Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (35 page)

Enter a sympathetic Congress.

“I am concerned about the American cattlemen,” Senator Steve Symms, a Republican from Idaho, told his colleagues in 1985. They were hashing out the latest incarnation of the Farm Bill—which sets government policy on agriculture and food—and Symms came from cattle country. “The cowboys are one group of farmers who do not come into Washington and have their hand in the federal trough. I do not know the answer, but I do have a great deal of concern for the American cattlemen, and I think they deserve our heartiest congratulations. I guess one thing we could all do is encourage everyone to go buy some beefsteak—that might help them as much as anything. We could also drink a couple extra glasses of milk and do our part to help get rid of the dairy surplus.”

As it turned out, the dairy cow buyout failed to make much of a dent in the overproduction of milk, since the dairies simply stocked up on new cows, and the ongoing overproduction of milk went toward making more and more cheese. But the ranchers would still get some relief by way of the 1985 Farm Bill. In the short run, the legislation required the Department of Agriculture to purchase 200 million pounds of beef over the next two years for distribution to the needy. Over the long term, however, the Farm
Bill had another, more ingenious solution to the surplus problem. It created a system through which meat and cheese producers could aggressively market their products directly to the entire American public and thus encourage the consumption of beef like never before.

Marketing had never been one of the beef and dairy industry’s strong points. To the extent that they understood the power of marketing, they quarreled among themselves too much to develop any kind of organized effort. The ranchers and dairy operators needed help, and Congress had just the solution in mind.
It created two marketing programs, one for beef and one for milk, and it put the Secretary of Agriculture in charge of them both.

The programs became known as “checkoffs,” so named for the scheme put in place to raise the money needed to pay for the marketing. Here is how it worked: the nintey-thousand-plus milk cow owners were required to pay fifteen cents to the checkoff for every 100 pounds—about 12 gallons—of milk they produced. For beef, the levy was based on transactions: Every time a cow was sold, such as from ranch to feedlot or from feedlot to slaughterhouse, the seller was required to pay one dollar into the marketing program for beef. Not everyone liked this idea of marketing beef as an undifferentiated mass. Some ranchers view their beef as superior, which they understandably want to promote through their own, specifically tailored advertising. When ranchers were asked to approve the creation of the checkoff program, one in five voted against it, but it wasn’t enough: The majority cast its lot with the Department of Agriculture, so everyone was required to pay the levy.

The dollars for marketing beef added up to more than $80 million a year, and over the years, the total money raised has topped $2 billion. That is, essentially, $2 billion for selling America on more beef, compared with the $6.5 million the USDA’s nutrition center gets each year to nudge Americans in the other direction—of cutting back, not only on fat but on sugar and salt as well. It hasn’t been a fair fight.

The money arrived in the nick of time. Public consumption of beef had been trending downward since 1976: The average person’s
yearly consumption
of red meat slipped from 94 pounds to 65 pounds, with hamburger accounting for about half of all beef consumed. At the same time, Americans were eating more and more chicken and, to a lesser extent, fish—both of which have far less saturated fat.

This was a real source of concern for beef, but with its new war chest it began mapping out a strategy to maneuver around the public’s concerns. It spent some of the money on market research and found that beef faced the same problem that cheese used to have. People had been stuck eating cheese by itself, or with crackers, until Kraft—supported by the dairy industry’s marketing program—got the idea of transforming the public’s concept of cheese, which sent sales and consumption through the roof. Why couldn’t beef do the same thing?

Mark Thomas, a biochemist, was working for a research and development arm of the beef industry when this lightbulb went on. His unit didn’t have a fancy research laboratory, so it set up a contest to solicit beef-as-an-ingredient ideas from all manner of potential inventors, from cattle growers to grocery manufacturers large and small. The mission: put beef into a prepared and packaged meal that needed only to be heated before being served.

“I thought it was a dumb idea,” Thomas told me. “We’d have these products sent to our test kitchen in Chicago and then presented to a group of judges who would pick five, with a top prize of $50,000. But we put all our advertising weight behind this new category. Fast forward to today, and you will find five to eight brands of ready-to-cook entrees that use beef, from Tyson and others. Hormel has a huge selection, Tips & Gravy, Pot Roast, that you microwave for fifteen minutes. I serve a pot roast to guests, and they think my wife made it.”

With the rise of chicken and its huge success in McNugget-type convenience foods, the industry then put its money to work creating finger foods using beef. A team of food technicians fiddled with beef every which way they could, wrapping it in pancakes with eggs and cheese, adding cheese to it and wrapping it around a stick, and stuffing it into a hollowed-out roll that had the added feature of standing upright on the plate, for a
little dining pizzazz. These technicians worked for a Denver-based group known as the Cattlemen’s Beef Board, which was funded by checkoff monies and had 106 members, all of whom were appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture. On its website, the board said that the impetus for all these finger-beef foods was the demise of the American family dinner, which, while lamentable, should be viewed as an opportunity.
“We’ve done a lot of research over the last couple of years regarding today’s youth and today’s adult consumer, and especially with the adult consumer,” a beef board official said in one promotional video. “They are on the go, and the same with kids, they are rushed as well. They are going to school, to various practices, to after-school events, and then spend a lot of time doing homework, and we ate at the dinner table every night, and we understand that today’s consumers don’t do that necessarily. So we try to make new convenient products that fit into their lifestyles. Based on the research, with people on the go, we tried to make these products as easy and convenient as possible and as portable as possible.”

If Americans were intent on snacking their way through the day, beef would be there for them. In this effort, the beef industry discovered it had a natural ally in dairy. They combined forces to develop recipes that used both beef and cheese, and worked together to
promote more fast food sales as well through campaigns like “Double Cheeseburger Days,” which launched in 2006, targeting college students. The beef industry’s own analysis has found that the checkoff program has been boosting the consumption of beef between 3 and 5 percent each year since its founding in 1986.

As it was promoting new convenience foods that used beef, the beef marketing program also went in the other direction. It developed new cuts of beef that had less fat, including one called the Flat Iron, which was taken from the animal’s shoulder. Today, the beef industry says it has at least
twenty-nine cuts of beef that meet the government guidelines for being lean: 4.5 grams of saturated fat in a serving, which, remember, is still nearly a third of the daily recommended maximum. It also rolled out an intense lobbying campaign that sought to dispel the notion that beef was
inherently fatty and, at the same time, emphasize its nutrients, such as zinc and vitamin B12. “Beyond beef’s leanness and favorable fatty acid profile, beef’s bundle of nutrients is beneficial for growing, developing and maintaining overall health through all life’s stages, from gestation to the senior years,” the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, an affiliate of the beef board, wrote to the USDA’s nutrition panel during the deliberations for the 2010 nutrition guide.

Behind the scenes, however, the industry has struggled with these leaner cuts. Some suffer greatly from having less fat, with an inferior mouthfeel and tough chewing. One of the industry’s solutions to this has been to soften up the muscular tissue in the processing plant by running the leanest meat through a device that deploys rows of steel needles or blades to pierce the meat, in what is known as “mechanical tenderization”; some 50 million pounds of meat is currently being softened in this fashion each month. Another method is to treat the meat with a briny solution that softens the tissue.
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One of the most successful approaches to marketing lean beef turned out to be the most controversial. It didn’t involve needles or brine or merely trimming fat off with a knife. It involved ammonia. This created the leanest, least expensive, most-commonly eaten burger America had yet seen—that is, until the public caught on and the lean, ammonia-processed beef came to be known as “pink slime.”

This material—which the USDA preferred to call
“lean finely textured beef”—is produced by taking pieces of beef from the fattiest parts of the cow—ranging up to 70 percent fat—that has previously been diverted to pet food or tallow. The material is then put through a high-speed centrifuge that spins much of the fat off, leaving a mash that has the virtue of being quite lean, with all but ten percent of the fat removed. It is then
formed into 30-pound blocks, frozen, and shipped to meat plants, where the blocks are combined with other beef trimmings to make hamburger.

The defatted beef became popular with the companies that make hamburger for another reason:
It was 15 percent cheaper than the naturally lean meat from South America, where ranchers raise their cattle on grass, forgoing the fat-inducing process of corn feeding that is typical in the American beef industry. The money to be saved was significant, and not only to grocers and restaurant chains like McDonald’s, who bought hamburger made with the defatted beef. The USDA itself realized that it could shave up to three cents off the price of every pound of hamburger it was buying for school lunch programs.
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In the early 1990s, the USDA gave the green light to its burger suppliers to start using the defatted processed beef as a component in ground beef.
The largest producer was a company called Beef Products Inc., based in South Dakota, but it had an additional step in its production that would prove to be its undoing. Beef Products Inc. began treating its processed meat with ammonia gas to kill any pathogens that might be present. This threat of contamination was more of an issue with the defatted material because it came from parts of the cow carcass most exposed to the feces that harbor
E. coli
. Meat gets tainted by
E. coli
in the slaughterhouse when these feces accidently get smeared on the meat during butchering. Adding the ammonia—which also gave the material a pink hue that was brighter than normal beef—was tricky. The company’s experiments in methodology led to cases where the ammonia either failed to kill pathogens or tainted the meat with its powerful smell. In 2003, officials in Georgia returned nearly 7,000 pounds to the company after cooks who were making meatloaf for state prisoners detected a “very strong odor of ammonia” in 60-pound blocks of the trimmings.
“It was frozen, but you could still smell
ammonia,” Charles Tant, a Georgia agriculture department official, told me. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Nevertheless, ammonia was soon being used as an additive in an estimated 70 percent of the hamburger sold by grocery stores and restaurants.
^a

Disturbed by the ammonia, officials in the USDA’s school lunch program fought to have its presence disclosed on the labeling but were overruled by others at the agency who were persuaded that ammonia should be viewed as just one of the many chemicals the industry uses in processing meat that are not subject to public disclosure. But the issue didn’t go away. In 2002, a USDA microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, sent an email message to colleagues in which he wrote,
“I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.” In this same email, he called the processed beef “pink slime.”

Zirnstein’s “pink slime” moniker became public when I
first published it in 2009, having obtained his email in the course of reporting on Beef Products Inc.’s struggles with the ammonia treatment. The article I wrote set in motion a cascade of events. The company vowed to improve its methodology, the USDA pledged to step up its scrutiny, and some parents—in Manhattan and Boston—contacted me to say that they had begun pressing their school districts to stop serving burger that used the defatted material. Far more significantly, one of the biggest users, McDonald’s, would initiate a slow-burn change in corporate policy that led, in 2011, to the chain discontinuing use of the defatted beef in the hamburger it served. Beef Products Inc. staunchly defended its product as safe and nutritious, but when word of the move by McDonald’s got out, a surge of public scrutiny led to a plunge in Beef Products’ sales.
^b

And still, the USDA tried to vouch for pink slime, using an argument that the meat industry had been wielding for years in its effort to get Americans to eat more beef. Sure, the stuff was cheap, and yes, the ammonia was making it safe to eat. But what made it vital to the U.S. food supply system was something else: its low level of fat. This made it a crucial ally in the war against childhood obesity, as the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, said in a press conference on March 28, 2012.
“That’s one of the reasons we have made it
a staple of the school lunch program,” he said. “We are concerned about obesity levels, and this is an opportunity for us to ensure that youngsters are receiving a product that is lean and contains less fat.”

By then, however, the meat industry was starting to worry that pink slime had opened up a Pandora’s box of issues with the potential to erode the sale of all meat. Experts were quoted saying that a tipping point may have been reached in which people in all walks of life, without regard to their ability to pay more money for food, were becoming aware of, and anxious about, what went into manufactured foods. As Phil Lempert, a food industry consultant, told one reporter,
“I think we are going to see a whole new concern and interest in what’s in our food and I think that is just going to build.”