True costs of cheap meat

[Guest guest]

The cost of steak

Factory farms produce cheap meat, until you consider the rivers of

sewage, the contaminants and the superbugs.

By Paul Roberts

August 23, 2008

 

If you are searching for signs that today's high food prices won't

last, the latest report on the meat industry isn't promising. In

May, a distinguished panel of scientists and meat industry officials

concluded that the current " factory farm " method for mass-producing

meat poses so many threats to public health -- from contaminated

water supplies to deadly epidemics of E. coli E. coli -- that the

whole system needs to go. The good news: Even meat companies agree

that change is unavoidable. The bad news: Replacing factory farms

with something " sustainable " likely means an end to 50 years of

falling meat prices.

 

The report, from a Pew Charitable Trusts commission, takes a hard

look at " confined animal feeding operations, " or CAFOs, which

produce most of the U.S. meat supply. These massive facilities house

tens of thousands of cattle, hogs and chickens and generate not just

huge amounts of meat but rivers of sewage, clouds of contaminated

dust and nearly a fifth of all greenhouse gases.

 

The crowded, often unsanitary conditions promote disease, which has

led to the overuse of antibiotics and to a class of superbugs that

are resistant to those same antibiotics. Even the modern corn-based

livestock diet causes problems. It makes meat fattier and may have

helped some strains of the E. coli bacteria evolve from benign

microbe to one of the deadliest pathogens in the food supply. And,

of course, to grow all the grain we now feed our livestock, we've

converted much of the Midwest into a huge corn and soybean

plantation.

 

The only solution, the report concludes, is to replace the giant

factory farms with models such as " free-range " operations that give

animals more space and use different methods of feeding, sewage

disposal and medical treatment. And that's where things get tricky,

because most of the practices the industry is being asked to abandon

have been pivotal in making meat cheap.

 

For example, grazing cattle on pasture grass would probably mean

less disease and leaner meat, not to mention happier cows. But

because the mega-farms confine livestock specifically to restrict

animals from moving (and thus burning calories unnecessarily), and

because corn is more calorie-dense than grass, CAFO-raised animals

fatten faster and thus more cheaply.

 

Likewise, reducing antibiotics in meat production, though it may

improve our health, will deprive the industry of the meat equivalent

of Miracle Gro.

 

Because small, steady doses of antibiotics kill the low-grade

infections that normally plague livestock, dosed animals spend fewer

calories fighting infection and thus have more calories available

for building muscle and bone. When fed antibiotics, livestock can

grow 25% faster on the same intake of feed -- a critical point,

given that feed is a meat companies' biggest cost.

 

Of course, we've long known that our meat miracle wasn't quite a

free lunch. Yet we were willing to overlook the negatives because

CAFOs made meat so abundant and cheap. Since 1960, for example, U.S.

poultry output has jumped sevenfold while the price per pound,

adjusted for inflation, has fallen by two-thirds. Prices for beef

and pork also have fallen precipitously. And as we exported CAFOs to

other countries, the entire world began to benefit from falling meat

prices and rising dietary standards.

 

But as the downsides of factory farming have grown too large to

ignore, we've had to admit that our meat is cheap only because we

don't count all the costs: Taxpayers spend $4.1 billion cleaning up

livestock sewage leaks and $2.5 billion treating salmonella. All

told, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, CAFOs may be

costing taxpayers $38 billion a year -- costs that aren't reflected

in the retail price of meat.

 

If cheap meat is an illusion, will meat produced under better

conditions necessarily be more expensive? Probably, even figuring in

the savings in environmental and public health costs.

 

Today, ground beef from grass-fed cattle -- which would meet the

goals in the Pew report -- sells for about a $1 a pound more than

hamburger from a CAFO cow, while grass-fed beefsteaks are $7 more.

Poultry and pork raised " sustainably " are also more expensive than

their factory-farmed counterparts.

 

Some of that price difference will narrow in the future as meat

producers refine a post-CAFO production model; even now, a small hog

farm, if efficiently managed, can boast lower per-pig costs than the

average mega-farm 10 times its size. The Pew commission argues that

if taxpayers are willing to support small and medium producers with

incentives such as accelerated tax depreciation and tax credits, the

cost to consumers might be further reduced.

 

But don't expect to end CAFOs and keep super-cheap meat. Sustainably

fed animals take longer to reach slaughter weight, thus reducing a

farmer's annual output. Likewise, shifting from confined operations

to a " free-range " model will require more land, at a time when farm

acres are already in short supply. All of which means we won't be

able to produce nearly as much meat as we used to, and a smaller

meat supply means higher prices.

 

Paying more isn't what consumers want to hear just now. But when it

comes to food, we're beginning to learn that cheaper may not always

be better.

 

Paul Roberts' newest book, " The End of Food, " was published in June.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-roberts23-

2008aug23,0,1032529.story