Personally, I've found meat to be too expensive even as it is. I have some cold cuts for lunchtime sandwiches, but that's it. All the rest of my diet is grain, fruit, veggies, soy, and the occasional pat of butter or cheese. And the sole reason I've gone almost entirely vegetarian is simply because it is less expensive.

So I'm all for regulating factory farms out of existence. It won't impact my budget hardly at all, and they really are ugly (in every sense of the word).

According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.

Not to nit-pick in attempting to discredit the thesis, but can this be right? That would mean that we use 2,760,000,000,000,000 gallons of water for the world's beef production.

What Shade Trail says. Even if meat prices don't change, the current trend of our economy will invariably lead to less meat consumption. I'm already eating a lot more beans and veggies, and feeling a lot healthier for it, too.

What worries me, though, is that instead of consuming more veggies and fruits (also quite expensive), folks will consume even more cheap simple starches like corn-syrup laden breads and potatoes. I know lots of "vegetarians" who really just live off of pasta and bread because preparation of vegetables requires more money and time.

what will replace deli meat/Oscar Mayer in the lunch buckets of the working class and their kids?

high fructose corn syrup should be high on the list of "foods" that need to be severely curtailed.

Yeah, I think 14All is right. When you can buy a bag of pasta for a dollar and sauce for 2, you can have dinner for the whole family for just a few bucks. If you work all day and have other obligations when you aren't working, and money is tight, it can be really tough to consistently place long term health ahead of fast, easy and cheap.

Anon: I'm not doing the conversions in my head, so I'm not going to vouch for that figure, but a staggeringly large number is plausible. The round number I've heard is that a quarter of the world's freshwater goes to meat consumption.

(These are not my professional opinions, btw. In this case, I'm only repeating what I've heard in the media.)

I'm half way through The End of Food by Paul Roberts (endorsed by Michael Pollen), and I recommend it to anyone who wants detail on what's driving the CAFO's, the role played by all the participants in the "food-chain," as well as pertinent (and timely) info on the financial mess.

Great post, EK. And we can each do something, multiple times each day, to make a statement against this inhumane brutality.

Those are great proposals to get started on food reform.

But let's generalize. What economists call 'externals' (the things companies get for free, from highways to poluting the air/water) should be priced in the cost of their products. So the Peruvian asparagus this morning in Whole Foods should be paying the cost of the CO2 and other polutants the airplanes spew into the air. No free rides on the ecology or the society. And that asparagus should bear the reasonable cost of labor that is adequately compensated - whether directly by paying higher wages or by export or import taxes that equalize the true costs of the product. We can't halt the 'dive to the bottom' which profits the mega-corps and enslaves the workers on subsistence or sub-subsistence wages without making the true social costs be embedded in prices.

You should calculate the number of jobs losts in the process. Iowa Grain farmers, feedlot workers and beef processors in Kansas and Oklahoma, and countless restaurants. All so that the U.S. can import more tofu and vegetables during the winter?

What is the cost of having fresh produce year round?
In the northern climes, locally raised meat may be the better choice.

Confined Animal Feeding Operations have problems, but they use less feed per pound of produced meat. They are efficient since the animals are slaughtered quickly and don't use a lot of energy walking around.

I think Ezra and Pollan need to spend a year or so working on a Montana ranch or North Dakota wheat farm. It would disabuse them of many of their notions of modern agriculture.

"What is the cost of having fresh produce year round?
In the northern climes, locally raised meat may be the better choice."

Is that a rhetorical or empirical question?

Because if it's an empirical one, I believe that the answer is that the environmental costs of transporting produce from summer locales to winter locales are still lower than the environmental costs of raising meat locally, for an equivalent amount of food, etc.

I think Ezra and Pollan need to spend a year or so working on a Montana ranch or North Dakota wheat farm.

Pollan spent an extended period on a number of farms. You've spent a year in a Smithfield pig factory, too?

The Iowa corn farmers that Pollan talked to wanted to get off the monoculture, but the entire economy is built around it.

All so that the U.S. can import more tofu and vegetables during the winter?

You keep dancing along the Yellow Brick Road with that strawman, Dorothy.

Pretending to be defenders of farm workers so that you don't have to confront the price of your manly man meat consumption is a pretty low move, people. And ignorant. I'm from West Texas ranchland that's been devastated by CAFOs, and I sat through enough maudlin country music and cowboy poetry deploring the loss of the major form of work in the area to know. Your beloved meat factories have done the same economic damage to those areas that NAFTA did to cities that were built around factories.

Good linkage. Everybody should know the "true" cost of meat, in economic terms if not in moral.

The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence.

This is very true, but it is especially important to recognize just what is at stake when we feed farm animals massive amounts of antibiotics:

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonialike disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency’s own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.

The drug, cefquinome, belongs to a class of potent antibiotics that are among medicine’s last defense against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals….

The American Medical Association and about 12 other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals probably would speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotic, as has happened with other drugs. [emphasis added by EF] Those supermicrobes could then spread to people.

http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/03/04/stupid-question-but-at-least-my-cow-is-well/

I'm confused about what you're advocating here. If it takes 5000 gallons of water to raise one pound of feedlot beef, then how many gallons will it require to raise a pound of grass-fed beef? Presumably far, far more.

This all sounds rather pie-in-the-sky unless you're advocating for a almost completely vegetarian diet that's almost universally adopted. How are you going to raise the billions of kgs of chicken demanded by the consumer? Even if you reduce meat consumption to 10% of its current level, you'd still need produce a staggering amount. What are you envisioning to take the place of modern farms? Should 80% of the population be toiling away at tiny and unproductive farms?

Not sure how you quantify it, but genetic diversity has got to be one of the hidden "costs" of industrial animal production. CAFOs depend on predictability -- knowing how large an animal will be, when it will mature, how much fat it will contain, and how it will react to antibiotics, for example. All of which reinforce a tendency to use the same genetic stock, and to reproduce genetic flaws associated with desirable characteristics, such as temperamentally unstable but low-fat pigs. The "tiny and unproductive" farms derided by other commenters at least, imho, make an effort to raise several different strains of whatever animal they're producing, including genetically rare "heirloom" varieties.

Ezra has yet to defend, or confront, the fact that what he is relentlessly advocating amounts to enforced vegetarianism for the poor. Upper middle class folks - like the ones advocating making meat expensive - can afford to eat whatever they want to. Making necessities of life, like food, expensive is a prescription for suffering. Of course, Ezra and the like wouldn't actually be impacted personally, so I suppose that they think it doesn't matter. Articles like this represent, straight out, arrogant class bias at its worst.

You can argue that we should treat animals more humanely - fine. And you can argue that we should pay the real costs of their operation - again fine. But all of these articles and the relentless push to make meat more expensive and less common, blah blah - I can't help but think that the people pushing this have never actually gone into a grocery store and had to think about what they could afford to buy.

Marc, wouldn't a decrease in the amount of meat produced also mean that animals pose less competition to humans for grains, etc? If we aren't feeding them an order of magnitude more calories than we get back, the price of bread and other staples should fall. If poverty is really a problem, more public assistance can be given, and with that assistance, it would be better to give people the option of choosing foods that are based on accurate price signals. Of course, since meat is more expensive, those who benefit most from meat subsidies are those who are least sensitive to food costs.

Also, I don't think he's advocating vegetarianism at all. I would expect this to mean people eat 25-50% less meat instead, which could have health benefits for many people. I've met people who are accustomed to having meat at every meal, which seems rather excessive.

People will also be able to choose meats such as chicken over beef if they have a better production efficiencies, and perhaps more people will keep an animal around that can eat their scraps.

I once visited a place that developed shrimp varieties - they said they could get a pound of shrimp for every 1.1 pounds of fish they fed them.

If the true cost of meat isn't worth it to consumers, why would we have a policy of encouraging over-consumption

I get a kick out of all of you arguing that it's going to cost the poor or workers a whole lot of money. Look, right now the meat industry as it exists is costing every individual a whole lot of money, except it is done so inefficiently through government subsidy and allowing meat production to offload costs through externalities. It's a situation where government is distorting the free market. It's your responsibility to argue that the social good that comes from that outweighs the economic gains that would come, ceteris paribus, from eliminating effective meat subsidies.

Marc: You hold a curious position. "...we should pay the real costs of their operation, fine. But all of these articles and the relentless push to make meat more expensive..." Am I the only one who sees a giant, flaming contradiction there?

and hw: You say that meat production would cease if the real costs were incorporated into it. Well, that's unlikely, but even if so, so what? That means modern industrial meat farming is entirely a government project, something akin to NASA, where if eliminated only the super rich would have access to meat/space travel. Fine--even supposing meat became that costly, you've yet to make an argument that the social good that comes from creating the meat industry project outweighs the inordinately large economic cost.

That said, the issue of healthful nutrition is important, and I don't want to see people surviving on potatoes and pasta. (The current set up for meat production, by the way, fails to help fix this. Despite all this posturing for the right of poor people to eat meat, for the bottom 10% quality meat is a luxury at best, as you'd know if you actually knew any.) I'd move the subsidies from corn to more nutritious vegetables, though I've not thought through the full implications of this. Perhaps a food stamp style program would be better.

Wandering About: Genetic diversity might just as easily be preserved via specialized institutions like seed banks that actually know what they are doing.

Now back to those tiny and unproductive farms: is that the new system of agriculture you're advocating for?

Think of it like this. A Buddhist monk enjoys his life of spiritual reflection and material simplicity, and relies on alms for his daily needs. He thinks this is a deeply meaningful way of life, as well he should. He might even think his lifestyle should be universally adopted. But who pays the alms then? The problem is that the lifestyle doesn't scale up: only a tiny proportion of the population can be monks.

Expensive, small-scale organic agriculture serves the needs of affluent urban consumers, but how would this scale?

Where my family lives in rural Saskatchewan, the entire landscape from the US border to half-way up the province is devoted to grain production, using large scale modern methods. How are you going to replace that production with low-yield organic methods? You'd need more land than actually exists.

Zephyrus: No, it doesn't mean the meat industry is a government project. Even without any government subsidies, the most economical way to raise livestock would look the same as it does now: high density, low labour, highly mechanized. That's certainly the case in Saskatchewan, where the government does not subsidize grain production, much to the chagrin of local grain farmers.

Mechanization and technology has lowered the labour requirements and increased agricultural output enormously over the last century. The Saskatchewan landscape is dotted with abandoned farms, the result of multiple farms merging into single combined entities.
This is not the result of central government planning, but rather a natural process of adaptation to a new technological environment.

Perhaps there are many valid critiques of the meat industry: complaints about animal welfare, food safety and sustainability are prominent among these. But the solutions to these problems are not to be found in traditional 19th century agricultural techniques.

Zephyrus: "The current set up for meat production, by the way, fails to help fix this. Despite all this posturing for the right of poor people to eat meat, for the bottom 10% quality meat is a luxury at best, as you'd know if you actually knew any."

Excuse me? I don't know any poor people? Glad you could clear that up for me.

That was more directed at Marc with his snide "oh you don't know what it's like to have to buy your own food!" remark.

Anonymous: I was responding to this dread scenario of hw and company that meat production would cease if subsidies were cut out. I don't buy into it, but if it's true, then yes, indeed, the meat industry is a government project.

Zephyrus: ok, no offense taken.

(I'm Anonymous@2:32 by the way. I guess I omitted my name and info by mistake...)

I think I must have not made myself clear: I don't think that meat production would plummet (say, to 10% of current levels) if subsidies were cut out. Ezra's post seems to advocate *active government regulation* to ban high density livestock production (due to concerns about animal welfare, widespread over-reliance on antibiotics, etc.), which really would enormously reduce supply and raise prices. That's a big step beyond merely dropping subsidies. One is passive and the other active.

Now, I personally eat so little meat that I'm almost a vegetarian (because I'm cheap, concerned about saturated fats, too lazy to prepare meat, etc), but I don't have anything against modern animal husbandry per se. In fact, I think a lot could be achieved by incrementally *reforming* agri-business while retaining large-scale operations.

My main concern is that many people who care about these issues (sustainability, animal welfare, environmental impact) seem to advocate for a radical (and to my mind infeasible) reordering of agriculture, rather than working for incremental reform. I feel like much of this is motivated by a romantic longing for a nonexistent bucolic past, and an aesthetic revulsion toward factory-farming. This seems counter-productive to me.

Marc, re: class warfare - the argument has been made elsewhere that health issues such as obesity are higher among the poor. While obviously people need to be able to afford food, eating less meat would be a good thing for society as a whole. Better health outcomes (which takes some strain out of insurance situation), and healthier living isn't a bad thing. I'd love to know the numbers around how much meat people eat daily. It's probably huge (and harmful at that amount). If you're going to call out class warfare, call out the government and the food and restaurant industries for putting profits over human health.

Obama hasn't won yet and the nanny state begins.

Before you continue on your track, you should consider that productivity has made hunger disappear. Just because the pendulum has swung too far one way does not mean that we should all go back to small scale farming.

>> Obama hasn't won yet and the nanny state begins.

Nanny state? We're talking about getting the government out of the transaction by eliminating subsidies and letting the free market take over.

Of course, you might feel that forcing factories to clean up their poop pits smacks of Marxism.

"I feel like much of this is motivated by a romantic longing for a nonexistent bucolic past, and an aesthetic revulsion toward factory-farming."

If you think this is about aesthetics, hw, then I respectfully submit that you don't understand the extent of the problem.

remember the same summer that michael vick was history's greatest monster for abusing a couple dogs, 1000s of head of cattle suffered miserable deaths being baked by the sun on feedlots throughout the midwest and nobody said shit.

if you havent, watch "king corn." the ranchers seem to know whats being done to cattle is wrong and immoral but theyre trapped.

Spine:
My family has owned a 200 head dairy farm, and now a multimillion kg/year poultry operation, so I have some experience with agribusiness. Care to expand on your comment?

Spine: Of course, my only experience is with Canadian agriculture, which perhaps retains more of a medium-scale family farm nature. My parents were actually pretty horrified by the multiple-thousand-head dairy farms they visited in Texas.

My main point is that there's no reason why large and medium scale agribusiness can't be made more sustainable, more humane, and more healthy. And the boutique-heirloom-back-to-the-land agriculture isn't going to feed the hungry masses.

http://www.cheap-lotrogold.com/