THE FAITHFUL CONSUMER April 06
…connecting faith and the environment
By Sarah Streed
Food is central to our lives. Without food, we don’t live. But how much do we pay attention to our food? With this month’s column, I’m going to start a series of columns on food and how what we eat affects us and our environment.
Our food system consists of growers, laborers, labor unions, distributors, processors, retailers, input suppliers, land, capital, consumers, restaurants, government policy, non-governmental organizations, even wildlife.
These all keep our food industry going—a huge, complex global collective of diverse businesses that together supply most of the food we eat. Only subsistence farmers—the farmers who survive on what they grow—can say they are outside the reach of the modern food industry. Can you or I survive on what you grow? Of course not. So you and I are part and parcel of the modern food industry.
When you think of a farm, you probably think of something like a child’s toy farm, with the barn, cow, a few sheep and a tractor out front. Some of the family farms today are like this; however, most of the farming today is done on farms that are factory farms, or corporate agriculture and agribusinesses. These large corporate centrally-managed farms are well-capitalized, large-scale, and full of high technology. They approach agriculture as a business enterprise with the main concern being the bottom line.
So who are these factory farms? Well, they have names like Archer, Daniels Midland
Corporation (ADM), ConAgra, Tyson, and Cargill.
ADM is a $500 billion a year company. It is the world’s number one grain and corn syrup company, but it also has over 270 processing plants where it processing soybeans, corn, cocoa, wheat, peanuts, rice, canola, barley, sunflower seeds and cottonseed. It also has over 2,000 barges, 800 tractor-trailers and 19,500 railcars. Here are just a few of the names of ADM products:
Flour (ADM is the number one milling company in the U.S.)
Baking powder
Cooking oil
Margarine
Soymilk
Protein bars
Fructose (as in high fructose corn syrup)
ADM Alliance Nutrition (feeds for everything from cows and horses to deer and goats)
Gasohol from ethanol
Non-petroleum oils for paint and printer’s ink
Plastics
In 1996 ADM pleaded guilty of conspiring with Japanese and Korean companies to fix the price of lysine (a feed additive) and citric acid (a food additive). Three ADM top officials, including the vice chairman, went to prison in 1999. In 2002 ADM was sued for fixing the price of corn syrup with Cargill and A.E. Stanley Manufacturing. The plaintiffs claimed they were overcharged by $1.4 billion. Currently, ADM is facing over two dozen civil suits for price fixing lysine, corn syrup and others.
ConAgra is another agribusiness. When ConAgra purchased Monfort meatpacking a few years ago, ConAgra became the biggest meatpacker in the world. It is also the largest foodservice supplier in North America, the number-one producer of French fries, the largest sheep and turkey processor in the U.S., the largest distributor of agricultural chemicals, the second-largest manufacturer of frozen food, the second-largest flour miller, the third-largest chicken and pork producer, the leading seed producer, the leading feed producer.
Professor William Heffernan from the University of Missouri uses the picture of an hourglass to illustrate the U.S. agricultural economy.
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 that takes place between the two.
The ten largest US based multinational corporations account for over half of the food and beverage sales in the US.
The benefits of industrial agriculture are cheap and plentiful food, big profits for chemical and agriculture industries, and increased food being shipped to other countries, as in currently the U.S. exports 60 percent of its wheat crop and 30 percent of its soybeans. But there are also costs, one of which is the loss of the family farmer. I will examine other costs in future columns.
April’s tip: Support local agriculture in your food lifestyle. Buy from the Farmer’s Market, Community Supported Agriculture, organic food sections, or the local grocery stores as opposed to chain supermarkets.
Sarah Streed is a board member of the Wisconsin Interfaith Climate & Energy Campaign (WICEC) and runs Write Stuff Works (www.writestuffworks.com ) a writing business. She lives in Stoughton, Wisconsin with her husband and children. Email smstreed@sbcglobal.net
All rights reserved by Sarah Streed.
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