick; food poisoning caused by Listeria generally requires hospitalization and proves fatal in about one out of every five cases. In the USDA study 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.

the national dish

IN THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century, hamburgers had a bad reputation. According to the historian David Gerard Hogan, the hamburger was considered “a food for the poor,” tainted and unsafe to eat. Restaurants rarely served hamburgers; they were sold at lunch carts parked near factories, at circuses, carnivals, and state fairs. Ground beef, it was widely believed, was made from old, putrid meat heavily laced with chemical preservatives. “The hamburger habit is just about as safe,” one food critic warned, “as getting your meat out of a garbage can.” White Castle, the nation’s first hamburger chain, worked hard in the 1920s to dispel the hamburger’s tawdry image. As Hogan notes in his history of the chain, Selling ’Em by the Sack (1997), the founders of White Castle placed their grills in direct view of customers, claimed that fresh ground beef was delivered twice a day, chose a name with connotations of purity, and even sponsored an experiment at the University of Minnesota in which a medical student lived for thirteen weeks on “nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water.”

The success of White Castle in the East and the Midwest helped to popularize hamburgers and to remove much of their social stigma. The chain did not attract a broad range of people, however. Most of White Castle’s customers were urban, working class, and male. During the 1950s, the rise of drive-ins and fast food restaurants in southern California helped turn the once lowly hamburger into America’s national dish. Ray Kroc’s decision to promote McDonald’s as a restaurant chain for families had a profound impact on the nation’s eating habits. Hamburgers seemed an ideal food for small children — convenient, inexpensive, hand-held, and easy to chew.

Before World War II, pork had been the most popular meat in the United States. Rising incomes, falling cattle prices, the growth of the fast food industry, and the mass appeal of the hamburger later pushed American consumption of beef higher than that of pork. By the early 1990s, beef production was responsible for almost half of the employment in American agriculture, and the annual revenues generated by beef were higher than those of any other agricultural commodity in the United States. The average American ate three hamburgers a week. More than two-thirds of those hamburgers were bought at fast food restaurants. And children between the ages of seven and thirteen ate more hamburgers than anyone else.

In January of 1993, doctors at a hospital in Seattle, Washington, noticed that an unusual number of children were being admitted with bloody diarrhea. Some were suffering from hemolytic uremic syndrome, a previously rare disorder that causes kidney damage. Health officials soon traced the outbreak of food poisoning to undercooked hamburgers served at local Jack in the Box restaurants. Tests of the hamburger patties disclosed the presence of E. coli 0157:H7. Jack in the Box issued an immediate recall of the contaminated ground beef, which had been supplied by the Vons Companies, Inc., in Arcadia, California. Nevertheless, more than seven hundred people in at least four states were sickened by Jack in the Box hamburgers, more than two hundred people were hospitalized, and four died. Most of the victims were children. One of the first to become ill, Lauren Beth Rudolph, ate a hamburger at a San Diego Jack in the Box a week before Christmas. She was admitted to the hospital on Christmas Eve, suffered terrible pain, had three heart attacks, and died in her mother’s arms on December 28, 1992. She was six years old.

The Jack in the Box outbreak received a great deal of attention from the media, alerting the public to the dangers of E. coli 0157:H7. The Jack in the Box chain almost went out of business amid all the bad publicity. But this was not the first outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 linked to fast food hamburgers. In 1982 dozens of children were sickened by contaminated hamburgers sold at McDonald’s restaurants in Oregon and Michigan. McDonald’s quietly cooperated with investigators from the CDC, providing ground beef samples that were tainted with E. coli 0157:H7 — samples that for the first time linked the pathogen to serious illnesses. In public, however, the McDonald’s Corporation denied that its hamburgers had made anyone sick. A spokesman for the chain acknowledged only “the possibility of a statistical association between a small number of diarrhea cases in two small towns and our restaurants.”

In the eight years since the Jack in the Box outbreak, approximately half a million Americans, the majority of them children, have been made ill by E. coli 0157:H7. Thousands have been hospitalized, and hundreds have died.

a bug that kills children

E. coli 0157:H7 is a mutated version of a bacterium found abundantly in the human digestive system. Most E. coli bacteria help us digest food, synthesize vitamins, and guard against dangerous organisms. E. coli 0157:H7, on the other hand, can release a powerful toxin — called a “verotoxin” or a “Shiga toxin” — that attacks the lining of the intestine. Some people who are infected with E. coli 0157:H7 do not become ill. Others suffer mild diarrhea. In most cases, severe abdominal cramps are followed by watery, then bloody, diarrhea that subsides within a week or so. Sometimes the diarrhea is accompanied by vomiting and a low-grade fever.

In about 4 percent of reported E. coli 0157:H7 cases, the Shiga toxins enter the bloodstream, causing hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which can lead to kidney failure, anemia, internal bleeding, and the destruction of vital organs. The Shiga toxins can cause seizures, neurological damage, and strokes. About 5 percent of the children who develop HUS are killed by it. Those who survive are often left with permanent disabilities, such as blindness or brain damage.

Children under the age of five, the elderly, and people with impaired immune systems are the most likely to suffer from illnesses caused by E. coli 0157:H7. The pathogen is now the leading cause of kidney failure among children in the United States. Nancy Donley, the president of Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), an organization devoted to food safety, says it is hard to convey the suffering that E. coli 0157:H7 causes children. Her six-year-old son, Alex, was infected with the bug in July of 1993 after eating a tainted hamburger. His illness began with abdominal cramps that seemed as severe as labor pains. It progressed to diarrhea that filled a hospital toilet with blood. Doctors frantically tried to save Alex’s life, drilling holes in his skull to relieve pressure, inserting tubes in his chest to keep him breathing, as the Shiga toxins destroyed internal organs. “I would have done anything to save my son’s life,” Donley says. “I would have run in front of a bus to save Alex.” Instead, she stood and watched helplessly as he called out for her, terrified and in pain. He became ill on a Tuesday night, the night after his mother’s birthday, and was dead by Sunday afternoon. Toward the end, Alex suffered hallucinations and dementia, no longer recognizing his mother or father. Portions of his brain had been liquefied. “The sheer brutality of his death was horrifying,” Donley says.

As Lee Harding learned, adults in perfect health can be stricken by the pathogen, too. Six months after seemingly recovering from his bout of E. coli 0157:H7 food poisoning, Harding began to urinate blood. He was diagnosed as having a kidney infection, one that he believes was facilitated by residual tissue damage from the Shiga toxins. Although the infection soon passed, Harding still experiences occasional pain three years after eating a Hudson Beef hamburger. Nevertheless, he considers himself lucky.

Antibiotics have proven ineffective in treating illnesses caused by E. coli 0157:H7. Indeed the use of antibiotics may make such illnesses worse by killing off the pathogen and prompting a sudden release of its Shiga toxins. At the moment, little can be done for people with life-threatening E. coli 0157:H7 infections, aside from giving them fluids, blood transfusions, and dialysis.

Efforts to eradicate E. coli 0157:H7 have been complicated by the fact that it is an extraordinarily hearty microbe that is easy to transmit. E. coli 0157:H7 is resistant to acid, salt, and chlorine. It can live in fresh water or seawater. It can live on kitchen countertops for days and in moist environments for weeks. It can withstand freezing. It can survive heat up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. To be infected by most food-borne pathogens, such as Salmonella, you have to consume a fairly large dose — at least a million organisms. An infection with E. coli 0157:H7 can be caused by as few as five organisms. A tiny uncooked particle of hamburger meat can contain enough of the pathogen to kill you.

The heartiness and minute infectious dose of E. coli 0157:H7 allow the pathogen to be spread in many ways. People have been infected by drinking contaminated water, by swimming in a contaminated lake, by playing at a contaminated water park, by crawling on a contaminated carpet. The most common cause of foodborne outbreaks has been the consumption of undercooked ground beef. But E. coli 0157:H7 outbreaks have also been caused by contaminated bean sprouts, salad greens, cantaloupe, salami, raw milk, and unpasteurized apple cider. All of those foods most likely had come in contact with cattle manure, though the pathogen may also be spread by the feces of deer, dogs, horses, and flies.

Person-to-person transmission has been responsible for a significant proportion of E. coli 0157:H7 illnesses. Roughly 10 percent of the people sickened during the Jack in the Box outbreak did not eat a contaminated burger, but were infected by someone who did. E. coli 0157:H7 is shed in the stool, and people infected with the bug, even those showing no outward sign of illness, can easily spread it through poor hygiene. Person-to-person transmission is most likely to occur among family members, at day care centers, and at senior citizen homes. On average, an infected person remains contagious for about two weeks, though in some cases E. coli 0157:H7 has been found in stool samples two to four months after an initial illness.

Some herds of American cattle may have been infected with E. coli 0157:H7 decades ago. But the recent changes in how cattle are raised, slaughtered, and processed have created an ideal means for the pathogen to spread. The problem begins in today’s vast feedlots. A government health official, who prefers not to be named, compared the sanitary conditions in a modern feedlot to those in a crowded European city during the Middle Ages, when people dumped their chamber pots out the window, raw sewage ran in the streets, and epidemics raged. The cattle now packed into feedlots get little exercise and live amid pools of manure. “You shouldn’t eat dirty food and dirty water,” the official told me. “But we still think we can give animals dirty food and dirty water.” Feedlots have become an extremely efficient mechanism for “recirculating the manure,” which is unfortunate, since E. coli 0157:H7 can replicate in cattle troughs and survive in manure for up to ninety days.

Far from their natural habitat, the cattle in feedlots become more prone to all sorts of illnesses. And what they are being fed often contributes to the spread of disease. The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less expensive materials to cattle, especially substances with a high protein content that accelerate growth. About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes — the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle — until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britain suggested that they were responsible for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as “mad cow disease.” Nevertheless, current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle. Americans who spent more than six months in the United Kingdom during the 1980s are now forbidden to donate blood, in order to prevent the spread of BSE’s human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. But cattle blood is still put into the feed given to American cattle. Steven P. Bjerklie, a former editor of the trade journal Meat & Poultry, is appalled by what goes into cattle feed these days. “Goddamn it, these cattle are ruminants,” Bjerklie says. “They’re designed to eat grass and, maybe, grain. I mean, they have four stomachs for a reason — to eat products that have a high cellulose content. They are not designed to eat other animals.”

The waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter, are also being fed to cattle. A study published a few years ago in Preventive Medicine notes that in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994. According to Dr. Neal D. Bernard, who heads the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, chicken manure may contain dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, parasites such as tapeworms and Giardia lamblia, antibiotic residues, arsenic, and heavy metals.

The pathogens from infected cattle are spread not only in feedlots, but also at slaughterhouses and hamburger grinders. The slaughterhouse tasks most likely to contaminate meat are the removal of an animal’s hide and the removal of its digestive system. The hides are now pulled off by machine; if a hide has been inadequately cleaned, chunks of dirt and manure may fall from it onto the meat. Stomachs and intestines are still pulled out of cattle by hand; if the job is not performed carefully, the contents of the digestive system may spill everywhere. The increased speed of today’s production lines makes the task much more difficult. A single worker at a “gut table” may eviscerate sixty cattle an hour. Performing the job properly takes a fair amount of skill. A former IBP “gutter” told me that it took him six months to learn how to pull out the stomach and tie off the intestines without spillage. At best, he could gut two hundred consecutive cattle without spilling anything. Inexperienced gutters spill manure far more often. At the IBP slaughterhouse in Lexington, Nebraska, the hourly spillage rate at the gut table has run as high as 20 percent, with stomach contents splattering one out of five carcasses.

The consequences of a single error are quickly multiplied as hundreds of carcasses quickly move down the line. Knives are supposed to be cleaned and disinfected every few minutes, something that workers in a hurry tend to forget. A contaminated knife spreads germs to everything it touches. The overworked, often illiterate workers in the nation’s slaughterhouses do not always understand the importance of good hygiene. They sometimes forget that this meat will eventually be eaten. They drop meat on the floor and then place it right back on the conveyer belt. They cook bite-sized pieces of meat in their sterilizers, as snacks, thereby rendering the sterilizers ineffective. They are directly exposed to a wide variety of pathogens in the meat, become infected, and inadvertently spread disease.

A recent USDA study found that during the winter about 1 percent of the cattle at feedlots carry E. coli 0157:H7 in their gut. The proportion rises to as much as 50 percent during the summer. Even if you assume that only 1 percent are infected, that means three or four cattle bearing the microbe are eviscerated at a large slaughterhouse every hour. The odds of widespread contamination are raised exponentially when the meat is processed into ground beef. A generation ago, local butchers and wholesalers made hamburger meat out of leftover scraps. Ground beef was distributed locally, and was often made from cattle slaughtered locally. Today large slaughterhouses and grinders dominate the nationwide production of ground beef. A modern processing plant can produce 800,000 pounds of hamburger a day, meat that will be shipped throughout the United States. A single animal infected with E. coli 0157:H7 can contaminate 32,000 pounds of that ground beef.

To make matters worse, the animals used to make about one-quarter of the nation’s ground beef — worn-out dairy cattle — are the animals most likely to be diseased and riddled with antibiotic residues. The stresses of industrial milk production make them even more unhealthy than cattle in a large feedlot. Dairy cattle can live as long as forty years, but are often slaughtered at the age of four, when their milk output starts to decline. McDonald’s relies heavily on dairy cattle for its hamburger supplies, since the animals are relatively inexpensive, yield low-fat meat, and enable the chain to boast that all its beef is raised in the United States. The days when hamburger meat was ground in the back of a butcher shop, out of scraps from one or two sides of beef, are long gone. Like the multiple sex partners that helped spread the AIDS epidemic, the huge admixture of animals in most American ground beef plants has played a crucial role in spreading E. coli 0157:H7. A single fast food hamburger now contains meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle.

all we care to pay

“THIS IS NO FAIRY STORY and no joke,” Upton Sinclair wrote in 1906; “the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one — there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.” Sinclair described a long list of practices in the meatpacking industry that threatened the health of consumers: the routine slaughter of diseased animals, the use of chemicals such as borax and glycerine to disguise the smell of spoiled beef, the deliberate mislabeling of canned meat, the tendency of workers to urinate and defecate on the kill floor. After reading The Jungle President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an independent investigation of Sinclair’s charges. When it confirmed the accuracy of the book, Roosevelt called for legislation requiring mandatory federal inspection of all meat sold through interstate commerce, accurate labeling and dating of canned meat products, and a fee-based regulatory system that made meatpackers pay the cost of cleaning up their own industry.

The powerful magnates of the Beef Trust responded by vilifying Roosevelt and Upton Sinclair, dismissing their accusations, and launching a public relations campaign to persuade the American people that nothing was wrong. “Meat and food products, generally speaking,” J. Ogden Armour claimed in a Saturday Evening Post article, “are handled as carefully and circumspectly in large packing houses as they are in the average home kitchen.” Testifying before Congress, Thomas Wilson, an executive at Morris & Company, said that blame for the occasional sanitary lapse lay not with the policies of industry executives, but with the greed and laziness of slaughterhouse workers. “Men are men,” Wilson contended, “and it is pretty hard to control some of them.” After an angry legislative battle, Congress narrowly passed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, a watered-down version of Roosevelt’s proposals that made taxpayers pay for the new regulations.

The meatpacking industry’s response to The Jungle established a pattern that would be repeated throughout the twentieth century, whenever health concerns were raised about the nation’s beef. The industry has repeatedly denied that problems exist, impugned the motives of its critics, fought vehemently against federal oversight, sought to avoid any responsibility for outbreaks of food poisoning, and worked hard to shift the costs of food safety efforts onto the general public. The industry’s strategy has been driven by a profound antipathy to any government regulation that might lower profits. “There is no limit to the expense that might be put upon us,” the Beef Trust’s Wilson said in 1906, arguing against a federal inspection plan that would have cost meatpackers less than a dime per head of cattle. “[Our] contention is that in all reasonableness and fairness we are paying all we care to pay.”

During the 1980s, as the risks of widespread contamination increased, the meatpacking industry blocked the use of microbial testing in the federal meat inspection program. A panel appointed by the National Academy of Sciences warned in 1985 that the nation’s meat inspection program was hopelessly outdated, still relying on visual and olfactory clues to find disease while dangerous pathogens slipped past undetected. Three years later, another National Academy of Sciences panel warned that the nation’s public health infrastructure was in serious disarray, limiting its ability to track or prevent the spread of newly emerging pathogens. Without additional funding for public health measures, outbreaks and epidemics of new diseases were virtually inevitable. “Who knows what crisis will be next?” said the chairman of the panel.

Nevertheless, the Reagan and Bush administrations cut spending on public health measures and staffed the U.S. Department of Agriculture with officials far more interested in government deregulation than in food safety. The USDA became largely indistinguishable from the industries it was meant to police. President Reagan’s first secretary of agriculture was in the hog business. His second was the president of the American Meat Institute (formerly known as the American Meat Packers Association). And his choice to run the USDA’s Food Marketing and Inspection Service was a vice president of the National Cattleman’s Association. President Bush later appointed the president of the National Cattleman’s Association to the job.

Two months after the threat of deadly new outbreaks was outlined by the National Academy of Sciences, the USDA launched the Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle (SIS-C). The program was designed to reduce the presence of federal inspectors in the nation’s slaughterhouses, allowing company employees to assume most of the food safety tasks. According to the Reagan administration, the Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle would help the USDA shrink its budget and deploy its manpower more efficiently. Freed from the hassles of continuous federal inspection, SIS-C also enabled meatpacking companies to increase their line speeds. Despite the fact that IBP and Morrell had just a year earlier been caught falsifying safety records and keeping two sets of injury logs, the meatpacking industry was given the authority to inspect its own meat. SIS-C was launched in 1988 as a pilot program at five major slaughterhouses that supplied about one-fifth of the beef consumed in the United States. The USDA hoped that within a decade the new system would extend nationwide and that the number of federal meat inspectors would be cut by half.

A 1992 USDA study of the Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle concluded that beef produced under the program was no dirtier than beef produced at slaughterhouses fully staffed by federal inspectors. But the accuracy of that study was thrown into doubt by the revelation that meatpacking firms had sometimes been told in advance when USDA investigators would be arriving at SIS-C slaughterhouses. The Monfort beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, was one of the original participants in the program. According to federal inspectors there, the meat produced under the Streamlined Inspection System “had never been filthier.” At SIS-C slaughterhouses, visibly diseased animals — cattle infected with measles and tapeworms, covered with abscesses — were being slaughtered. Poorly trained company inspectors were allowing the shipment of beef contaminated with fecal material, hair, insects, metal shavings, urine, and vomit.

The Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle was discontinued in 1993, following the Jack in the Box outbreak. Cutbacks in federal inspection seemed difficult to justify, when hundreds of children had been made seriously ill by tainted hamburgers. Although the precise source of E. coli 0157:H7 contamination was never identified, some of the beef used by Jack in the Box came from an SIS-C plant — a Monfort slaughterhouse. The meatpacking industry’s immediate reaction to the outbreak was an attempt to shift the blame elsewhere. As children continued to be hospitalized after eating Jack in the Box hamburgers, J. Patrick Boyle, the head of the American Meat Institute said, “This recent outbreak sheds light on a nationwide problem: inconsistent information about proper cooking temperatures for hamburger.” The meat industry’s allies at the USDA also seemed remarkably laissez-faire, noting that the contaminated hamburger patties had not violated any federal standards. According to Dr. Russell Cross, head of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, “The presence of bacteria in raw meat, including E. coli 0157:H7, although undesirable, is unavoidable, and not cause for condemnation of the product.” Members of the newly elected Clinton administration disagreed. Dr. Cross, a Bush appointee, resigned. On September 29, 1993, his replacement, Michael R. Taylor, announced that E. coli 0157:H7 would henceforth be considered an illegal adulterant, that no ground beef contaminated with it could be sold, and that the USDA would begin random microbial testing to remove it from the nation’s food supply. The American Meat Institute immediately filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent the USDA from testing any ground beef for E. coli 0157:H7. Judge James R. Rowlin, a conservative and a cattleman, dismissed the meatpacking industry’s arguments and allowed the testing to proceed.

a matter of will

WHILE THE MEATPACKING INDUSTRY sought to block implementation of a science-based inspection system, the owner of the Jack in the Box chain, Foodmaker, Inc., struggled to recover from the bad publicity surrounding the outbreak. Robert Nugent, the president of Foodmaker, had waited a week before acknowledging that Jack in the Box bore some responsibility for the illnesses. His first instinct had been to blame the chain’s ground beef supplier and Washington State health officials. He claimed that Jack in the Box had never received a thorough explanation of why hamburgers needed to be fully cooked. Nugent soon recruited Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter’s former press secretary, to help improve the company’s image and hired David M. Theno, a prominent food scientist, to prevent future outbreaks.

Theno had previously helped Foster Farms, a family-owned poultry processor in California, eliminate most of the Salmonella from its birds. He was a strong advocate of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) programs, embracing a food safety philosophy that the National Academy of Sciences had promoted for years. The essence of a HACCP program is prevention; it attempts to combine scientific analysis with common sense. The most vulnerable steps in a food production system are identified and then monitored. Stacks and stacks of records are kept in order to follow what went where. Theno quickly realized after arriving at Jack in the Box that the chain relied upon the safety standards of its suppliers — instead of imposing its own. He created the first HACCP plan in the fast food industry, a “farm-to-fork” policy that scrutinized threats to food safety at every level of production and distribution. Assuring Jack in the Box customers that their food was safe not only seemed the right thing to do, it seemed essential for the chain’s survival. In the years since the Jack in the Box outbreak, David Theno has emerged as a fast food maverick, applauded by consumer groups and considered “the Antichrist,” he says, by many in the meatpacking industry.

Theno insisted that every Jack in the Box manager attend a food safety course, that every refrigerated delivery truck have a record-keeping thermometer mounted inside it, that every kitchen grill be calibrated to ensure an adequate cooking temperature, and that every grill person use tongs to handle hamburger patties instead of bare hands. An almost fanatical devotion to microbial testing, however, became the key to Theno’s food safety program. He discovered that the levels of contamination varied enormously in ground beef supplied by different meatpacking companies. Some slaughterhouses did a fine job; others were adequate; and a few were appalling. The companies that manufactured hamburger patties for Jack in the Box were required to test their beef every fifteen minutes for a wide range of dangerous microbes, including E. coli 0157:H7. Slaughterhouses that continued to ship bad meat were eliminated as suppliers.

Jack in the Box now buys all of its ground beef from two companies: SSI, a subsidiary of the J. R. Simplot Company, and Texas-American, a subsidiary of the family-owned American Food Service Corporation. Theno gave me a tour of the Texas-American plant in Fort Worth that makes hamburger patties for Jack in the Box. We were accompanied by the plant manager, Tim Biela. Much of Biela’s work involved testing things repeatedly and maintaining records of the tests. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” he said more than once. His records contain not only the date and time when a case of hamburger patties was produced, but also which employees worked that shift, which slaughterhouse provided that beef, and which feedlots sent cattle to the slaughterhouse that day. The hamburger patty plant looked new and clean. I saw huge vats of beef scraps — some shipped all the way from Australia — stacked high in a cooler. The beef was dumped from the vats into shiny stainless steel machines. It was ground into fine particles by giant augers, mixed into exact proportions of lean meat and fat, stamped into patties, perforated, frozen, passed through metal detectors and then sealed in plastic wrap. The frozen hamburger patties that came out of the machines looked like little pink waffles.

David Theno would like the meatpacking industry to adopt a system of “performance-based grading.” Slaughterhouses that produced consistently clean meat would received a grade A. Plants that performed moderately well would receive a grade B, and so on. Microbial testing would determine the grades, and the marketplace would reward companies that ranked highest. Plants that earned only a C or a D would have to do better — or stick to making dog food.

Some people in the fast food industry resent the idea that Jack in the Box, which was involved in such a large outbreak of food poisoning, has assumed the mantle of leadership on the issue of food safety. Theno’s support for tough food safety legislation in California made him unpopular with the state’s restaurant association. The meatpacking industry is not fond of him, either. Theno says that the industry’s long-standing resistance to microbial testing is a form of denial. “If you don’t know about a problem,” he explained, “then you don’t have to deal with it.” He thinks that the problem of E. coli 0157:H7 contamination in ground beef can be solved. He has an optimistic faith in the power of science and reason. “If you put in a score-keeping system and profile these meatpacking companies,” Theno says, “you can fix this problem. You can actually fix this problem in six months… This is a matter of will, not technology.” Despite the meatpacking industry’s claims, the solution need not be enormously expensive. The entire Jack in the Box food safety program raises the cost of the chain’s ground beef by about one penny per pound.

a lack of recall

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION’S EFFORTS to implement a tough, science-based food inspection system received an enormous setback when the Republican Party gained control of Congress in November of 1994. Both the meatpacking industry and the fast food industry have been major financial supporters of the Republican Party’s right wing. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, stressing government deregulation and opposition to an increased minimum wage, fit perfectly with the legislative agenda of the large meatpackers and fast food chains. A study of campaign contributions between 1987 and 1996, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, found that Gingrich received more money from the restaurant industry than any other congressman. Among the top twenty-five House recipients of restaurant industry funds, only four were Democrats. The meatpacking industry also directed most of its campaign contributions to conservative Republicans, providing strong support in the Senate to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Orrin Hatch of Utah. Between 1987 and 1996, Phil Gramm, a Republican from Texas, received more money from the meatpacking industry than any other U.S. senator. Gramm is a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and his wife, Wendy Lee, sits on the board of IBP.

The meatpacking industry’s allies in Congress worked hard in the 1990s to thwart modernization of the nation’s meat inspection system. A great deal of effort was spent denying the federal government any authority to recall contaminated meat or impose civil fines on firms that knowingly ship contaminated products. Under current law, the USDA cannot demand a recall. It can only consult with a company that has shipped bad meat and suggest that it withdraw the meat from interstate commerce. In extreme cases, the USDA can remove its inspectors from a slaughterhouse or processing plant, for all intents and purposes shutting down the facility. That step is rarely taken, however — and can be challenged by a meatpacker in federal court. In most cases, the USDA conducts negotiations with a meatpacking company over the timing and the scale of a proposed recall. The company has a strong economic interest in withdrawing as little meat as possible from the market (especially if the meat is difficult to trace) and in limiting publicity about the recall. And every day the USDA and the company spend discussing the subject is one more day in which Americans risk eating contaminated meat.

The Hudson Foods outbreak revealed many of the flaws in the current USDA policies on recall. Officials at Hudson Foods were informed late in July of 1997 that its frozen hamburger patties had infected Lee Harding with E. coli 0157:H7. Because Harding had saved the box, Hudson Foods knew the exact lot number and production code of the tainted meat. The company made no effort to warn the public or to recall the frozen patties for another three weeks, until the USDA found a second box of Hudson Foods patties contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. On August 12 the company announced that it was voluntarily recalling 20,000 pounds of ground beef, an amount determined through negotiations with the USDA. The recall seemed surprisingly small, considering that the Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, Nebraska, could produce as much as 400,000 pounds of ground beef in a single shift — and that tainted patties had been manufactured, according to the product codes on their boxes, on at least three separate days in June. As food safety advocates and reporters began to question the size of the recall, it started to expand, reaching 40,000 pounds on August 13, 1.5 million pounds on August 15, and 25 million pounds on August 21. The recall eventually extended to 35 million pounds of ground beef, most of which had already been eaten.

The USDA had not only been forced to negotiate the Hudson Foods recall, it had to rely on company officials for information about how much meat needed to be recalled. Two of those officials suggested that just a few small lots of ground beef might have been contaminated. In reality, Hudson Foods had for months been using “rework” — ground beef left over from the previous day of production — as part of its routine processing supply. It had shipped hamburger meat potentially contaminated with the same strain of E. coli 0157:H7 from at least May of 1997 until the third week of August, when the company voluntarily agreed to shut the plant. Brent Wolke, the manager of the Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, and Michael Gregory, the company director of customer relations and quality control, were indicted in December of 1998. Federal prosecutors claimed that the pair had deliberately misled USDA inspectors and had falsified company documents to minimize the scale of the recall. Both men were later found innocent.

Once a company has decided voluntarily to pull contaminated meat from the market, it is under no legal obligation to inform the public — or even state health officials — that a recall is taking place. During the Jack in the Box outbreak, health officials in Nevada did not learn from the company that contaminated hamburger patties had been shipped there; they got the news when people noticed trucks pulling up to Jack in the Box restaurants in Las Vegas and removing the meat. Once the investigators realized that tainted ground beef had reached Nevada, a number of cases of severe food poisoning that might otherwise have been wrongly diagnosed were linked to E. coli 0157:H7. In 1994, Wendy’s tried to recall about 250,000 pounds of ground beef without officially notifying state health officials, the USDA, or the public. The meat had been shipped to Wendy’s restaurants in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. When news of the recall leaked, Wendy’s issued a press release claiming that only 8,000 pounds was being withdrawn, because it “had not been fully tested.” The press release failed to mention that some ground beef from the same lot had indeed been tested — and had tested positive for E. coli 0157:H7.

A subsequent investigation by Cox News Service reporters Elliot Jaspin and Scott Montgomery found that the USDA does not inform the public when contaminated meat is recalled from fast food restaurants. “We live in a very litigious society,” Jacque Knight, a USDA spokesman explained; if every meat recall was publicly announced, companies would face problems from “everybody with a stomachache.” Between 1996 and 1999, the USDA didn’t tell the public about more than one-third of the Class I recalls, cases in which consumers faced a serious and potentially lethal threat. The USDA now informs the public about every Class I recall, but will not reveal exactly where contaminated meat is being sold (unless it is being distributed under a brand name at a retail store). State health officials have attacked the USDA policy, arguing that it makes outbreaks much more difficult to trace and puts victims of food poisoning at much greater risk. Someone infected with E. coli 0157:H7, unsure about what has caused his or her symptoms and unaware of a local outbreak, may take over-the-counter medications that make the illness much worse.

Both the USDA and the meatpacking industry argue that details about where a company has distributed its meat must not be revealed in order to protect the firm’s “trade secrets.” In February of 1999, when IBP recalled 10,000 pounds of ground beef laced with small pieces of glass, the company would disclose only that the meat had been shipped to stores in Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Neither IBP, nor the USDA, would provide the names of those stores. “It’s very frustrating for us,” an Indiana health official told a reporter, explaining why the beef containing broken glass could not easily be removed from supermarket shelves. “If they don’t give [the information] to us, there’s not much we can do.”

In addition to letting meatpacking executives determine when to recall ground beef, how much needs to be recalled, and who should be told about it, for years the USDA allowed these companies to help write the agency’s own press releases about the recalls. After the Hudson Foods outbreak, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman ended the policy of submitting USDA recall announcements to meatpacking companies for prior approval. Two years later, however, USDA officials proposed that the agency stop issuing any press releases about meat recalls, leaving that task entirely to the meatpacking industry. That proposal was never adopted. In January of 2000, the USDA decided to announce every meat recall with an official press release; the recalls are also noted on the agency’s Web site. The new policy, however, has not made it any easier to learn where contaminated meat has been sold. “Press releases will not identify the specific recipients of product,” the USDA directive says, “unless the supplier chooses to release the information to the public.”

A recent IBP press release, announcing the recall of more than a quarter of a million pounds of ground beef possibly tainted with E. coli 0157:H7, suggests that the industry’s needs and those of consumers are not always the same. “In an abundance of caution, IBP is conducting this voluntary recall,” the release said on June 23, 2000, implying that the move had been prompted mainly by a spirit of corporate generosity and good will. Hamburger meat potentially contaminated with the lethal pathogen had been shipped to wholesalers, distributors, and grocery stores in twenty-five states. At times, the press release reads more like an advertisement for IBP than an urgent health warning. It devotes more space to a description of the company’s food safety program — with its “Triple Clean” slaughterhouse system and its “approved and accredited laboratories”— than to the details of how IBP managed to distribute nationwide enough suspect meat to make at least a million life-threatening hamburgers. Nowhere does the press release mention, for example, that the E. coli 0157:H7 in IBP’s ground beef was first detected not by one of the firm’s own accredited laboratories, not by employees at the Geneseo, Illinois, IBP plant where the meat was produced, not by USDA inspectors — but by investigators from the Arkansas Department of Health, who found the pathogen in a package of IBP ground beef at Tiger Harry’s restaurant in El Dorado, Arkansas. Thirty-six people who’d recently eaten at Tiger Harry’s had been sickened by E. coli 0157:H7. Despite the discovery of tainted ground beef in the restaurant freezer, the Arkansas Department of Health could not conclusively link IBP meat to the El Dorado E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak. “There have been no illnesses associated with this product,” the company’s press release brashly asserted. IBP’s voluntary recall was issued about six weeks after the ground beef’s production date. By then, almost all of the questionable meat had been eaten.

In the aftermath of the Jack in the Box outbreak, the Clinton administration backed legislation to provide the USDA with the authority to demand meat recalls and impose civil fines on meatpackers. Republicans in Congress failed to enact not only that bill, but also similar legislation introduced in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. The inability of the USDA to seek monetary damages from the meatpacking industry is highly unusual, given the federal government’s power to use fines as a means of regulatory enforcement in the airline, automobile, mining, steel, and toy industries. “We can fine circuses for mistreating elephants,” Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman complained in 1997, “but we can’t fine companies that violate food-safety standards.”

our friend the atom

SURROUNDED BY PARENTS WHOSE children had died after eating hamburgers tainted with E. coli 0157:H7, President Clinton announced in July of 1996 that the USDA would finally adopt a science-based meat inspection system. Under the new regulations, every slaughterhouse and processing plant in the United States would by the end of the decade have to implement a government-approved HACCP plan and submit meat to the USDA for microbial testing. Clinton’s announcement depicted the changes as the most sweeping reform of the federal government’s food safety policies since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. The USDA plan, however, had been significantly watered down during negotiations with the meatpacking industry and Republican members of Congress. The new system would shift many food safety tasks to company employees. The records compiled by those employees — unlike the reports traditionally written by federal inspectors — would not be available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. And meatpacking plants would not be required to test for E. coli 0157:H7, a pathogen whose discovery might lead to immediate condemnation of their meat. Instead, they could test for other bacteria as a broad measure of fecal contamination levels; the results of those tests would not have to be revealed to the government; and meat containing whatever organisms the tests found could still be sold to the public.

Many federal meat inspectors opposed the Clinton administration’s new system, arguing that it greatly diminished their authority to detect and remove contaminated meat. Today the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is demoralized and understaffed. In 1978, before the first known outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7, the USDA had 12,000 meat inspectors; now it has about 7,500. The federal inspectors I interviewed felt under enormous pressure from their USDA superiors not to slow down the line speeds at slaughterhouses. “A lot of us are feeling beaten down,” one inspector told me. Job openings at the service are going unfilled for months. Federal inspectors warn that the new HACCP plans are only as good as the people running them — and that in the wrong hands HACCP stands for Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray. The Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, Nebraska, was operating under a HACCP plan in 1997 when it shipped 35 million pounds of potentially tainted meat.

“We give no serious validity to company-generated records,” a longtime federal inspector told me. “There’s a lot of falsification going on.” His view was confirmed by other inspectors, and by former meatpacking workers who were in charge of quality control. According to Judy, a former “QC” at one of IBP’s largest slaughterhouses, the HACCP plan at her plant was terrific on paper but much less impressive in real life: senior management cared much more about production than food safety. The quality control department was severely understaffed. A single QC had to keep an eye on two production lines simultaneously. “I had to check the sterilizer temperature, I had to check the Cryovac temperature, I had to look at packaging, I had to note the vats — did they have foreign objects in them or not? — I had to keep an eye on workers, so they wouldn’t cheat,” Judy said. “I was overwhelmed with work, it was just impossible to keep up with it all.” She routinely falsified her checklist, as did the other QCs. The HACCP plan would have been “fantastic” if three people had been employed doing her job. There was no way that one person could get all the tasks on the list properly done.

Though the meatpacking industry has fought almost every federal effort to mandate food safety, it has also invested millions of dollars in new equipment to halt the spread of dangerous pathogens. IBP, for example, has installed expensive steam pasteurization cabinets at all of its beef slaughterhouses. Sides of beef enter the new contraption, which blow-dries them, bathes them in 220-degree steam for eight seconds, and then sprays them with cold water. When used properly, steam pasteurization cabinets can kill off most of the E. coli 0157:H7 and reduce the amount of bacteria on the meat’s surface by as much as 90 percent. But an IBP internal corporate memo from 1997 suggests that the company’s large investment in such technologies has been motivated less by a genuine concern for the health and well-being of American consumers than by other considerations.

“We have been informed that carcasses in your plant are occasionally being delayed for extended periods of time on the USDA outrail for final disposition (up to 6 hours),” the IBP memo began. It was sent by the company’s vice president for quality control and food safety to the plant manager at the Lexington, Nebraska, slaughterhouse. It warned that the longer a carcass remains on the outrail, the harder it is to clean. With every passing minute, bacteria grows more firmly attached and difficult to kill. “This delayed carcass deposition,” the memo emphasized, “is of concern and is cause for extraordinary actions regarding such affected carcasses.” When carcasses sat for half an hour on the outrail, supervisors were instructed to find the cause for the delay. When carcasses sat for an hour, supervisors were told to spray the meat with a special acid wash. Carcasses that sat for longer than two hours, that were at highest risk for bacterial contamination, were not to be destroyed, or sent to rendering, or set aside for processing into precooked meats. “Such carcasses,” IBP’s top food safety executive advised, “are to be designated for outside (non-IBP) carcass sale.” The dirtiest meat was to be shipped out and sold for public consumption — but not with an IBP label on it.

Instead of focusing on the primary causes of meat contamination — the feed being given to cattle, the overcrowding at feedlots, the poor sanitation at slaughterhouses, excessive line speeds, poorly trained workers, the lack of stringent government oversight — the meatpacking industry and the USDA are now advocating an exotic technological solution to the problem of foodborne pathogens. They want to irradiate the nation’s meat. Irradiation is a form of bacterial birth control, pioneered in the 1960s by the U.S. Army and by NASA. When microorganisms are zapped with low levels of gamma rays or x-rays, they are not killed, but their DNA is disrupted, and they cannot reproduce. Irradiation has been used for years on some imported spices and domestic poultry. Most irradiating facilities have concrete walls that are six feet thick, employing cobalt 60 or cesium 137 (a waste product from nuclear weapons plants and nuclear power plants) to create highly charged, radioactive beams. A new technique, developed by the Titan Corporation, uses conventional electricity and an electronic accelerator instead of radioactive isotopes. Titan devised its SureBeam irradiation technology during the 1980s, while conducting research for the Star Wars antimissile program.

The American Medical Association and the World Health Organization have declared that irradiated foods are safe to eat. Widespread introduction of the process has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council — whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants — has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking industry is also working hard to get rid of the word “irradiation,” much preferring the phrase “cold pasteurization.”

One slaughterhouse engineer that I interviewed — who has helped to invent some of the most sophisticated food safety equipment now being used — told me that from a purely scientific point of view, irradiation may be safe and effective. But he is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking workforce. “These are not the type of people you want working on that level of equipment,” he says. He also worries that the widespread use of irradiation might encourage meatpackers “to speed up the kill floor and spray shit everywhere.” Steven Bjerklie, the former editor of Meat & Poultry, opposes irradiation on similar grounds. He thinks it will reduce pressure on the meatpacking industry to make fundamental and necessary changes in their production methods, allowing unsanitary practices to continue. “I don’t want to be served irradiated feces along with my meat,” Bjerklie says.

what kids eat

FOR YEARS SOME OF the most questionable ground beef in the United States was purchased by the USDA — and then distributed to school cafeterias throughout the country. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the USDA chose meat suppliers for its National School Lunch Program on the basis of the lowest price, without imposing additional food safety requirements. The cheapest ground beef was not only the most likely to be contaminated with pathogens, but also the most likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristle left behind by Automated Meat Recovery Systems (contraptions that squeeze the last shreds of meat off bones). A 1983 investigation by NBC News said that the Cattle King Packing Company — at the time, the USDA’s largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy’s — routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat. Cattle King’s facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. Rudy “Butch” Stanko, the owner of the company, was later tried and convicted for selling tainted meat to the federal government. He had been convicted just two years earlier on similar charges. That earlier felony conviction had not prevented him from supplying one-quarter of the ground beef served in the USDA school lunch program.

More recently, an eleven-year-old boy became seriously ill in April of 1998 after eating a hamburger at his elementary school in Danielsville, Georgia. Tests of the ground beef, which had been processed by the Bauer Meat Company, confirmed the presence of E. coli 0157:H7. Bauer Meat’s processing plant in Ocala, Florida, was so filthy that on August 12, 1998, the USDA withdrew its inspectors, a highly unusual move. Frank Bauer, the company’s owner, committed suicide the next day. The USDA later declared Bauer’s meat products “unfit for human consumption,” ordering that roughly 6 million pounds be detained. Nearly a third of the meat had already been shipped to school districts in North Carolina and Georgia, U.S. military bases, and prisons. Around the same time, a dozen children in Finley, Washington, were sickened by E. coli 0157:H7. Eleven of them had eaten undercooked beef tacos at their school cafeteria; the twelfth, a two-year-old, was most likely infected by one of the other children. The company that had supplied the USDA with the taco meat — Northern States Beef, a subsidiary of ConAgra — had in the previous eighteen months been cited for 171 “critical” food safety violations at its facilities. A critical violation is one likely to cause serious contamination and to harm consumers. Northern States Beef was also linked to a 1994 outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 in Nebraska that sickened eighteen people. Nevertheless, the USDA continued to do business with the ConAgra subsidiary, buying about 20 million pounds of its meat for use in American schools.

In the summer and fall of 1999, a ground beef plant in Dallas, Texas, owned by Supreme Beef Processors failed a series of USDA tests for Salmonella. The tests showed that as much as 47 percent of the company’s ground beef contained Salmonella — a proportion five times higher than what USDA regulations allow. Every year in the United States food tainted with Salmonella causes about 1.4 million illnesses and 500 deaths. Moreover, high levels of Salmonella in ground beef indicate high levels of fecal contamination. Despite the alarming test results, the USDA continued to purchase thousands of tons of meat from Supreme Beef for distribution in schools. Indeed, Supreme Beef Processors was one of the nation’s largest suppliers to the school meals program, annually providing as much as 45 percent of its ground beef. On November 30, 1999, the USDA finally took action, suspending purchases from Supreme Beef and removing inspectors from the company’s plant, effectively shutting it down.

Supreme Beef responded the next day by suing the USDA in federal court, claiming that Salmonella was a natural organism, not an adulterant. With backing from the National Meat Association, Supreme Beef challenged the legality of the USDA’s science-based testing system and contended that the government had no right to remove inspectors from the plant. A. Joe Fish, a federal judge in Texas, heard Supreme Beef’s arguments and immediately ordered USDA inspectors back into the plant, pending final resolution of the lawsuit. The plant shutdown — the first ever attempted under the USDA’s new science-based system — lasted less than one day. A few weeks later, USDA inspectors detected E. coli 0157:H7 in a sample of meat from the Supreme Beef plant, and the company voluntarily recalled 180,000 pounds of ground beef that had been shipped to eight states. Nevertheless, just six weeks after that recall, the USDA resumed its purchases from Supreme Beef, once again allowing the company to supply ground beef for the nation’s schools.

On May 25, 2000, Judge Fish issued a decision in the Supreme Beef case, ruling that the presence of high levels of Salmonella in the plant’s ground beef was not proof that conditions there were “unsanitary.” Fish endorsed one of Supreme Beef’s central arguments: a ground beef processor should not be held responsible for the bacterial levels of meat that could easily have been tainted with Salmonella at a slaughterhouse. The ruling cast doubt on the USDA’s ability to withdraw inspectors from a plant where tests revealed excessive levels of fecal contamination. Although Supreme Beef portrayed itself in the case as an innocent victim of forces beyond its control, much of the beef used at the plant had come from its own slaughterhouse in Ladonia, Texas. That slaughterhouse had repeatedly failed USDA tests for Salmonella.

Not long after the ruling, Supreme Beef failed another Salmonella test. The USDA moved to terminate its contract with the company and announced tough new rules for processors hoping to supply ground beef to the school lunch program. The rules sought to impose the same sort of food safety requirements that fast food chains demand from their suppliers. Beginning with the 2000–2001 school year, ground beef intended for distribution to schools would be tested for pathogens; meat that failed the tests would be rejected; and “downers” — cattle too old or too sick to walk into a slaughterhouse — could no longer be processed into the ground beef that the USDA buys for children. The meatpacking industry immediately opposed the new rules.

your kitchen sink

DURING THE 1990s, the federal government (which is supposed to ensure food safety) applied standards to the meat it purchased for schools that were much less stringent than the standards applied by the fast food industry (which is responsible for much of the current threat to food safety). Having played a central role in the creation of a meatpacking system that can spread bacterial contamination far and wide, the fast food chains are now able to avoid many of the worst consequences. Much like Jack in the Box, the leading chains have in recent years forced their suppliers to conduct frequent tests for E. coli 0157:H7 and other pathogens. More importantly, the enormous buying power of the fast food giants has given them access to some of the cleanest ground beef. The meatpacking industry is now willing to perform the sort of rigorous testing for fast food chains that it refuses to do for the general public.

Anyone who brings raw ground beef into his or her kitchen today must regard it as a potential biohazard, one that may carry an extremely dangerous microbe, infectious at an extremely low dose. The current high levels of ground beef contamination, combined with the even higher levels of poultry contamination, have led to some bizarre findings. A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, “You’d be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink.”

Although the fast food chains have belatedly made food safety a priority, their production and distribution systems remain vulnerable to newly emerging foodborne pathogens. A virus that carries the gene to produce Shiga toxins is now infecting previously harmless strains of E. coli. Dr. David Acheson, an associate professor of medicine at Tufts University Medical School, believes the spread of that virus is being encouraged by the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cattle feed. In addition to E. coli 0157:H7, approximately sixty to one hundred other mutant E. coli organisms now produce Shiga toxins. Perhaps a third of them cause illnesses in human beings. Among the most dangerous are E. coli 0103, 0111, 026, 0121, and 0145. The standard tests being used to find E. coli 0157:H7 do not detect the presence of these other bugs. The CDC now estimates that roughly 37,000 Americans suffer food poisoning each year from non-0157 strains of E. coli, about 1,000 people are hospitalized, and about 25 die.

No matter how well executed the HACCP plan, no matter how highly automated the grills, no matter how many bursts of gamma radiation are fired at the meat, the safety of the food at any restaurant ultimately depends upon the workers in its kitchen. Dr. Patricia Griffin, one of the CDC’s leading experts on E. coli 0157:H7, believes that food safety classes should be mandatory for fast food workers. “We place our lives in their hands,” she says, “in the same way we entrust our lives to the training of airline pilots.” Griffin worries that a low-paid, unskilled workforce composed of teenagers and recent immigrants may not always be familiar with proper food handling procedures.

Dr. Griffin has good reason to worry. A 1997 undercover investigation by KCBS-TV in Los Angeles videotaped local restaurant workers sneezing into their hands while preparing food, licking salad dressing off their fingers, picking their noses, and flicking their cigarettes into meals about to be served. In May of 2000, three teenage employees at a Burger King in Scottsville, New York, were arrested for putting spit, urine, and cleaning products such as Easy-Off Oven Cleaner and Comet with Bleach into the food. They had allegedly tampered with the Burger King food for eight months, and it was served to thousands of customers, until a fellow employee informed the management.

The teenage fast food workers I met in Colorado Springs, Colorado, told me other horror stories. The safety of the food seemed to be determined more by the personality of the manager on duty than by the written policies of the chain. Many workers would not eat anything at their restaurant unless they’d made it themselves. A Taco Bell employee said that food dropped on the floor was often picked up and served. An Arby’s employee told me that one kitchen worker never washed his hands at work after doing engine repairs on his car. And several employees at the same McDonald’s restaurant in Colorado Springs independently provided details about a cockroach infestation in the milk-shake machine and about armies of mice that urinated and defecated on hamburger rolls left out to thaw in the kitchen every night.

WHENEVER I TOLD SOMEONE in Berlin that I was planning to visit Plauen, I got the same reaction. It didn’t matter whom I told — someone old or young, hip or square, gay, straight, raised in West Germany, raised in the East — there’d always be a laugh, followed by a look of slight amazement. “Plauen?” they’d say. “Why would you ever want to go to Plauen?” The way the name was spoken, the long, drawn-out emphasis on the second syllable, implied that the whole idea was vaguely ridiculous. Located halfway between Munich and Berlin, in a part of Saxony known as the Vogtland, Plauen is a small provincial city surrounded by forests and rolling hills. To Berliners, whose city is the present capital of Germany and perhaps the future capital of Europe, Plauen is a sleepy backwater that sat for decades on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Berliners regard the place in much the same way that New Yorkers view Muncie, Indiana. But I found Plauen fascinating. The countryside around it is lush and green. Some of the old buildings have real charm. The people are open, friendly, unpretentious — and yet somehow cursed.

For decades Plauen has been on the margins of history, far removed from the centers of power; nevertheless, events there have oddly foreshadowed the rise and fall of great social movements. One after another, the leading ideologies of modern Europe — industrialism, fascism, communism, consumerism — have passed through Plauen and left their mark. None has completely triumphed or been completely erased. Bits and pieces of these worldviews still coexist uneasily, cropping up in unexpected places, from the graffiti on the wall of an apartment building to the tone of an offhand remark. There is nothing settled yet, nothing that can be assumed. All sorts of things, good and bad, are still possible. In the heart of the Vogtland, without much notice from the rest of the world, the little city of Plauen has been alternately punished, rewarded, devastated, and transformed by the great unifying systems of the twentieth century, by each new effort to govern all of mankind with a single set of rules. Plauen has been a battlefield for these competing ideologies, with their proudly displayed and archetypal symbols: the smokestack, the swastika, the hammer and sickle, the golden arches.

For centuries, Plauen was a small market town where Vogtland farmers came to buy and sell goods. And then, at the end of the nineteenth century, a local weaving tradition gave birth to a vibrant textile industry. Between 1890 and 1914, the city’s population roughly tripled, reaching 118,000 on the eve of World War I. Its new textile mills specialized in lace and in embroidered fabrics, exporting most of their output to the United States. The doilies on dinner tables throughout the American Midwest came from Plauen, as well as the intricate lace-work that set the tone of many upper-middle-class Victorian homes. Black-and-white postcards from Plauen before the Great War show lovely Art Nouveau and Neo-Romantic buildings that evoke the streets of Paris, elegant cafés and parks, electric streetcars, zeppelins in the air.

Life in Plauen became less idyllic after Germany’s defeat. When the Victorian world and its values collapsed, so did the market for lace. Many of Plauen’s textile mills closed, and thousands of people were thrown out of work. The social unrest that later engulfed the rest of Germany came early to Plauen. In the 1920s Plauen had the most millionaires per capita in Germany — and the most suicides. It also had the highest unemployment rate. Amid the misery, extremism thrived. Plauen was the first city outside of Bavaria to organize its own chapter of the Nazi party. In May of 1923, the Hitler Youth movement was launched in Plauen, and the following year, the little city became the Nazi headquarters for Saxony. Long before the Nazi reign of terror began elsewhere, union leaders and leftists were murdered in Plauen. Hitler visited the city on several occasions, receiving an enthusiastic welcome. Hermann Goring and Joseph Goebbels visited too, and Plauen became a sentimental favorite of the Nazi leadership. On the night of November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, a crowd eagerly destroyed Plauen’s only synagogue, a strikingly modern building designed by Bauhaus architect Fritz Landauer. Not long afterward, Plauen officially became Jüden-frei (Jew-free).

For most of World War II, Plauen remained strangely quiet and peaceful, an oasis of ordinary life. It provided safe haven to thou-sands of German refugees fleeing bombed-out cities. All sorts of rumors tried to explain why Plauen was being spared, while other towns in Saxony were being destroyed. On September 19, 1944, American bombers appeared over the city for the first time. Instead of rushing into shelters, people stood in the streets, amazed, watching bombs fall on the railway station and on a factory that built tanks for the German army. A few months later, Plauen appeared alongside Dresden on an Allied bombing list.

Plauen was largely deserted on April 10, 1945, when hundreds of British Lancaster bombers appeared over the city. Its inhabitants no longer felt mysteriously protected; they knew that Dresden had recently been fire-bombed into oblivion. During a single raid the Royal Air Force dropped 2,000 tons of high explosives on Plauen. Four days later, the U.S. Army occupied what was left of the town. The birthplace of the Hitler Youth, the most Nazified city in Saxony, gained another distinction only weeks before the war ended. More bombs were dropped on Plauen, per square mile, than on any other city in eastern Germany — roughly three times as many as were dropped on Dresden. Although the carnage was far worse in Dresden, a larger proportion of Plauen’s buildings was destroyed. At the end of the war, about 75 percent of Plauen lay in ruins.

When the Allies divided their spheres of influence in Germany, Plauen’s misfortune continued. The U.S. Army pulled out of the city and the Soviet army rolled in. Plauen became part of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), but just barely. The new border with West Germany was only nine miles away. Plauen languished under Communist rule. It lost one-third of its prewar population. Sitting in a remote corner of the GDR, it received little attention or investment from the Communist party leadership in East Berlin. Much of Plauen was never rebuilt; parking lots and empty lots occupied land where ornate buildings had once stood. One of the few successful factories, a synthetic wool plant, blanketed Plauen in some of East Germany’s worst air pollution. According to historian John Connelly, the polluted air helped give the city an “unusually low quality of life, even for GDR standards.”

On October 7, 1989, the first mass demonstration against East Germany’s Communist rulers took place in Plauen. Small, scattered protests also occurred that day in Magdeberg, East Berlin, and other cities. The size of Plauen’s demonstration set it apart. More than one-quarter of the city’s population suddenly took to the streets. The level of unrest greatly surprised local government officials. The Stasi (East Germany’s secret police) had expected about four hundred people to appear in the town center that day, the fortieth anniversary of the GDR’s founding. Instead, about twenty thousand people began to gather, despite dark skies and a steady drizzle. The demonstration had no leadership, no organizers, no formal plan of action. It grew spontaneously, spreading through word of mouth.

The protesters in other East German cities were mainly college students and members of the intelligentsia; in Plauen they were factory workers and ordinary citizens. Some of the demonstration’s most fervent supporters were long-haired, working-class fans of American heavy metal music, known in Plauen as die Heavies, who rode their motorcycles through town distributing antigovernment pamphlets. As the crowd grew, people began to chant Mikhail Gorbachev’s nickname — “Gorby! Gorby!” — cheering the Soviet leader’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, demanding similar reforms in East Germany, defiantly yelling “Stasi go home!” One large banner bore the words of the German poet Friedrich von Schiller. “We want freedom,” it said, “like the freedom enjoyed by our forefathers.”

Police officers and Stasi agents tried to break up the demonstration, arresting dozens of people, firing water cannons at the crowd, flying helicopters low over the rooftops of Plauen. But the protesters refused to disperse. They marched to the town hall and called for the mayor to come outside and address their demands. Thomas Küttler, the superintendent of Plauen’s Lutheran church, volunteered to act as a mediator. Inside the town hall, he found Plauen’s high-ranking officials cowering in fear. None would emerge to face the crowd. The equation of power had fundamentally changed that day. A mighty totalitarian system of rule, erected over the course of four decades, propped up by tanks and guns and thousands of Stasi informers, was crumbling before his eyes, as its rulers nervously chain-smoked in the safety of their offices. The mayor finally agreed to address the crowd, but a Stasi official prevented him from leaving the building. And so Küttler stood on the steps of the town hall with a megaphone, urging the soldiers not to fire their weapons and telling the demonstrators that their point had been made, now it was time to go home. As bells atop the Lutheran church rang, the crowd began to disperse.

A month later, the Berlin Wall fell. And a few months after that extraordinary event, marking the end of the Cold War, the McDonald’s Corporation announced plans to open its first restaurant in East Germany. The news provoked a last gasp of collectivism from Ernst Doerfler, a prominent member of the doomed East German parliament, who called for an official ban on “McDonald’s and similar abnormal garbage-makers.” McDonald’s, however, would not be deterred; Burger King had already opened a mobile hamburger cart in Dresden. During the summer of 1990, construction quickly began on the first McDonald’s in East Germany. It would occupy an abandoned lot in the center of Plauen, a block away from the steps of the town hall. The McDonald’s would be the first new building erected in Plauen since the coming of a new Germany.

uncle mcdonald

AS THE FAST FOOD industry has grown more competitive in the United States, the major chains have looked to overseas markets for their future growth. The McDonald’s Corporation recently used a new phrase to describe its hopes for foreign conquest: “global realization.” A decade ago, McDonald’s had about three thousand restaurants outside the United States; today it has about seventeen thousand restaurants in more than 120 foreign countries. It currently opens about five new restaurants every day, and at least four of them are overseas. Within the next decade, Jack Greenberg, the company’s chief executive, hopes to double the number of McDonald’s. The chain earns the majority of its profits outside the United States, as does KFC. McDonald’s now ranks as the most widely recognized brand in the world, more familiar than Coca-Cola. The values, tastes, and industrial practices of the American fast food industry are being exported to every corner of the globe, helping to create a homogenized international culture that sociologist Benjamin R. Barber has labeled “McWorld.”

The fast food chains have become totems of Western economic development. They are often the first multinationals to arrive when a country has opened its markets, serving as the avant-garde of American franchising. Fifteen years ago, when McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Turkey, no other foreign franchisor did business there. Turkey now has hundreds of franchise outlets, including 7-Eleven, Nutra Slim, Re/Max Real Estate, Mail Boxes Etc., and Ziebart Tidy Car. Support for the growth of franchising has even become part of American foreign policy. The U.S. State Department now publishes detailed studies of overseas franchise opportunities and runs a Gold Key Program at many of its embassies to help American franchisors find overseas partners.

The anthropologist Yunxiang Yan has noted that in the eyes of Beijing consumers, McDonald’s represents “Americana and the promise of modernization.” Thousands of people waited patiently for hours to eat at the city’s first McDonald’s in 1992. Two years later, when a McDonald’s opened in Kuwait, the line of cars waiting at the drive-through window extended for seven miles. Around the same time, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Saudi Arabia’s holy city of Mecca set new sales records for the chain, earning $200,000 in a single week during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In Brazil, McDonald’s has become the nation’s largest private employer. The fast food chains are now imperial fiefdoms, sending their emissaries far and wide. Classes at McDonald’s Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Illinois, are taught in more than two dozen languages. Few places on earth seem too distant or too remote for the golden arches. In 1986, the Tahiti Tourism Promotion Board ran an ad campaign featuring pristine beaches and the slogan “Sorry, No McDonald’s.” A decade later, one opened in Papeete, the Tahitian capital, bringing hamburgers and fries to a spot thousands of miles, across the Pacific, from the nearest cattle ranches or potato fields.

As the fast food chains have moved overseas, they have been accompanied by their major suppliers. In order to diminish fears of American imperialism, the chains try to purchase as much food as possible in the countries where they operate. Instead of importing food, they import entire systems of agricultural production. Seven years before McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in India, the company began to establish a supply network there, teaching Indian farmers how to grow iceburg lettuce with seeds specially developed for the nation’s climate. “A McDonald’s restaurant is just the window of a much larger system comprising an extensive food-chain, running right up to the farms,” one of the company’s Indian partners told a foreign journalist.

In 1987, ConAgra took over Australia Meat Holdings, the largest beef company in the country that exports more beef than any other in the world. Over the past decade, Cargill and IBP have gained control of the beef industry in Canada. Cargill has established large-scale poultry operations in China and Thailand. Tyson Foods is planning to build chicken-processing plants in China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. ConAgra’s Lamb Weston division now manufactures frozen french fries in Holland, India, and Turkey. McCain, the world’s biggest french fry producer, operates fifty processing plants scattered across four continents. In order to supply McDonald’s, J. R. Simplot began to grow Russet Burbank potatoes in China, opening that nation’s first french fry factory in 1993. A few years ago Simplot bought eleven processing plants in Australia, aiming to increase sales in the East Asian market. He also purchased a 3-million-acre ranch in Australia, where he hopes to run cattle, raise vegetables, and grow potatoes. “It’s a great little country,” Simplot says, “and there’s nobody in it.”

As in the United States, the fast food companies have targeted their foreign advertising and promotion at a group of consumers with the fewest attachments to tradition: young children. “Kids are the same regarding the issues that affect the all-important stages of their development,” a top executive at the Gepetto Group told the audience at a recent KidPower conference, “and they apply to any kid in Berlin, Beijing, or Brooklyn.” The KidPower conference, attended by marketing executives from Burger King and Nickelodeon, among others, was held at the Disneyland outside of Paris. In Australia, where the number of fast food restaurants roughly tripled during the 1990s, a survey found that half of the nation’s nine- and ten-year-olds thought that Ronald McDonald knew what kids should eat. At a primary school in Beijing, Yunxiang Yan found that all of the children recognized an image of Ronald McDonald. The children told Yan they liked “Uncle McDonald” because he was “funny, gentle, kind, and… he understood children’s hearts.” Coca-Cola is now the favorite drink among Chinese children, and McDonald’s serves their favorite food. Simply eating at a McDonald’s in Beijing seems to elevate a person’s social status. The idea that you are what you eat has been enthusiastically promoted for years by Den Fujita, the eccentric billionaire who brought McDonald’s to Japan three decades ago. “If we eat McDonald’s hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years,” Fujita once promised his countrymen, “we will become taller, our skin will become white, and our hair will be blonde.”

The impact of fast food is readily apparent in Germany, which has become one of McDonald’s most profitable overseas markets. Germany is not only the largest country in Europe, but also the most Americanized. Although the four Allied powers occupied it after World War II, the Americans exerted the greatest lasting influence, perhaps because their nationalism was so inclusive, and their nation so distant. Children in West German schools were required to study English, facilitating the spread of American pop culture. Young people who sought to distance themselves from the wartime behavior of their parents found escape in American movies, music, and novels. “For a child growing up in the turmoil of [postwar] Berlin… the Americans were angels,” Christa Maerker, a Berlin filmmaker, wrote in an essay on postwar Germany’s infatuation with the United States. “Anything from them was bigger and more wonderful than anything that preceded it.”

The United States and Germany fought against each other twice in the twentieth century, but the enmity between them has often seemed less visceral than other national rivalries. The recent takeover of prominent American corporations — such as Chrysler, Random House, and RCA Records — by German companies provoked none of the public anger that was unleashed when Japanese firms bought much less significant American assets in the 1980s. Despite America’s long-standing “special relationship” with Great Britain, the underlying cultural ties between the United States and Germany, though less obvious, are equally strong. Americans with German ancestors far outnumber those with English ancestors. Moreover, during the past century both American culture and German culture have shown an unusually strong passion for science, technology, engineering, empiricism, social order, and efficiency. The electronic paper-towel dispenser that I saw in a Munich men’s room is the spiritual kin of the gas-powered ketchup dispensers at the McDonald’s in Colorado Springs.

The traditional German restaurant — serving schnitzel, bratwurst, knackwurst, sauerbraten, and large quantities of beer — is rapidly disappearing in Germany. Such establishments now account for less than one-third of the German foodservice market. Their high labor costs have for the most part been responsible for their demise, along with the declining popularity of schnitzel. McDonald’s Deutschland, Inc., is by far the biggest restaurant company in Germany today, more than twice as large as the nearest competitor. It opened the first German McDonald’s in 1971; at the beginning of the 1990s it had four hundred restaurants, and now it has more than a thousand. The company’s main dish happens to be named after Hamburg, a German city where ground-beef steaks were popular in the early nineteenth century. The hamburger was born when Americans added the bun. McDonald’s Deutschland uses German potatoes for its fries and Bavarian dairy cows for its burgers. It sends Ronald McDonald into hospitals and schools. It puts new McDonald’s restaurants in gas stations, railway stations, and airports. It battles labor unions and — according to Siegfried Pater, author of Zum Beispiel McDonald’s — has repeatedly fired union sympathizers. The success of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and T.G.I. Fridays in Germany has helped spark a franchising boom. Since 1992, the number of franchised outlets there has doubled, and about five thousand more are being added every year. In August of 1999, McDonald’s Deutschland announced that it would be putting restaurants in Germany’s new Wal-Mart stores. “The partnership scheme will undoubtedly be a success,” a German financial analyst told London’s Evening Standard. “The kiddie factor alone — children urging their parents to shop at Wal-Mart because they have a McDonald’s inside the store — could generate an upsurge in customers.”

The golden arches have become so commonplace in Germany that they seem almost invisible. You don’t notice them unless you’re looking for them, or feeling hungry. One German McDonald’s, however, stands out from the rest. It sits on a nondescript street in a new shopping complex not far from Dachau, the first concentration camp opened by the Nazis. The stores were built on fields where Dachau’s inmates once did forced labor. Although the architecture of the shopping complex looks German and futuristic, the haphazard placement of the buildings on the land seems distinctively American. They would not seem out of place near an off-ramp of I-25 in Colorado. Across the street from the McDonald’s there’s a discount supermarket. An auto parts store stands a few hundred yards from the other buildings, separated by fields that have not yet vanished beneath concrete. In 1997, protests were staged against the opening of a McDonald’s so close to a concentration camp where gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, and political opponents of the Nazis were imprisoned, where Luftwaffe scientists performed medical experiments on inmates and roughly 30,000 people died. The McDonald’s Corporation denied that it was trying to profit from the Holocaust and said the restaurant was at least a mile from the camp. After the curator of the Dachau Museum complained that McDonald’s was distributing thousands of leaflets among tourists in the camp’s parking lot, the company halted the practice. “Welcome to Dachau,” said the leaflets, “and welcome to McDonald’s.”

The McDonald’s at Dachau is one-third of a mile from the entrance to the concentration camp. The day I went there, the restaurant was staging a “Western Big Mac” promotion. It was decorated in a Wild West theme, with paper place mats featuring a wanted poster of “Butch Essidie.” The restaurant was full of mothers and small children. Teenagers dressed in Nikes, Levis, and Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts sat in groups and smoked cigarettes. Turkish immigrants worked in the kitchen, seventies disco music played, and the red paper cups on everyone’s tray said “Always Coca-Cola.” This McDonald’s was in Dachau, but it could have been anywhere — anywhere in the United States, anywhere in the world. Millions of other people at that very moment were standing at the same counter, ordering the same food from the same menu, food that tasted everywhere the same.

at the circus

THE MOST SURREAL EXPERIENCE that I had during three years of research into fast food took place not at the top-secret air force base that got its Domino’s pizzas delivered, not at the flavor factory off the New Jersey Turnpike, not at the Dachau McDonald’s. It occurred on March 1, 1999, at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. Like an epiphany, it revealed the strange power of fast food in the new world order. The Mirage — with its five-story volcano, its shark tank, dolphin tank, indoor rain forest, Lagoon Saloon, DKNY boutique, and Secret Garden of Siegfried & Roy — is a fine place for the surreal. Even its name suggests the triumph of illusion over reality, a promise that you won’t believe your eyes. On that day in March, as usual, Las Vegas was full of spectacles and name acts. George Carlin was at Bally’s, and David Cassidy was at the MGM Grand, starring in EFX, a show billed as a high-tech journey through space and time. The History of Sex was at the Golden Nugget, The Number One Fool Contest was at the Comedy Stop, Joacquin Ayala (Mexico’s most famous magician) was at Harrah’s, the Radio City Rockettes were at the Flamingo Hilton, “the Dream King” (Elvis impersonator Trent Carlini) was at the Boardwalk. And Mikhail Gorbachev (former president of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, winner of the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner of Labor, and the Nobel Peace Prize) was at the Grand Ballroom of the Mirage, giving the keynote speech before a fast food convention.

The convention and its setting were an ideal match. In many ways Las Vegas is the fulfillment of social and economic trends now sweeping from the American West to the farthest reaches of the globe. Las Vegas is the fastest-growing major city in the United States — an entirely man-made creation, a city that lives for the present, that has lit-tie connection to its surrounding landscape, that cares little about its own past. Nothing in Las Vegas is built to last, hotels are routinely demolished as soon as they seem out of fashion, and the city limits seem as arbitrary as its location, with plastic bags and garbage littering the open land where the lawns end, the desert not far from the Strip.

Las Vegas began as an overnight camp for travelers going to California on the Old Spanish Trail. It later became a ranching town, notable in the early 1940s mainly for its rodeo, its Wild West tourist attractions, and a nightclub called the Apache Bar. The population was about 8,000. The subsequent growth of Las Vegas was made possible by the federal government, which spent billions of dollars to erect the Hoover Dam and build military bases near the city. The dam supplied water and electricity, while the bases provided the early casinos with customers. When authorities in southern California cracked down on illegal gambling after World War II, the gamblers headed for Nevada. As in Colorado Springs, the real boom in Las Vegas began toward the end of the 1970s. Over the past twenty years the population of Las Vegas has nearly tripled.

Today there are few remaining traces of the city’s cowboy past. Indeed, the global equation has been reversed. While the rest of the world builds Wal-Marts, Arby’s, Taco Bells, and other outposts of Americana, Las Vegas has spent the past decade recreating the rest of the world. The fast food joints along the Strip seem insignificant compared to the new monuments towering over them: recreations of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sphinx, enormous buildings that evoke Venice, Paris, New York, Tuscany, medieval England, ancient Egypt and Rome, the Middle East, the South Seas. Las Vegas is now so contrived and artificial that it has become something authentic, a place unlike any other. The same forces that are homogenizing other cities have made Las Vegas even more unique.

At the heart of Las Vegas is technology: machinery that cools the air, erupts the volcano, and powers the shimmering lights. Most important of all is the machinery that makes money for the casinos. While Las Vegas portrays itself as a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial town where anyone can come and strike it rich, life there is more tightly regulated, controlled, and monitored by hidden cameras than just about anywhere else in the United States. The city’s principal industry is legally protected against the workings of the free market, and operates according to strict rules laid down by the state. The Nevada Gaming Control Board determines not only who can own a casino, but who can enter one. In a town built on gambling, where fortunes were once earned with a roll of the dice, it is remarkable how little is now left to chance. Until the late 1960s, about three-quarters of a typical casino’s profits came from table games, from poker, blackjack, baccarat, roulette. During the last twenty-five years table games, which are supervised by dealers and offer gamblers the best odds, have been displaced by slot machines. Today about two-thirds of a typical casino’s profits now come from slots and video poker — machines that are precisely calibrated to take your money. They guarantee the casino a profit rate of as much as 20 percent — four times what a roulette wheel will bring.

The latest slot machines are electronically connected to a central computer, allowing the casino to track the size of every bet and its outcome. The music, flashing lights, and sound effects emitted by these slots help disguise the fact that a small processor inside them is deciding with mathematical certainty how long you will play before you lose. It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manufacture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope. That is what Las Vegas really sells, the most brilliant illusion of all, a loss that feels like winning.

Mikhail Gorbachev was in town to speak at the Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange, a convention sponsored by the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association. Executives from the major fast food companies had gathered to discuss, among other things, the latest labor-saving machinery and the prospects of someday employing a workforce that needed “zero training.” Representatives from the industry’s leading suppliers — ConAgra, Monfort, Simplot, and others — had come to sell their latest products. The Grand Ballroom at the Mirage was filled with hundreds of middle-aged white men in expensive business suits. They sat at long tables beneath crystal chandeliers, drinking coffee, greeting old friends, waiting for the morning program to begin. A few of them were obviously struggling to recover from whatever they’d done in Las Vegas the night before.

On the surface, Mikhail Gorbachev seemed an odd choice to address a group so resolutely opposed to labor unions, minimum wages, and workplace safety rules. “Those who hope we shall move away from the socialist path will be greatly disappointed,” Gorbachev had written in Perestroika (1987), at the height of his power. He had never sought the dissolution of the Soviet Union and never renounced his fundamental commitment to Marxism-Leninism. He still believed in the class struggle and “scientific socialism.” But the fall of the Berlin Wall had thrown Gorbachev out of power and left him in a precarious financial condition. He was beloved abroad, yet despised in his own land. During Russia’s 1996 presidential election he received just 1 percent of the vote. The following year he expressed great praise for America’s leading fast food chain. “And the merry clowns, the Big Mac signs, the colourful, unique decorations and ideal cleanliness,” Gorbachev wrote in the foreword of To Russia with Fries, a memoir by a McDonald’s executive, “all of this complements the hamburgers whose great popularity is well deserved.”

In December of 1997, Gorbachev appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial, following in the footsteps of Cindy Crawford and Ivana Trump. A group of patrons at a Moscow Pizza Hut thanked him in the ad for bringing the fast food chain to Russia and then shouted “Hail to Gorbachev!” In response Gorbachev saluted them by raising a slice of pizza. He reportedly earned $160,000 for his appearance in the sixty-second spot, money earmarked for his nonprofit foundation. A year later Pizza Hut announced that it was pulling out of Russia as the country’s economy collapsed, and Gorbachev told a German reporter that “all my money is gone.” For his hour-long speech at the Mirage, Gorbachev was promised a fee of $150,000 and the use of a private jet.

The Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange officially opened with a video presentation of the national anthem. As the song boomed from speakers throughout the Grand Ballroom, two huge screens above the stage displayed a series of patriotic images: the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, amber waves of grain. In one of the morning’s first speeches, an executive hailed the restaurant industry’s record profits the previous year, adding without irony, “As if things weren’t good enough, consumers also dropped all pretense of wanting healthy food.” An ongoing industry survey had found that public concerns about salt, fat, and food additives were at their lowest level since 1982, when the survey began — one more bit of news to justify the industry’s “current state of bliss.” Another executive, a self-described “sensory evaluation specialist,” emphasized the importance of pleasant smells. He noted that Las Vegas resorts were now experimenting with “signature scents” in their casinos, hoping the subtle aromas would subconsciously make people gamble more money.

Robert Nugent, the head of Jack in the Box and honorary chairman of the Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange, broke the cheery mood with an ominous, unsettling speech. He essentially accused critics of the fast food industry of being un-American. “A growing number of groups who represent narrow social and political interests,” Nugent warned, “have set their sights on our industry in an effort to legislate behavioral change.” Enjoying a great meal at a restaurant was “the very essence of freedom,” he declared, a ritual now being threatened by groups with an agenda that was “anti-meat, anti-alcohol, anti-caffeine, anti-fat, anti-chemical additives, anti-horseradish, anti-non-dairy creamer.” The media played a central role in helping these “activist fearmongers,” but the National Restaurant Association had recently launched a counterattack, working closely with journalists to dispel myths and gain better publicity. Nugent called upon the fast food executives to respond even more forcefully to their critics, people who today posed “a real danger to our industry — and more broadly to our way of life.”

Not long afterward Mikhail Gorbachev appeared onstage and received a standing ovation. Here was the man who’d ended the Cold War, who’d brought political freedom to hundreds of millions, who’d opened vast new markets. At the age of sixty-nine Gorbachev looked remarkably unchanged from his appearance during the Reagan years. His hair was white, but he seemed vigorous and strong, still capable of running a mighty empire. He spoke quickly in Russian and then waited patiently for the translator to catch up. His delivery was full of energy and passion. “I like America,” Gorbachev said with a broad smile. “And I like American people.” He wanted to give the audience a sense of what was happening in Russia today. Few people in the United States seemed to care much about events in Russia, a dangerous state of affairs. He asked the crowd to learn about his country, to form partnerships and make investments there. “You must have a lot of money,” Gorbachev said. “Send it to Russia.”

A few minutes into Gorbachev’s speech, the audience began to lose interest. He had badly misjudged the crowd. His speech might have been a success at the Council on Foreign Relations or at the United Nations General Assembly, but at the Grand Ballroom of the Mirage it was a bomb. As Gorbachev explained why the United States must strongly support the policies of Yevgeny Primakov (the Russian prime minister who was fired not long afterward) row after row of eyes began to glaze. He earnestly asked why there was “some kind of a dislike of Primakov that is widespread in this country,” unaware that few Americans knew who Yevgeny Primakov was and even fewer cared about him, one way or the other. I counted at least half a dozen people seated near me in the Grand Ballroom who fell asleep during Gorbachev’s speech. The executive right beside me suddenly awoke in the middle of a long anecdote about how the Mongol invasion had affected the Russian character in the Middle Ages. The executive seemed startled and unaware of his surroundings, then glanced at the podium for a moment, felt reassured, and drifted back to sleep, his chin resting flat on his chest.

Gorbachev sounded like a politician from a distant era, from a time before sound bites. He was serious, long-winded, and sometimes difficult to follow. His mere presence at the Mirage was far more important to this crowd than anything he said. The meaning hit me as I looked around at all the fast food executives, the sea of pinstriped suits and silk ties. In ancient Rome, the leaders of conquered nations were put on display at the Circus. The symbolism was unmistakable; the submission to Rome, complete. Gorbachev’s appearance at the Mirage seemed an Americanized version of that custom, a public opportunity for the victors to gloat — though it would have been even more fitting if the fast food convention had been down the road at Caesars Palace.

As a Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev never learned when to leave the stage, a flaw that led to his humiliating defeat in the election of 1996. He made the same mistake in Las Vegas; people got up and left the Grand Ballroom while he was still speaking. “Margaret Thatcher was a lot better,” I heard one executive say to another as they headed for the door. Thatcher had addressed the previous year’s Chain Operators Exchange.

The day after Gorbachev’s speech at the Mirage, Bob Dylan performed at the grand opening of the new Mandalay Bay casino. And billboards along the interstate announced that Peter Lowe’s Success 1999 was coming to Las Vegas, with special appearances by Elizabeth Dole and General Colin Powell.

an empire of fat

FOR MOST OF THE twentieth century, the Soviet Union stood as the greatest obstacle to the worldwide spread of American values and the American way of life. The collapse of Soviet Communism has led to an unprecedented “Americanization” of the world, expressed in the growing popularity of movies, CDs, music videos, television shows, and clothing from the United States. Unlike those commodities, fast food is the one form of American culture that foreign consumers literally consume. By eating like Americans, people all over the world are beginning to look more like Americans, at least in one respect. The United States now has the highest obesity rate of any industrialized nation in the world. More than half of all American adults and about one-quarter of all American children are now obese or overweight. Those proportions have soared during the last few decades, along with the consumption of fast food. The rate of obesity among American adults is twice as high today as it was in the early 1960s. The rate of obesity among American children is twice as high as it was in the late 1970s. According to James O. Hill, a prominent nutritionist at the University of Colorado, “We’ve got the fattest, least fit generation of kids ever.”

The medical literature classifies a person as obese if he or she has a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher — a measurement that takes into account both weight and height. For example, a woman who is five-foot-five and weighs 132 pounds has a BMI of 22, which is considered normal. If she gains eighteen pounds, her BMI rises to 25, and she’s considered overweight. If she gains fifty pounds, her BMI reaches 30, and she’s considered obese. Today about 44 million American adults are obese. An additional 6 million are “super-obese”; they weigh about a hundred pounds more than they should. No other nation in history has gotten so fat so fast.

A recent study by half a dozen researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the rate of American obesity was increasing in every state and among both sexes, regardless of age, race, or educational level. In 1991, only four states had obesity rates of 15 percent or higher; today at least thirty-seven states do. “Rarely do chronic conditions such as obesity,” the CDC scientists observed, “spread with the speed and dispersion characteristic of a communicable disease epidemic.” Although the current rise in obesity has a number of complex causes, genetics is not one of them. The American gene pool has not changed radically in the past few decades. What has changed is the nation’s way of eating and living. In simple terms: when people eat more and move less, they get fat. In the United States, people have become increasingly sedentary — driving to work instead of walking, performing little manual labor, driving to do errands, watching television, playing video games, and using a computer instead of exercising. Budget cuts have eliminated physical education programs at many schools. And the growth of the fast food industry has made an abundance of high-fat, inexpensive meals widely available.

As people eat more meals outside the home, they consume more calories, less fiber, and more fat. Commodity prices have fallen so low that the fast food industry has greatly increased its portion sizes, without reducing profits, in order to attract customers. The size of a burger has become one of its main selling points. Wendy’s offers the Triple Decker; Burger King, the Great American; and Hardee’s sells a hamburger called the Monster. The Little Caesars slogan “Big! Big!” now applies not just to the industry’s portions, but to its customers. Over the past forty years in the United States, per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks has more than quadrupled. During the late 1950s the typical soft drink order at a fast food restaurant contained about eight ounces of soda; today a “Child” order of Coke at McDonald’s is twelve ounces. A “Large” Coke is thirty-two ounces — and about 310 calories. In 1972, McDonald’s added Large French Fries to its menu; twenty years later, the chain added Super Size Fries, a serving three times larger than what McDonald’s offered a generation ago. Super Size Fries have 610 calories and 29 grams of fat. At Carl’s Jr. restaurants, an order of CrissCut Fries and a Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger boasts 73 grams of fat — more fat than ten of the chain’s milk shakes.

A number of attempts to introduce healthy dishes (such as the McLean Deluxe, a hamburger partly composed of seaweed) have proven unsuccessful. A taste for fat developed in childhood is difficult to lose as an adult. At the moment, the fast food industry is heavily promoting menu items that contain bacon. “Consumers savor the flavor while operators embrace [the] profit margin,” Advertising Age noted. A decade ago, restaurants sold about 20 percent of the bacon consumed in the United States; now they sell about 70 percent. “Make It Bacon” is one of the new slogans at McDonald’s. With the exception of Subway (which promotes healthier food), the major chains have apparently decided that it’s much easier and much more profitable to increase the size and the fat content of their portions than to battle eating habits largely formed by years of their own mass marketing.

The cost of America’s obesity epidemic extends far beyond emotional pain and low self-esteem. Obesity is now second only to smoking as a cause of mortality in the United States. The CDC estimates that about 280,000 Americans die every year as a direct result of being overweight. The annual health care costs in the United States stemming from obesity now approach $240 billion; on top of that Americans spend more than $33 billion on various weight-loss schemes and diet products. Obesity has been linked to heart disease, colon cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, infertility, and strokes. A 1999 study by the American Cancer Society found that overweight people had a much higher rate of premature death. Severely overweight people were four times more likely to die young than people of normal weight. Moderately overweight people were twice as likely to die young. “The message is we’re too fat and it’s killing us,” said one of the study’s principal authors. Young people who are obese face not only long-term, but also immediate threats to their health. Severely obese American children, aged six to ten, are now dying from heart attacks caused by their weight.

The obesity epidemic that began in the United States during the late 1970s is now spreading to the rest of the world, with fast food as one of its vectors. Between 1984 and 1993, the number of fast food restaurants in Great Britain roughly doubled — and so did the obesity rate among adults. The British now eat more fast food than any other nationality in Western Europe. They also have the highest obesity rate. Obesity is much less of a problem in Italy and Spain, where spending on fast food is relatively low. The relationship between a nation’s fast food consumption and its rate of obesity has not been definitively established through any long-term, epidemiological study. The growing popularity of fast food is just one of many cultural changes that have been brought about by globalization. Nevertheless, it seems wherever America’s fast food chains go, waistlines start expanding.

In China, the proportion of overweight teenagers has roughly tripled in the past decade. In Japan, eating hamburgers and french fries has not made people any blonder, though it has made them fatter. Overweight people were once a rarity in Japan. The nation’s traditional diet of rice, fish, vegetables, and soy products has been deemed one of the healthiest in the world. And yet the Japanese are rapidly abandoning that diet. Consumption of red meat has been rising in Japan since the American occupation after World War II. The arrival of McDonald’s in 1971 accelerated the shift in Japanese eating habits. During the 1980s, the sale of fast food in Japan more than doubled; the rate of obesity among children soon doubled, too. Today about one-third of all Japanese men in their thirties — members of the nation’s first generation raised on Happy Meals and “Bi-gu Ma-kus” — are overweight. Heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, and breast cancer, the principal “diseases of affluence,” have been linked to diets low in fiber and high in animal fats. Long common in the United States, these diseases are likely to become widespread in Japan as its fast food generation ages. More than a decade ago a study of middle-aged Japanese men who had settled in the United States found that their switch to a Western diet doubled their risk of heart disease and tripled their risk of stroke. For the men in the study, embracing an American way of life meant increasing the likelihood of a premature death.

Obesity is extremely difficult to cure. During thousands of years marked by food scarcity, human beings developed efficient physiological mechanisms to store energy as fat. Until recently, societies rarely enjoyed an overabundance of cheap food. As a result, our bodies are far more efficient at gaining weight than at losing it. Health officials have concluded that prevention, not treatment, offers the best hope of halting the worldwide obesity epidemic. European consumer groups are pushing for a complete ban on all television advertising directed at children. In 1991 Sweden banned all TV advertising directed at children under the age of twelve. Restrictions on ads during children’s programming have been imposed in Greece, Norway, Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands. The eating habits of American kids are widely considered a good example of what other countries must avoid. American children now get about one-quarter of their total vegetable servings in the form of potato chips or french fries. A survey of children’s advertising in the European Union (EU) found that 95 percent of the food ads there encouraged kids to eat foods high in sugar, salt, and fat. The company running the most ads aimed at children was McDonalds.

mclibel

“RESIST AMERICA BEGINNING with Cola,” said a banner at Beijing University in May of 1999. “Attack McDonald’s, Storm KFC.” The U.S. Air Force had just bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and anti-American demonstrations were erupting throughout China. At least a dozen McDonald’s and four Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants were damaged by Chinese protesters. For some reason, no Pizza Huts were harmed. “Maybe they think it’s Italian,” said a Pizza Hut spokesman in Shanghai.

A generation ago American embassies and oil companies were the most likely targets of overseas demonstrations against “U.S. imperialism.” Today fast food restaurants have assumed that symbolic role, with McDonald’s a particular favorite. In 1995, a crowd of four hundred Danish anarchists looted a McDonald’s in downtown Copenhagen, made a bonfire of its furniture in the street, and burned the restaurant to the ground. In 1996, Indian farmers ransacked a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Bangalore, convinced that the chain threatened their traditional agricultural practices. In 1997, a McDonald’s in the Colombian city of Cali was destroyed by a bomb. In 1998, bombs destroyed a McDonald’s in St. Petersburg, Russia, two McDonald’s in suburban Athens, a McDonald’s in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, and a Planet Hollywood in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1999, Belgian vegetarians set fire to a McDonald’s in Antwerp, and a year later, May Day protesters tore the sign off a McDonald’s in London’s Trafalgar Square, destroyed the restaurant, and handed out free hamburgers to the crowd. Fearing more violence, McDonald’s temporarily closed all fifty of its London restaurants.

In France, a French sheep farmer and political activist named Jose Bove led a group that demolished a McDonald’s under construction in his hometown of Millau. Bove’s defiant attitude, brief imprisonment, and impassioned speeches against “lousy food” have made him a hero in France, praised by socialists and conservatives, invited to meetings with the president and the prime minister. He has written a French bestseller entitled The World Is Not for Sale — And Nor Am I! In a society where food is a source of tremendous national pride, the McDonald’s Corporation has become an easy target, for reasons that are not entirely symbolic. McDonald’s is now the largest purchaser of agricultural commodities in France. Bove’s message — that Frenchmen should not become “servile slaves at the service of agribusiness”— has struck a chord. During July of 2000 an estimated thirty thousand demonstrators gathered in Millau when Jose Bove went on trial, some carrying signs that said “Non à McMerde.”

The overseas critics of fast food are far more diverse than America’s old Soviet bloc adversaries. Farmers, leftists, anarchists, nationalists, environmentalists, consumer advocates, educators, health officials, labor unions, and defenders of animal rights have found common ground in a campaign against the perceived Americanization of the world. Fast food has become a target because it is so ubiquitous and because it threatens a fundamental aspect of national identity: how, where, and what people choose to eat.

The longest-running and most systematic assault on fast food overseas has been waged by a pair of British activists affiliated with London Greenpeace. The loosely organized group was formed in 1971 to oppose French nuclear weapon tests in the South Seas. It later staged demonstrations in support of animal rights and British trade unions. It protested against nuclear power and the Falklands War. The group’s membership was a small, eclectic mix of pacifists, anarchists, vegetarians, and libertarians brought together by a commitment to nonviolent political action. They ran the organization without any formal leadership, even refusing to join the International Greenpeace movement.

A typical meeting of London Greenpeace attracted anywhere from three people to three dozen. In 1986 the group decided to target McDonald’s, later explaining that the company “epitomises everything we despise: a junk culture, the deadly banality of capitalism.” Members of London Greenpeace began to distribute a six-page leaflet called “What’s Wrong with McDonald’s? Everything they don’t want you to know.” It accused the fast food chain of promoting Third World poverty, selling unhealthy food, exploiting workers and children, torturing animals, and destroying the Amazon rain forest, among other things. Some of the text was factual and straightforward; some of it was pure agitprop. Along the top of the leaflet ran a series of golden arches punctuated by slogans like “McDollars, McGreedy, McCancer, McMurder, McProfits, McGarbage.” London Greenpeace distributed the leaflets for four years without attracting much attention. And then in September of 1990 McDonald’s sued five members of the group for libel, claiming that every statement in the leaflet was false.

The libel laws in Great Britain are far more unfavorable to a defendant than those in the United States. Under American law, an accuser must prove that the allegations at the heart of a libel case are not only false and defamatory, but also have been recklessly, negligently, or deliberately spread. Under British law, the burden of proof is on the defendant. Allegations that may harm someone’s reputation are presumed to be false. Moreover, the defendant in a British court has to use primary sources, such as firsthand witnesses and official documents, to prove the accuracy of a published statement. Secondary sources, including peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, are deemed inadmissible as evidence. And the defendant’s intentions are irrelevant — British libel case can be lost because of a truly innocent mistake.

The McDonald’s Corporation had for years taken advantage of British libel laws to silence its critics. During the 1980s alone, McDonald’s threatened to sue at last fifty British publications and organizations, including Channel 4, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, student publications, a vegetarian society, and a Scottish youth theater group. The tactic worked, prompting retractions and apologies. The cost of losing a libel case, in both legal fees and damages, could be huge.

The London Greenpeace activists being sued by McDonald’s had not written the leaflet in question; they had merely handed it to people. Nevertheless, their behavior could be ruled libelous. Fearing the potential monetary costs, three of the activists reluctantly appeared in court and apologized to McDonald’s. The other two decided to fight.

Helen Steel was a twenty-five-year-old gardener, minibus driver, and bartender who’d been drawn to London Greenpeace by her devotion to vegetarianism and animal rights. Dave Morris was a thirty-six-year-old single father, a former postal worker interested in labor issues and the power of multinational corporations. The two friends seemed to stand little chance in court against the world’s largest fast food chain. Steel had left school at seventeen, Morris at eighteen; and neither could afford a lawyer. McDonald’s, on the other hand, could afford armies of attorneys and had annual revenues at the time of about $18 billion. Morris and Steel were denied legal aid and forced to defend themselves in front of a judge, instead of a jury. But with some help from the secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, the pair turned the “McLibel case” into the longest trial in British history and a public relations disaster for McDonald’s.

The McDonald’s Corporation had never expected the case to reach the courtroom. The burden on the defendants was enormous: Morris and Steel had to assemble witnesses and official documents to support the broad assertions in the leaflet. The pair proved to be indefatigable researchers, aided by the McLibel Support Campaign, an international network of activists. By the end of the trial, the court record included 40,000 pages of documents and witness statements, as well as 18,000 pages of transcripts.

McDonald’s had made a huge tactical error by asserting that everything in the leaflet was libelous — not only the more extreme claims (“McDonald’s and Burger King are… using lethal poisons to destroy vast areas of Central American rainforest”), but also the more innocuous ones (“a diet high in fat, sugar, animal products, and salt… is linked with cancers of the breast and bowel, and heart disease”). The blunder allowed Steel and Morris to turn the tables, putting McDonald’s on trial and forcing a public examination of the chain’s labor, marketing, environmental, nutrition, food safety, and animal welfare policies. Some of the chain’s top executives were forced to appear on the stand and endure days of cross-examination by the pair of self-taught attorneys. The British media seized upon the David-and-Goliath aspects of the story and made the trial front-page news.

After years of legal wrangling, the McLibel trial formally began in March of 1994. It ended more than three years later, when Justice Rodger Bell submitted an 800-page Judgement. Morris and Steel were found to have libeled McDonald’s. The judge ruled that the two had failed to prove most of their allegations — but had indeed proved some. According to Justice Bell’s decision, McDonald’s did “exploit” children through its advertising, endanger the health of customers who eat there several times a week, pay its restaurant workers unreasonably low wages, and bear responsibility for the cruelty inflicted upon animals by many of its suppliers. Morris and Steel were fined £60,000. The two promptly announced they would appeal the decision. “McDonald’s don’t deserve a penny,” Helen Steel said, “and in any event we haven’t got any money.”

Evidence submitted during the McLibel trial disclosed much about the inner workings of the McDonald’s Corporation. Many of its labor, food safety, and advertising practices had already been publicly criticized in the United States for years. Testimony in the London courtroom, however, provided new revelations about the company’s attitude toward civil liberties and freedom of speech. Morris and Steel were stunned to discover that McDonald’s had infiltrated London Greenpeace with informers, who regularly attended the group’s meetings and spied on its members.

The spying had begun in 1989 and did not end until 1991, nearly a year after the libel suit had been filed. McDonald’s had used subterfuge to find out who’d distributed the leaflets, and also learnt from its spies how Morris and Steel reacted to the company’s legal action. The company had employed at least seven different undercover agents. During some London Greenpeace meetings, about half the people in attendance were corporate spies. One spy broke into the London Greenpeace office, took photographs, and stole documents. Another had a six-month affair with a member of London Greenpeace while informing on his activities. McDonald’s spies inadvertently spied on each other, unaware that the company was using at least two different detective agencies. They participated in demonstrations against McDonald’s and gave out anti-McDonald’s leaflets.

During the trial, Sidney Nicholson — the McDonald’s vice president who’d supervised the undercover operation, a former police officer in South Africa and former superintendent in London’s Metropolitan Police — admitted in court that McDonald’s had used its law enforcement connections to obtain information on Steel and Morris from Scotland Yard. Indeed, it was officers belonging to Special Branch, an elite British unit that tracks “subversives” and organized crime figures, who informed McDonald’s of the pair’s identity. One of the company’s undercover agents later had a change of heart and testified on behalf of the McLibel defendants. “At no time did I believe they were dangerous people,” said Fran Tiller, following her conversion to vegetarianism. “I think they genuinely believed in the issues they were supporting.”

For Dave Morris, perhaps the most disturbing moment of the trial was hearing how McDonald’s had obtained his home address. One of its spies admitted in court that a gift of baby clothes had been a ruse to find out where Morris lived. Morris had unwittingly accepted the gift, believing it to be an act of friendship — and was disgusted to learn that his infant son had for months worn outfits supplied by McDonald’s as part of its surveillance.

I visited Dave Morris one night in February of 1999, as he prepared for an appearance the next day before the Court of Appeal. Morris lives in a small flat above a carpet shop in North London. The apartment lacks central heating, the ceilings are sagging, and the place is crammed with books, boxes, files, transcripts, leaflets, and posters announcing various demonstrations. The place feels like everything McDonald’s is not — lively, unruly, deeply idiosyncratic, and organized according to a highly complex scheme that only one human being could possibly understand. Morris spent about an hour with me, as his son finished homework upstairs. He spoke intensely about McDonald’s, but stressed that its arrogant behavior was just one manifestation of a much larger problem now confronting the world: the rise of powerful multinationals that shift capital across borders with few qualms, that feel no allegiance to any nation, no loyalty to any group of farmers, workers, or consumers.

The British journalist John Vidal, in his book on the McLibel trial, noted some of the similarities between Dave Morris and Ray Kroc. As Morris offered an impassioned critique of globalization, the comparison made sense — both men true believers, charismatic, driven by ideas outside the mainstream, albeit championing opposite viewpoints. During the McLibel trial, Paul Preston, the president of McDonald’s UK, had said, “Fitting into a finely working machine, that’s what McDonald’s is about.” And here was Morris, in the living room of his North London flat, warmed by a gas heater in the fireplace, surrounded by stacks of papers and files, caring nothing for money, determined somehow to smash that machine.

On March 31, 1999, the three Court of Appeal justices overruled parts of the original McLibel verdict, supporting the leaflet’s assertions that eating too much McDonald’s food can cause heart disease and ruling that it was ‘fair comment’ to say that workers are treated badly. The court reduced the damages owed by Steel and Morris to about £40,000. The McDonald’s Corporation had previously announced that it had no intention of collecting the money and would no longer try to stop London Greenpeace from distributing the leaflet (which by then had been translated into twenty-seven languages). McDonald’s was tired of the bad publicity and wanted this case to go away. But Morris and Steel were not yet through with McDonald’s. They appealed the Court of Appeal decision to the British House of Lords and sued the police for providing information about them to McDonalds. Scotland Yard settled the case out of court, apologizing to the pair and paying them £10,000 in damages. When the House of Lords refused to hear their case, Morris and Steel filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, challenging the validity not only of the verdict, but also of the British libel laws. As of this writing, the McLibel case is entering its eleventh year. After intimidating British critics for years, the McDonald’s Corporation picked on the wrong two people.

back at the ranch

WHEN THE FIRST McDonald’s opened in East Germany, in December of 1990, the company was unsure how American food would be received there. On opening day the McDonald’s in Plauen served potato dumplings, a Vogtland favorite, along with hamburgers and fries. Today hundreds of McDonald’s restaurants dot the landscape of eastern Germany. In town after town, statues of Lenin have come down and statues of Ronald McDonald have gone up. One of the largest is in Bitterfeld, where a three-story-high, illuminated Ronald can be seen from the autobahn for miles.

During my first visit to Plauen, in October of 1998, McDonald’s was the only business open in the central market square. It was Reunification Day, a national holiday, and everything else was closed, the small shops selling used clothing and furniture, the pseudo-Irish pub on one corner, the pizzeria on another. McDonald’s was packed, overflowing not just with children and their parents, but with teenagers, seniors, young couples, a cross-section of the town. The restaurant was brightly lit and spotlessly clean. Cheerful middle-aged women took orders behind the counter, worked in the kitchen, delivered food to tables, scrubbed the windows. Most of them had worked at this McDonald’s for years. Some had been there since the day it opened. Across the street stood an abandoned building once occupied by a branch of the East German army; a few blocks away the houses were dilapidated and covered in graffiti, looking as though the Wall had never fallen. That day McDonald’s was the nicest, cleanest, brightest place in all of Plauen. Children played with the Hot Wheels and Barbi that came with their Happy Meals, and smiling workers poured free refills of coffee. Outside the window, three bright red flags bearing the golden arches fluttered in the wind.

Life after Communism has not been easy in Plauen. At first there was an outpouring of great optimism and excitement. As in other East German towns, people quickly used their new liberty to travel overseas for the first time. They borrowed money to buy new cars. According to Thomas Küttler, the hero of Plauen’s 1989 uprising, thoughts about Friedrich von Schiller and the freedom of their forefathers soon gave way to a hunger for Western consumer goods. Küttler is disappointed by how fast the idealism of 1989 vanished, but feels little nostalgia for the old East Germany. Under Communist rule in Plauen, a person could be arrested for watching television broadcasts from the West or for listening to American rock ’n’ roll. Today in Plauen you can get dozens of channels on cable and even more via satellite. MTV is popular there, and most of the songs on the radio are in English. Becoming part of the larger world, however, has had its costs. Plauen’s economy has suffered as one after another, old and inefficient manufacturing plants closed, throwing people out of work. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Plauen has lost about 10 percent of its population, as people move away in search of a better life. The town seems unable to break free from its past. Every year a few unexploded bombs from World War II are still discovered and defused.

At the moment, Plauen’s unemployment rate is about 20 percent — twice the rate in Germany as a whole. You see men in their forties, a lost generation, too young to retire but too old to fit into the new scheme, staggering drunk in the middle of the day. The factory workers who bravely defied and brought down the old regime are the group who’ve fared worst, the group with the wrong skills and the least hope. Others have done quite well.

Manfred Voigt, the McDonald’s franchisee in Plauen, is now a successful businessman who, with his wife, Brigitte, vacations in Florida every year. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Manfred Voigt attributed his recent success to forces beyond his control. “It was dumb luck,” Voigt explained; “fate.” He and his wife had no money and could not understand why McDonald’s had chosen them to own its first restaurant in East Germany, why the company had trained and financed them. One explanation, never really explored in the Wall Street Journal profile, might be that the Voigts were one of the most powerful couples in Plauen under the old regime. They headed the local branch of Konsum, the state-controlled foodservice monopoly. Today the Voigts are one of Plauen’s wealthiest couples; they own two other McDonald’s in nearby towns. Throughout the former Eastern bloc, members of the old Communist elite have had the easiest time adjusting to Western consumerism. They had the right connections and many of the right skills. They now own some of the most lucrative franchises.

The high unemployment rate in Plauen has created social and political instability. What seems lacking is a stable middle ground. Roughly a third of the young people in eastern Germany now express support for various nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. Right-wing extremists have declared large parts of the east to be “foreigner-free” zones, where immigrants are not welcome. The roads leading into Plauen are decorated with signs posted by the Deutschland Volks Union, a right-wing party. “Germany for the Germans,” the signs say. “Jobs for Germans, Not Foreigners.” Neo-Nazi skinheads have thus far not caused much trouble in Plauen, though a black person today needs real courage to walk the city’s streets at night. The opposition to American fast food voiced by many environmentalists and left-wing groups does not seem to be shared by German groups on the far right. When I asked an employee at the McDonald’s in Plauen if the restaurant had ever been the target of neo-Nazis, she laughed and said there’d never been any threats of that kind. People in the area did not consider McDonald’s to be “foreign.”

Around the time that Plauen got its McDonald’s in 1990, a new nightclub opened in a red brick building on the edge of town. “The Ranch” has an American flag and a Confederate flag hanging out front. Inside there’s a long bar, and the walls are decorated with old-fashioned farm implements, saddles, bridles, and wagon wheels. Frieder Stephan, the owner of The Ranch, was inspired by photographs of the American West, but gathered all the items on the walls from nearby farms. The place looks like a bar in Cripple Creek, circa 1895. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frieder Stephan was a disc jockey on an East German tourist ferry. He secretly listened to Creedance Clearwater, the Stones, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. Now forty-nine years old, he is the leading impresario in Plauen’s thriving country-western scene, booking local bands (like the Midnight Ramblers and C.C. Raider) at his club. The city’s country-western fans call themselves “Vogtland Cowboys,” put on their western boots and ten-gallon hats at night, and hit the town, drinking at The Ranch or joining the Square Dance Club at a bar called the White Magpie. The Square Dance Club is sponsored by Thommy’s Western Store on Friedrich Engels Avenue. Plauen now has a number of small western-wear shops like Thommy’s that sell imported cowboy boots, cowboy posters, fancy belt buckles, work shirts with snaps, and Wrangler jeans. While teenagers in Colorado Springs today could not care less about cowboys, kids in Plauen are sporting bolo ties and cowboy hats.

Every Wednesday night, a few hundred people gather at The Ranch for line dancing. Members of Plauen’s American Car Club pull up in their big Ford and Chevy trucks. Others come from miles away, dressed in their western best, ready to dance. Most of them are working class, and many are unemployed. Their ages range from seven years old to seventy. If somebody doesn’t know how to line-dance, a young woman named Petra gives lessons. People wear their souvenir T-shirts from Utah. They smoke Marlboros and drink beer. They listen to Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, Johnny Cash — and they dance, kicking up their boots, twirling their partners, waving their cowboy hats in the air. And for a few hours the spirit of the American West fills this funky bar deep in the heart of Saxony, in a town that has seen too much history, and the old dream lives on, the dream of freedom without limits, self-reliance, and a wide-open frontier.