The Meaty Truth (19 page)

The good news is we could save over 126,000 lives and $17 billion in health-care costs per year if we ate less meat and more veggies.
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Currently we are not even consuming half of the daily recommended value of fruits and vegetables.
Just increasing our daily intake of fruits and vegetables by half a cup per day could save $2.7 trillion in health-care costs. That is just half a cup! Adding everything together, the value of lives saved would exceed $11 trillion dollars. Yes, simple dietary changes really are that powerful.

The Cost of Sh!tty Food

Our current production of meat and dairy gives us not only sub-quality and unhealthy food, but also adds significant health-care costs from foodborne illness. Food not regulated by the FDA is costing us $5.7 billion and, socially, thirty thousand years of life each year.
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Although we tend to focus on the top heavy hitters, such as
Listeria, Campylobacter, E. coli
and
salmonella,
a research team from the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute looked at just how much the fourteen most common pathogens in our food cost us each year. Here’s the breakdown by disease and cost per year:
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1. Campylobacter
   in poultry: $1.3 billion
   
2. Toxoplasma in pork: $1.2 billion
   
3. Listeria
   in deli meats: $1.1 billion
   
4. Salmonella
   in poultry: $700 million
   
5. Listeria
   in dairy products: $700 million
   
6. Salmonella
   in complex foods: $600 million
   
7. Norovirus in complex foods: $900 million
   
8. Salmonella
   in produce: $500 million
   
9. Toxoplasma in beef: $700 million
   
10. Salmonella
    in eggs: $400 million
    

It seems like our national stomachache is proving more expensive than we thought. Contaminated chicken and turkey products alone cost an estimated $2.5 billion and fifteen thousand years of life per year.
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These costs don’t even include the continued cost of care resulting from failed kidneys and permanently impaired immune functions. Nor do they cover the true cost of losing a family member. Let’s not kid ourselves. The industry isn’t responsible for any reimbursement to cover health-care costs. At minimum, they should be required to fully disclose every ingredient that goes in to our food, particularly the antibiotics, chemicals, rocket fuel, etc. Although the meat industries claim it is apparently “too expensive” to make meat that isn’t contaminated, we think it is too expensive for us to eat contaminated food.

Adding to the cost of foodborne illness is the growing number of pathogens that are antibiotic resistant. Our abuse of antibiotics in livestock is costing us dearly. Back in 2000, antibiotic resistance was costing us $20 billion a year and affecting nine hundred thousand Americans.
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Today, more than two million Americans are affected, and antibiotic resistance is
costing us more than $20 billion a year in direct costs and an additional $35 billion in indirect costs from lost productivity.
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Antibiotic resistance is killing about twenty-three thousand Americans per year despite being a completely avoidable cost. Even more frightening is this statement by Tom Frieden, the Director of the CDC, announcing in 2013 that “if we don’t act now, our medicine cabinet will be empty and we won’t have the antibiotics we need to save lives.”
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Imagine the health-care costs then.

The corporations will kindly tell us that jeopardizing our health is all done in the name of efficiency and profit. The net benefit of using antibiotics on animals to the producers is about twenty-five cents, which is too small to even be reflected in or impact retail sales prices.
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We are letting the industry offload enormous costs and threaten the future of medicine over twenty-five pennies. The very near future might not have cures at the rate superbugs are becoming resistant to antibiotics. It’s time to learn from history. Remember the Black Plague and influenza scares? We too are poised to let the next pandemics wipe out whole populations, thanks to antibiotics that no longer work. But not to worry because we got a bargain and only paid ninety-nine cents for that chicken sandwich. Weighing what’s important to you? Agribusiness is surely not.

Marketing Money Talks

Knowing what we know about meat and dairy’s health claims, it’s distressing to learn that the federal government is one of the main financiers behind the marketing campaigns that push the wrong nutritional messages on the public. In fact, the government has created check-off programs that directly subsidize the marketing for meat and dairy products. The goal of these programs is to influence us to buy more animal products than we would otherwise. These check-off programs are mandatory, tax-like programs that take 1 percent of the wholesale price of food products and collect these funds to pay for research and marketing that in turn boosts animal-based product sales.
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These funds are given to councils such as the Dairy Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association that then come up with the witty slogans we know so well.
“Beef, It’s What’s for Dinner” and “Milk: It Does a Body Good” both benefit from these check-off programs. Most Americans have absolutely no idea that these programs exist.

These check-off programs provide about $557 million in research and marketing money for animal products.
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Although forty cents of every one hundred dollars might not seem like a lot, according to the USDA the money is well spent. The return on investment from these programs has been about $4.6 billion in sales. If we add in job creation, it brings us to a whopping $8.2 billion in return.
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For every one dollar of check-off funds spent on advertising, it can boost sales by about eighteen dollars.

Dairy has been the biggest winner of the check-off programs, resulting in an additional $7 billion worth of milk sold. That is an extra forty-seven servings of dairy per person in the United States. The check-off program even helped the Dairy Board team up with Domino’s to offer pizzas to two thousand schools. That is clearly healthy. It’s not like we don’t have a childhood obesity and diabetes problem. Teenagers already consume 78 percent more saturated fat than recommended. While the industry is winning from these programs, friends, we are losing. Dairy is one of the most contaminated and toxic substances that provides this industry with one of the largest bank accounts devoted just to marketing, which does not serve the public sincerely. This is just wrong. The National Dairy Promotion and Research Board boasts $389 million in check-off funds annually. No other industry comes close to having these resources. It spends $58 million a year convincing consumers that dairy is healthy.
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Their budget is three times bigger than that of vegetable and fruit producers’, which provide the delicious foods we should be eating anyway.

Although the industry is benefiting from these programs, the one at fault here is the federal government. Did you know the “Pork, the Other White Meat” slogan is actually a government-marketing campaign? That’s right, the Supreme Court established in the
Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association
case that these check-off programs and their resulting marketing campaigns are actually government speech.
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The government
decided to get involved to make the programs mandatory. In fact, every single marketing campaign is passed through the USDA for approval. While the National Pork Board might be telling us that everything is better with bacon, the overarching voice behind that slogan is our very own government.

While government and industry applaud these programs, they might want to go back and look at the numbers. Let’s add in external costs and see how well these programs pay off. Since every $1.00 spent on meat, eggs, fish, poultry, and dairy generates $1.70 in external costs, that means there is an external cost of $7.8 billion not reflected in retail prices.
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Basic mathematical comparison says that this $7.8 billion dwarfs the $4.2 billion generated in industry sales. Even including the job creation, the external costs and revenue are almost equal. The question then is, are these programs that support unhealthy practices and destroy our environment still worth it? We think not.

Survival of the Fittest

In 2011, the US government agreed to buy $40 million worth of unwanted chicken products. Apparently the demand for chicken products remained far below the number of chickens produced that year. This buyout, along with a similar purchase in 2010, gave “producers an extra $86 million in government chicken purchases above the roughly $100 million the USDA buys in scheduled chicken purchases for a year.”
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Apparently the National Chicken Council was all too thrilled with this federal bailout, stating, “At a time when the industry is under great stress due to the high cost of feed ingredients and the general economic slowdown, we appreciate USDA’s willingness to step forward and acquire additional chicken.” Excited? We’re not smiling.

Under normal circumstances, when demand for a product declines, business has to adjust to the changing landscape and market forces. That is a basic tenet of capitalism. Instead, our government decides to prop up an industry and isolate it from market forces. Why can’t we let the market regulate supply and demand like it does for other products and commodities? What is even more annoying is that the poultry industry already
receives billions and billions of dollars in subsidies to pay for almost every aspect of its business. Then on top of it all, the government buys millions of dollars’ worth of unwanted product and pushes this onto our children’s lunch plates. It’s no wonder our children’s health is failing as we continue to feed them what is considered the most contaminated meat product. We are also setting our children up for failing health; chicken is high in cholesterol and saturated fat that contribute to weight problems, heart disease, and diabetes, as well as some cancers. Remember, the first ten years of a child’s life directly impact his or her risk of developing a chronic disease later in life, so establishing healthy childhood eating habits is crucial.

What is a loss for our nation’s children is a huge win for the chicken industry. According to the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, the chicken industry alone saved nearly $1.25 billion in feed costs from 1997 to 2005.
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Feed is the most expensive capital cost of producing chickens. So who paid for the feed? Taxpayers. The report also found that society is currently absorbing environmental costs ranging from $2.55 to $4.00 per hundred pounds of manure for waste treatment beyond lagoon storage. If the amount of water it takes to make hamburgers was not subsidized, Americans would pay thirty-five dollars a pound instead of the enticing dollar menu they are currently paying.

Friends, this practice is the epitome of wasteful and reckless spending of government dollars. Government handouts and bailouts are an extremely contentious political issue. We argue over bailing out the banks and the auto industry, but why, when it comes to agribusiness, are we silenced and complicit in funding a clearly failing venture? Not to mention that when the auto industry received its bailout, it still had to return the money. We highly doubt the chicken industry is about to make good on its IOU.

In fact, the only reasons factory farms have survived and profited are from the expensive government handouts in the form of direct and indirect subsidies and through their ability to escape responsibility for any environmental and health problems. As taxpayers we spend a total of $38 billion each year directly subsidizing meat and dairy. By comparison, actual healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables receive a meager
$17 million.
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Fruits and vegetables don’t impose the health and environmental costs that animal products do; they reduce them.

The biggest subsidy that factory farms depend upon is the crop subsidy. The government gives subsidies to grain and soybean growers when prices fall below the price of production. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Union for Concerned Scientists.
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It is expensive to feed animals that have been shifted from a natural diet of grass to grains. This is why it is no surprise that factory farms like to use disgusting fillers, such as crap, dead animals, contaminated food, and even newspaper for the animals’ food.

How much money are we really talking about in subsidies? Consider this: taxpayers paid $161 billion in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.
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But two-thirds of American farmers never saw a cent. The lion’s share of these subsidies goes to factory farms. Government subsidies are skewed to promote big corporate farms rather than aid the smaller farmers who would need the most help. And let’s be honest, they probably are producing healthier versions of meat and dairy products.

This “free” money results in big-time savings for the factory farms. For instance, between 1997 and 2005, the pork industry saved $947 million per year, or $8.5 billion over eight years.
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Since grain comprises 60 percent of factory farms’ capital-input costs, this subsidy makes factory farming profitable.

But wait, the government gives more. Another direct subsidy is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) payments to help with waste-management costs. EQIP was originally designed to help small farmers. Yet the 2002 Farm Bill opened up payments to livestock production. Big mistake. These factory farms suck up most of the EQIP payments. In a four-year time frame, one thousand factory farms received, at minimum, $35 million in EQIP funding. Today the estimated amount in EQIP funding is between $100 million and $125 million a year. To be clear, this federal subsidy that we pay for is to come
up with better waste management procedures for the volumes of sh!t the animals produce.