James Pogue penned an intriguing column last week entitled “The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Underneath their Nose.” In it, Pogue wrangles with the prognostications of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CA), who’s been saying that Americans are feeling a “metaphysical (or spiritual) crisis,” “an unspooling of identity and meaning,” and that it’s related to a “massive concentration of corporate power.” That narrative is echoed constantly at diner counters, at church pitch-ins and in Hoosier columnists. It shows up in documentaries and books.
And, it’s the underpinning sentiment that drives the final film of the Green Film Series, “Food Inc 2.”
“Food Inc: What to know about your food sources,” which can be rented from Amazon Prime (the Bezos mega-corporation), opens with news footage of the pandemic shutdowns, with footage of milk spilled in the dirt and pigs slaughtered by the hundreds in the mud.
Then it descends into farm country — Waterloo, Iowa, home of a Tyson meat plant. Over a diner breakfast of bacon, eggs and biscuits, the local sheriff explains that during one month in 2020, 1,300 out of 2,500 employees had COVID, forcing the plant to shut down for two weeks, while the community sustained an exponential uptick in deaths every day.
The sheriff said that Tyson Meats CEO John Tyson worried about lost revenue, so he wrote a letter to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and sent a copy to national newspapers. America was going to run out of meat, it warned.
In reaction, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to allow the company to continue production despite the loss of life in their plants, the sheriff and the documentarians note. The U.S. House of Representatives reported in 2021 that more than 59,000 American meat packers tested positive for COVID-19, and 269 people had died. After substantial lobbying at the height of the pandemic, they were told that quitting their jobs to protect their health was not a legitimate reason to receive unemployment benefits. (Read the “New Select Subcommittee Report Reveals Extensive Coordination Between Trump Administration and Meatpacking Industry to Protect Profits While Endangering Workers,” which has a long title but isn’t 922 pages).
By the end of 2020, Tyson reported a 50% increase in earnings per share for its investors while selling record amounts of meat to China. One of its competitors, Smithfield, also saw record sales and profits to China. To counter that, Smithfield argued that most of the 129,000 tons of American pork exported to China in April 2020 was ordered before the pandemic and included cuts that Americans don’t buy.
What didn’t change in the narrative was that a few consolidated meat companies have been kneecapping small family farms in recent decades, in addition to fearmongering about bacon to cover for putting U.S. workers at risk.
“Food Inc. 2” builds a strong narrative about the failure of anti-trust enforcement that has consolidated food sources into a few mega-companies that control most of the market share. That means they control what farmers are paid, as well as what is produced, advertised, shelved and consumed by the public. Here are some numbers from the documentary:
• In the 1980s, the four largest beef companies had 25% of the market; now the top four control 85% of the beef market.
• Three companies control 83% of the cold cereal market
• Two companies control 70% of carbonated soft drink market share
• Two companies control 80% of baby formula market
The implications of that consolidation manifested in 2021 when one of the two companies that produce baby formula had to shut down a factory. The fragility of the market meant parents took to social media bargaining and begging for help to feed their infants.
Two other components of fragility are due to our almost mono-markets. Consumers pay more; suppliers earn less.
Farmers know best how much less they are paid. Eric Schlosser, the documentary’s maker, takes the crew to one woman’s family dairy farm in Columbia County, Wisconsin, where she speaks of trying to scale up the family herd as dairy prices drop. For a while, keeping up with Joneses was a thousand head of cattle, then it was 5000, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 dairies. Meanwhile, processors merging into large corporations means that small family operations couldn’t shop their milk for better prices. It’s pushing family farms out of business.
From Wisconsin, Schlosser takes his audience to Arizona where corporations are moving their herds. Regulation is low, land is cheap, and water has to be pumped out of aquifers — every pound of beef requires 2,500 gallons of water to produce. “Food Inc. 2” doesn’t mention Riverview LLP, which High Country News reported on and which supports the documentary’s evidence that profits are king.
In Winnebago, Iowa, a farmer climbs into his combine while talking about how farms used to include apple orchards, multiple types of animals and crops. To survive and compete, they replaced that biodiversity with government-subsidized commodity crops, leading to monocropping. He points out that farmers are “losing topsoil faster than they’re making it,” pointing off at the fence line and its disparity with field level. Farms the size of several hundred acres no longer support a family, so farmers turn to side gigs — selling seed, chemicals, inputs, fertilizers and equipment.
“Food Inc. 2” then turns policy leaders on the Senate Agriculture Committee to examine how problems at the root of supply chain are impacting people in urban and suburban communities. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Jon Tester (D-MT) comment on the loss of whole and healthy grains in exchange for commodity crops that are used to develop cheap, highly processed foods. Those are leading to multiple health crises in the nation because ultra-processed foods interfere with our bodies’ ability to count calories.
The food industry is now producing 4000 calories per person per day - twice what humans need (on average). Since the corporations serve their shareholders and investors, they have to find a way to get us to eat all those calories so they can make a profit.
To make food shelf-stable enough to be placed anywhere (and increase profit margin), processed foods now include additives, emulsifiers, and chemical compounds that mimic flavor and sweetness that are the driving diabetes, cardiovascular disease, liver disease, renal disease, gastrointestinal diseases and depression. Studies at Purdue University show that a single diet soda a day can increase the waist size of people by 50% as they age. Studies cited in Food Inc. 2 show that side-by-side diets fixed for recommended calories, salt and fat — one with 80% calories from ultra-processed foods (UPF) and the other with 0% UPFs — led to 500 more calories consumed per day per person.
“We’re eating ourselves to death,” says Mark Schatzker, author of “The Dorito Effect.” We’re consuming products manipulated to mimic real flavor and fewer calories, even sometimes actual nutrition, but our bodies don’t metabolize those as they do whole, natural foods. Fifty-eight percent of total energy intake is now from ultra-processed food which contains far less nutrition (at least in the U.S. which allows hundreds more additives than Europe.)
“Food Inc. 2” builds a forceful narrative that mega-corporations are fleecing at worst, and profiteering at best in ways that stick farmers and eaters in a cognitive, ethical conundrum. Generally, people want to take responsibility and have agency over eating better and treating farmers and fellow workers well. But we need these increasingly consolidated, shareholder-driven companies for food. No wonder we feel a spiritual kind of crisis. We’re powerless to dismantle the corporations that rob us of living a more principled, uncomplicated life. Lots of people want smaller government, but what about smaller corporations?
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