Beef, It’s What’s For Dinner?

Fast Food and the US Meat Industry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ethics of Development in a Global Environment

Professor Bruce

March 2003

 

Shayna Nicole Fernandez

Shayna@Stanford.EDU

 

“There was a low-fat craze that came and went. The veggie craze came and went. But beef—that’s part of us. Americans have always liked beef.”

-Ed Figlewics, Owner of E&M Foods (Carpenter, 2000)

 

The United States Beef Industry has had its shares of ups and downs. The Nineties was a devastating decade for the beef industry, as the nation known for its love of burgers and steaks, seemed to have had its fill of red meat. Everyone from government officials to Oprah had a beef with beef. However after a decade of flat sales, and after millions of dollars in marketing and advertisement, national sale projections tells us that beef is back. The United States Beef Industry has been affected by many cultural, social and economic factors. This paper explores the cultural, social and economic factors that have contributed to the variation in beef sales and consumption in the untied states and around the world.

The American culture is the strongest dictating force behind the successes and failures of the beef industry. Our culture, through the efforts of the media, dominates what we like and dislike, and thus what we buy and don’t buy.   When Oprah Winfrey was put on trial for bad-mouthing beef, some saw the trial as outrageous, and few others saw yet another sign of the political influence of the meat industry. In the end, free speech prevailed and an all out pro-beef campaign was ignited to try and repair the reputation that Oprah had given to beef. From relaxed labeling standards, to the lack of food safety regulations for processors passed by Congress, to subsidized grazing lands for cattle ranchers in the West, the perks given to this industry have been enormous. Lobbyists go to great extents to reverse these unfair standards and attempt to reform and enforce stronger beef regulations. Regardless of the significance of these debates, the politics behind the beef industry is hardly realized by the average consumer (Kirk). Prices speak to consumers more than politics when it comes to meat. 

Mark Thomas, vice president of consumer marketing for the Denver-based National Cattleman’s Beef Association (NCBA), recently remarked that “Consumers have a passion for this product and our strategy with our TV and radio campaign is to fuel that consumer passion for beef.” This “campaign” hopes to celebrate beef as the king of all meals with a new, humorous $13 million print and television campaign that makes that big slab of steak the star again. The television and radio advertising again features the voice of actor Sam Elliott delivering the trademark, “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.” Print ads play heavy on short, humorous headlines. One shows a sliced roast with the headline: “All of a sudden, a $2,000 grill seems reasonable.” Another shows a steak done to perfection with the line: “Why space aliens steal our cows.” Jonathan Hoffman, executive creative director at Burnett believes that,  “It’s the king of all foods. It was really important to get to the core appeal that sets beef apart from other meat.” After a growth in the late 1990s, this new campaign comes as per capita beef consumption fell slightly in 2001 and 2000. However, as will be addressed in subsequent issues of this paper, the amount people spend on beef is on the rise. The official starting date of the campaign was this January 13th, 2003.  The campaign will run through Feb. 9, and again later in the year.

A large variety of slaughterhouses exist. Slaughter sites vary from simple slaughter slabs to very modern slaughterhouses or abattoirs. In slaughterhouses the animals are killed and subsequently, blood, hide or skin, intestines and internal organs are removed. The carcass is cut and processed into different meat products through e.g.: cutting, grinding, curing or canning. Large quantities of edible offal, parts that are cut off in dressing the carcass of an animal killed for food, and non-edible offal are produced. Manure, contents of rumen and intestines, hair, bones and feathers, and fat recovered from the wastewater are considered inedible, while blood and liver are considered edible. The majority of these products could be further processed and utilized, as dog food for example, but this is not always the case. In the worst-case scenario, these waste products may end up in the meat we consume. The by-products however are most frequently dumped out or discharged on surface water. Poor quality slaughtering, lack of equipment for processing of by-products, small quantities of by-products and low-end value contribute to increased quantities of waste production from slaughterhouses. Liberal use of water leads to large quantities of wastewater. Direct discharge of untreated wastewater on the surface water or the public sewage system causes bad odors, oxygen poor water and sanitary and environmental problems (Scholler).

In the 1930s, unionization swept through the meatpacking industry, and for decades meat jobs were well paid, came with health insurance and led to stable communities. But that has all changed, according to Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation,” published by Houghton Mifflin.

The industry has consolidated and moved its factories from the city to the U.S. High Plains. In the late 1970s, the top four beef companies controlled about 20 percent of the market; now they control more than 80 percent, Schlosser said. A return to poor working conditions in this period is not only bad for laborers but also ultimately dangerous to consumers, he added.  In 1995, Schlosser, an Atlantic Monthly correspondent, wrote a story about Latin American migrant strawberry laborers in California. Rolling Stone magazine editors read it and asked him to write about fast food in the United States, leading to his new book, which spent six week under review in Houghton Mifflin’s legal department before publication. On arriving in meatpacking towns, Schlosser would meet with migrant workers from Mexico and Guatemala. Many of them were illiterate in English or Spanish, which made it hard for them to work together or organize to make conditions better, he said. Many meat workers are lured to the United States from Mexico by Spanish radio advertisements paid for by U.S. meat companies, which bus the workers to factories in the rural United States.

The dangers that a typical slaughterhouse worker encounters transfers a danger factor into the meat we eat. Meatpacking is the most dangerous job in America. In 1998, the latest available statistics, at least 29.3 percent of meat workers suffered injury or illness, compared to 9.7 percent for the rest of manufacturing, the Labor Department reported. Unlike the chicken processing industry, automation in beef packing plants is limited because cattle come in all shapes and sizes and the knife remains the most important tool.

Companies are under enormous pressure to speed up their lines, which can lead to injuries and dangerous food, Schlosser wrote. “The three meat packing giants -- ConAgra, IBP and Excel (the meat division of Cargill Inc.) -- try to increase their earnings by maximizing the volume of production at each plant.” A former meat factory nurse told Schlosser: “I could always tell the line speed by the number of people with lacerations coming into my office.” Speeding up lines can also mean workers have no time to clean or sharpen their knives, which can lead to repetitive stress injuries and, ultimately, dirty food. These conditions have already led to health risks, particularly in eating hamburger, Schlosser writes, because ground beef is more exposed to dirty working environments than meat chops are.

People who eat fast food are most at risk, since fast food chains, a $110 billion business, buys most of the country’s beef, said Schlosser. Schlosser still however eats at fast food chains, just not hamburgers. Cattle intestines often carry dangerous pathogens such as E. coli and are supposed to be kept away from meat, but faster lines can lead to more intestinal spillage onto meat, he said. Slaughterhouse workers told him they looked forward to packing beef bound for the European Union, because companies slowed the lines then so the meat would pass stricter EU inspections.

Schlosser envisions stronger meatpacking unions as a possible resolution. “There’s no question that in some industries unions have become corrupted and a source of inefficiency and operate more like organized crime than a workers’ rights group,” he said. “But if there was ever an industry in this country that needed more unions, it’s this one.”  McDonald’s announced a stringent new policy on how its suppliers treat live chickens in a campaign called “Be Kind to Hens” two summers go, in response to protests from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “McDonald’s has instituted some strict rules for its suppliers on how livestock should be treated,” Schlosser said, “but what they really need to do is institute strict rules for their suppliers on how human beings should be treated.”

In addition to the sanitation and health hazards of slaughterhouses, the working conditions in American Slaughterhouses are controversial. Upton Sinclair’s classic 1906 novel “The Jungle” called attention to an under-addressed issue that disturbed President Theodore Roosevelt so much that he ordered an independent investigation, which led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.  

Under pressure from major customers like the McDonald’s Corporation, farms and packinghouses are acting to reduce the stress and suffering of the cattle, pigs and chickens they take to slaughter. Meatpackers are better training workers and installing new, safer equipment. Egg farms that supply McDonald’s are being forced to give laying hens more room and give up a practice known as “forced molting,” withholding food and water from the birds so they will lay more eggs.

After McDonald’s set animal-handling standards for its meat suppliers in 1999, packinghouses began changing their practices and helped develop industry training videos. The fast-food chain suspended purchases from two cattle-slaughtering plants that failed its inspections. These plants have not been identified. The slaughterhouse audits and hen standards were a good step and people are urging more, like refusing to purchase pork from farms that confine sows to stalls.

Audits assess whether the animals are frightened or upset during handling and whether they are properly stunned before being bled and skinned. A plant automatically flunks if auditors find an animal is bled while still conscious, and the plants that flunk don’t get business from Mc Donald’s. “Our customers care about social issues. They expect a lot from companies like McDonald’s,” wrote Bob Langert, the company’s senior director of public and community affairs. There’s another a benefit for the companies, too, because stress can result in discolored meat.

The Milan slaughterhouse was among the more humane slaughterhouses in the country long before McDonald’s started doing audits. But Colleen Schultz Kaster, Milan’s vice president of food safety and technical services, said that McDonald’s restaurant’s monitoring has made her job easier in getting approval from company executives for further improvements in the plant. Last year the company became the first U.S. plant to install gassing, a new stunning system that uses carbon dioxide rather than a jolt of electricity to anesthetize pigs. Researchers say gassing is less stressful for the faster-growing but more excitable pigs now being bred.

It is important, therefore, to get the facts on humane slaughter. The Humane Slaughter Act (HAS) requires that animals be rendered insensitive to pain before slaughter. The HSA is under the supervision of the United States Department of Agriculture, but the law has not been consistently enforced since it was passed in 1958. Technically, slaughterhouse production lines should be halted for any violation of this law, but few of them are. Faster production lines, an increase in the number of animals slaughtered, and regulations that shift some oversight responsibilities to slaughterhouses have made federal inspectors hesitant to halt these lines. Federal regulators are even more hesitant to sanction slaughterhouses. As a result, animals are frequently dismembered while still alive and conscious.

In a Washington Post article dated April 10, 2001, “They Die Piece by Piece,” slaughterhouse workers revealed a serious pattern of animal suffering in U.S. slaughterhouses. One worker, whose position is “second-legger,” cuts off hocks from carcasses. He explained that dozens of animals reach him daily while still alive and conscious, even though law should stop the line in each case. The Post reported that USDA records offer snapshots of the extraordinarily inhumane slaughter practices at processing plants:

The USDA is supposed to ensure enforcement, but instead has been criticized for fostering the problems. Even when slaughterhouses are cited for violations, the federal officials take little if any action to assure that remedies are adopted. Some USDA inspectors attribute this to the agency’s lack of record keeping. “Under the new system, the agency no longer tracks the number of humane-slaughter violations its inspectors find each year,” reported the Post.

While most industries have been required to adapt their ways in response to concern for the environment, the cattle ranchers remain a holdout. For decades, cattle and sheep ranchers throughout the West have been permitted to graze their herds on some 270 million acres of our federal estate. They enjoy rates that are well below what the states charge and a fraction of what grazing lands are worth on the open market. Some estimates of the subsidies for grazing on public lands range as high as $250 million annually. Current rates for grazing livestock on public lands are well below what private landholders charge, and below what the states charge for their lands. The current federal fee is about $1.35 for a cow and its calf (or five sheep) to graze for a month. This fee does not even cover program administration costs. And lobbyists for the livestock industry are working hard to block any reform at all. They are pushing legislation that will guarantee the ability of large livestock corporations to continue their subsidized destruction of federal rangeland in perpetuity.

A [SNF1] fair amount of environmental destruction can be linked to the way we pattern our lives. From car use to energy consumption there are ways of living that place more or less of a burden on this poor old planet of ours. A vegetarian diet is well known for its health benefits. Radically lower heart disease and cancer levels have been discovered in vegetarians, and 95 per cent of food poisoning cases occur in animal foods. Studies have shown that cutting back on the meat in your diet can cut premature mortality by up to 20 per cent and that a vegetarian diet can fight osteoporosis and diabetes.

The livestock industry is one of the biggest. 70 per cent of land is used for agriculture, of which up to 85 per cent is used to produce meat. Where we don’t graze livestock, we grow crops to feed to livestock. Agriculture is a big business and yet this land-hungry industry contributes only 1.5 per cent of our gross domestic product.

These huge crowds of animals do more than occupy the land - they pollute it too. Manure, slurry and sewage sludge, full of the heavy metals added to feed, is spread upon the land every day. In the Netherlands they have found themselves with too much shit for too little land, and have declared the country a ‘manure surplus region’. The muck they can spread gives off ammonia - a major cause of acid rain - while the remainder is shipped off and dumped on the developing world. Here in the UK things are almost as bad. The accumulation of heavy metals in the soil is reaching serious proportions, and every year between 2,000 and 4,000 serious water pollution incidents can be linked directly to industrial farming. 

The unwitting farm animals pollute the air too. Muck spreading and slurry storage cause a good deal of discomfort for those caught ‘down wind’ from Old MacDonald’s factory farm. Over 3,500 complaints are received every year about ‘farm smells’. 

After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most common greenhouse gas, and increasing levels of this gas in the atmosphere are worrying experts as it has 11 times the global warming capacity of carbon dioxide. Cows belch and burp and incredible 60 liters of methane every day, and when added to the flatulent excesses of other farm animals, they represent the single largest source of methane in the UK, belching and farting a massive 26 per cent of all emissions. 

Meat production is a smelly, polluting business, but it doesn’t end there. More land needed for more cattle means the continued destruction of otherwise valuable wildlife habitats. Though we’ve long since lost most of our forest here in Britain, we still have our hedgerows, yet over 52,000 km of hedgerow have been lost since 1984 through agricultural expansion. Beyond our shores, an area of tropical rainforest the size of England is destroyed every year, in regions like South America the majority is cleared for cattle ranching, even though the soil is virtually useless once the forests have gone. For the four or five short years that the soil will sustain pasture, the ranchers will only manage to stock their range with one head of cattle per hectare. 

The meat or fish on our plates is doing more than just damaging our land and forests. With nets large enough to capture 12 Boeing 747 jets and radar planes to track shoals of fish, huge factory trawlers are decimating the last few remaining stocks of fish. Of the world’s 22 major fisheries all but two have reached their limits and 7 are in serious decline. In the North Sea we take out half of all the fish stocks every year, dragging thousands of dolphins, whales and sea birds with them.

In our rivers and estuaries, fish producers have adopted the techniques of the factory farm, and are caging tens of thousands of salmon and trout in hideously cramped conditions. Packed in together, the fish are an ideal breeding ground for disease and so pesticides and antibiotics have to be added to the water, some of which have been linked to cancer in humans. 

These large, static fish populations have more than just cages in common with the factory farm. Pollution from sewage is just as worrying on fish farms; a single ton of trout can create a pollution load equivalent to the untreated sewage of 100-200 people. 

There is, of course, an alternative. A vegetarian diet is not just better for you and the 900 animals you would normally eat during the course of your lifetime. Vegetarians can exist on around 30 per cent of the agricultural land used to produce meat. Feeding perfectly good crops to animals is an inefficient and shortsighted way of producing protein - 10kg of vegetable protein to produce just one kg of meat! Using less land, more sensibly could mean fewer pesticides and fertilizers and more land available for wildlife. The developing world could stop shipping us valuable grain for our livestock, and wouldn’t have to deal with the shit they produce.

A vegetarian diet will cut out the antibiotics, growth promoters and chemicals found in meat, and would go a long way to reducing the pollutants in our drinking water. You’ll be healthier almost immediately, and you’ll be making sure that your little piece of the planet stretches just that little bit further (Fox).

Nearly 200 years ago, Thomas Robert Malthus observed a fundamental difference between human beings and the land: We increase; it does not. Malthus saw this as a harsh and inevitable natural limit to population growth. The ensuing two centuries, however, failed to support his thesis. The industrial revolution and the emergence of scientific agriculture enabled population to rise six fold while harvests multiplied even more. Today the debate over the future security of the world’s food supply still rages, one side arguing that natural resource constraints may well limit population growth, the other arguing that human ingenuity is spurred by that growth and inevitably finds or makes substitutes for scarce natural resources.

World Population and Arable Land, 1700 - 1990

Over the past three centuries, world population has increased eightfold while the amount of arable land has increased only fivefold. More intensive use of arable land has allowed food production to keep pace with population growth despite the slower expansion of arable land. There is limited potential, however, to expand arable land much further. Continued population growth could result in unsustainable demands on the earth’s agricultural land and water resources in the coming decades.

The following data, prepared by the U.S.D.A. & U.S.M.E.F., shows that the U.S. is conquering new markets. Beef exports more than doubled from 1988 to 1997.

U.S. beef exports from 1988 to 1997

 

 

From just 88,000 tons in 1980, exports now exceed 1.3 million tons/year, and they account for one in every eight dollars the cattle business takes in. Overall, beef exports total 2.7 billion lbs./year. Pull out exports, and that much extra beef would go into the U.S. domestic market. Moreover, foreign markets snap up cuts like short plates and liver that don’t have much U.S. demand. For U.S. beef producers, that means higher cattle prices than what the domestic market alone could provide, says Wendy Radokovich of the U.S. Meat Export Federation.

U.S. exports also largely feed Mexico. A total of 76.2% of the meat imported into Mexico comes from the U.S. Gustavo Torres Flores, president of Mexico’s National Livestock Federation, says the U.S. Meat Export Federation’s aggressive marketing has U.S. beef displacing homegrown product in many supermarkets and restaurants. Grupo PM, a Mexican marketing firm, says the winning U.S. approach is to use branding, and each U.S. product carries its own label. Meanwhile, domestic Mexican beef continues to sell in bulk. Unless Mexico changes its merchandising methods, it will never be able to compete with U.S. products, Grupo PM says. Overall, U.S. agricultural products cover up to 40% of Mexico’s food needs, a fact attributed to the variety, convenience and price of the products (Levenstein).

Pick up most foods at your grocery store and you’ll find a label that tells you calories, fat, cholesterol, and more, but you won’t find this on most packages of steak, chops, hamburger, or other fresh meat or poultry. That’s because packaged and processed foods are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but “fresh meat” is produced and packaged under the rules of the USDA. And the USDA doesn’t require nutritional labeling.

Consumers and health groups have criticized this patchwork quilt of regulation and supervision. It’s particularly troublesome that the U.S. government gives preferential labeling treatment to the meat industry since most of the fat, saturated fat and cholesterol that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year is hidden in that meat. And, even more troubling is that animal feed falls under the jurisdiction of the FDA because most animal feed is packed with hormones, steroids, antibiotics, and other drugs.

All measurements taken from 100 gram servings

 

Protein

Cholesterol

Saturated
Fats

Total Fat

Calories

% Calories
From Fat

           Fish-1

22.9g

47mg

.104g

.81g

105

6.9%

  Chicken-2

31.0g

85mg

1.0g

3.5g

165

19.5%

     Pork-3

29.3g

86mg

3.4g

9.7g

212

41%

  Beef-4

25.9g

88mg

8.5g

21.5 g

305

63.6%

Beefalo-5

30.7g

58mg

2.7g

6.3g

188

30.3%

All figures taken from the USDA Nutrient Database for standard release 11 (September 1996)

 

Some are suggesting that one of the reasons the meat industry gets favorable perks and legislation is because of their powerful political influence over lawmakers. According to a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity, the meat industry has created one of Washington’s most effective influence machines, partly by recruiting federal lawmakers and congressional aides for its lobbying juggernaut. The report found House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Republican Senators Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas ranked among the top recipients. Gramm received $611,484 from meat industry groups between 1987 and 1996, followed by Hutchison with $409,178 and Gingrich with $232,239. Current Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, who joined the Clinton administration after representing Kansas in Congress, accepted $37,540 in campaign contributions from slaughterhouses while he was in elected office, the report said. And although today’s headlines are filled with talk of lobbying and campaign finance reform, the enormous political influence of the meat industry has gone largely unnoticed.

While industry promotion from car makers or computer manufacturers would be seen as pure advertising, the beef and dairy industries enjoy the ability to aggressively advertise their products while being seen as doing public service for the health of our country. For example, in December 1997, The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) visited national food editors and writers of some of the country’s largest food and lifestyle magazines, providing up-to-date information on beef. The results are paying off -generating more than 7,050 positive beef stories that reached into homes 1.24 billion times during one year according to NCBA statistics (Rifkin). The media overall has largely influenced the countries perceptions and understandings about the meat industry.

The U.S. flavor and fragrance materials industry, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), is an international industry with U.S. firms operating throughout the world and foreign companies operating subsidiaries in the United States. Shipments of flavor and fragrance materials in the United States were estimated to have been valued at more than $2.5 billion in 1997. The ITC released a report on the thousands of flavor and fragrance products imported into and exported from the United States. This report basically said that U.S. consumption of flavor and fragrance materials increased from $2.1 billion in 1993 to $2.3 billion in 1997. U.S. production satisfies a significant share of domestic demand for these products, although the ratio of imports to consumption increased from 27 percent in 1993 to nearly 35 percent in 1997. As a major world consumer of the products that incorporate flavor and fragrance materials, the United States imports a significant amount of these products that are not available domestically. The United States relies primarily upon a wide range of foreign suppliers, including Japan, the Netherlands, France, India, Switzerland, Ireland, China and Brazil, to supplement domestic production. U.S. imports of these products have increased by approximately 45 percent during 1993-97. U.S. exports of flavor and fragrance materials increased by about 38 percent during 1993-97; major markets for U.S. products are Canada and Mexico. The largest individual export market increases were seen in Canada, Mexico, and several Western European markets, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands (Industry and Trade Summary: Flavor and Fragrance).

When people aren’t eating beef, what are they eating?  As discussed previously, beef is a good source of many vitamins and minerals, but in terms of protein, it seems as though Americans turned to eating poultry. During the years 1993-1997, the United States was the world’s leading producer and exporter of poultry and likely will dominate the world market in the future according to reports the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Between 1993 and 1997, the U.S. poultry industry expanded very quickly, largely due to a boom in exports. During the period, exports more than doubled, and averaged 26 percent annual growth. There was also a 5 percent growth in annual production. Export growth likely will continue but there is some economic uncertainty in Asia and the Russia both major U.S. markets.  Brazil, Thailand, China, and the European Union also are competitive international markets for the United States Poultry trade.

Endowed with a promising future, state-of-the-art production technology, low feed costs, and advantageous market structures, the U.S. poultry industry is among the most efficient in the world. The average annual value of U.S. poultry in 1993-1997 was about $15 billion, while the industry employed approximately 230,000 persons. The U.S. imports of poultry are negligible, at less than 0.5 percent of consumption while exports remain high with main markets including Russia, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, and Japan. There has also been substantial U.S. export growth from 8 percent in 1993 to 17 percent of U.S. production in 1997.

Furthermore, these figures on World poultry trade are restricted by both tariff and non-tariff measures. For example, tariffs on U.S. product exported to Russia, Japan, and Canada are in excess of 20 percent, while non-tariff barriers, such as sanitary certification, veterinary equivalence, and labeling requirements, represent major obstacles for U.S. exports (Williams).

The principal U.S. consumers for poultry products include households, restaurants, institutions, and producers of further processed products such as breaded chicken fillets and nuggets, as previously mentioned in the context of cultural influences on the beef industry.  Changes in consumer incomes and retail prices for poultry products relative to other meats are the principal factors influencing the demand for poultry products as well. Other factors affecting consumption include advertising, promotion, and concern about health and nutrition. (Industry and Trade Summary: Poultry). The Chic-Fil-A campaign for example, “Eat Mor Chikin,” was an advertisement that used a comical approach to get people’s attention, increase chicken sales in competition with rising beef sales, and humor the American public. It was successful in achieving all of these goals.

 

(Source: Chick-Fil-A Website: http://www.chickfila.com/)

 

Despite the promising projections previously discussed about beef, there are still some who feel that the rise in chicken consumption in the United States will continue to increase while beef consumption falls over the next several years. Randall W. Goins, Chairman of the National Chicken Council for example believes that beef is expensive and that cattle herds are become reduced in numbers. He believes that the rising price of beef will turn off consumers and reduce sales. Goins cited statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that prices for nearly all types of beef products early that year were at their highest points in the last ten years. The National Chicken Council also released the results of a survey showing that chicken outscored beef and pork on every attribute explored in the survey, which included versatility, taste, ease of preparation, being healthful and nutritious, price, and consistency of quality (Williams).

Percentages of consumers who agreed that certain attributes were true of chicken, beef and pork:

Attribute

Chicken

Beef

Pork

Can be prepared in many ways

98

96

90

Tastes good

95

92

88

Is easy to prepare

94

90

81

Is healthful and nutritious

93

76

69

Is reasonably priced

86

62

71

Is consistent in quality

73

59

65

The survey of 1,008 randomly selected adults was taken by telephone March 2-4, 2001, by Bruskin Research of Edison, New Jersey.

 

“Chicken’s strong showing in the survey helps confirm that consumers have great confidence in a variety of chicken’s attributes,” said William P. Roenigk, NCC senior vice president and chief economist. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association recently released figures showing that Americans consumed 82 pounds of chicken per capita in 2000 while they consumed 69.5 pounds of beef. Goins further noted that consumption of chicken has steadily increased from 47 pounds per person in 1980, while beef consumption has dropped from 77 pounds in that year.

Goins also predicted that the chicken industry would export 25 percent of its production by the year 2005, up from 18 percent in 2000, as foreign demand continues to build for poultry, especially leg meat. He said this would help hold down the retail price of white meat in the United States by addressing the domestic imbalance of demand, since white meat is more popular than leg meat domestically while leg meat is more popular overseas.

The future of the United States Meat Industry is uncertain, but one thing that can be deduced is that no one type of meat is always going to be popular or in favor. The cultural and social implication on the market are hugely influential and can change the preference of consumers from one day to the next. Meat is a part of the American diet, and it will be a long time before the American diet excludes it from the menu, if ever it does. Hopefully though, after reading this paper, that slab of meat on your plate will get a second thought before it is consumed. The United States meat industry is an industry that may vary from time to time, but one thing is for sure: meat it is here to stay, and consumption and exports are sure to increase and endure.

Works Cited

Carpenter, Dave. “Beef Is Back.” 13 March 2000. The Associated Press National

Cattlemen’s Beef Association: <http://beef.org/>

Fox, Nicols. It was probably something you ate:  A Practical Guide to Avoiding and

Surviving Foodbourne Illness. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Gardner, Timothy. “Working Conditions in American Slaughterhouses.” Feb. 27, 2001.

Industry and Trade Summary: Poultry. “United States Remains the World’s Leading

Poultry Producer.” USITC Publication 3148, News Release 98-095. 8 Dec. 1998.

Industry and Trade Summary: Flavor and Fragrance Materials. “ITC Issues Overview of

U.S. Flavor and Fragrance Materials Industry.” USITC Publication 3162, News Release 99-032. 17 March 1999.

Kirk, Jim. “Beef is Back.” Chicago Tribune. January 10, 2003

<www.chicago.tribune.com>

Kroc, Ray, and Robert Anderson. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonalds.

<http://www.buyandhold.com/bh/en/education/history/2001/mcdonalds.html>

Levenstein, Harvey. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in America. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Richards, John F. The Earth as Transformed by Human Action; Population Reference

Bureau. Food and Agriculture Organization

Rifkin, Jeremy. Beyond the Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. New York:

Penguin 1998.

Schlosser, Eric. “Fast Food Nation.” New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.

- - - .    Interview with Shayna Nicole Fernandez. Stanford, California. 6 March 2003.

- - - .   “The Dark Side of the All American Meal.” Stanford University: Human Biology

Department. Storey Theme House. Stanford, California. 5 March 2003.

Warrick, Joby. “They Die Piece by Piece.” Washington Post. April 10, 2001.

Williams, Willard F., and Thomas T. Stout. Economics of Livestock-Meat Industry.

New York: MacMillan, 1999.

 

 

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