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Industrialized meat has devastating impacts. Can ‘good meat’ exist?

In this excerpt from ‘Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat,’ Chloe Sorvino covers the challenges of changing our food system.

Industrialized meat has devastating impacts. Can ‘good meat’ exist?

[Source Photo: kcline/Getty Images]

BY Kristin Toussaint5 minute read

There are dozens of factors to consider when designing a system where good meat exists. Good meat is not just meat that is made in a way that does not directly worsen climate change, although that is a crucial element. It must be good for all the other parts of the system too: the animals, the workers, the producers, food waste, land use, biodiversity, the nutrition and health of the community around production.

I’m not going so far as to say everyone must be a vegan. Bill Gates, in his 2021 book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, suggests that everyone in wealthy nations should eat only synthetic meat. Far less meat should be consumed overall, and meat from cramped factories that pollute must come to an end. But the leading alternatives, meat and meatless, are still double the price of industrial meat, and meat from livestock that graze and rotate on pasture has a critical role to play in our future, if it can become more accessible.

That’s not to say that voting with your dollars is a panacea. Consumers have been trained to believe spending power can signal changing preferences and thereby shifts in demand. In reality, billionaires’ whims are far more influential when it comes to deciding what food people can buy. The government’s power to rein in corporate greed is probably strongest of all, yet the most rarely used. There is some power in sourcing food with a strict ethical code, especially if it’s supporting alternative systems with fewer brokers and middlemen. The problem is figuring out which purveyors are worth the time.

That’s harder today than ever before, because the lines between what’s ethical to support and what’s not have blurred, almost beyond the point of recognition: There’s now Amazon-owned Whole Foods, venture-backed subscription services, and frothy IPOs turned popular household brands. How do you make sure not only that your vote gets placed but that the message you want it to convey is heard clearly?

It is only through collaboration between a network of farmers, processors, manufacturers, retail and food services (like restaurants, cafeterias, and hospitals), and consumers that we can combat the devastating impact of industrialized meat—on climate change, human rights, hunger, health—and avoid a tragic future in which only a few powerful players control the entire industry, where more price hikes, human health threats, commodification, and inhumane working conditions abound.

A growing number of eaters have decided to stop right here and go vegan. Others are experimenting as so-called flexitarians or reducetarians—opting to go meatless with mushrooms, beans, tofu, or often with an array of venture-backed brands. Yet another group is limiting their meat consumption to only the most ethical meat, like bison or certain operations with livestock raised on pastures under rotational management. Some of these alternative challengers show promise, but most are not set up to effectively make a dent in overall industrial meat consumption. A certain level of scale is needed to avoid a fate like the past decade of locavorism, which has barely affected the total annual volume.

Ignoring meat is not the answer to the future of sustainable food. Meat production has been a staple of the American economy, culture, and diet for generations, but industrial agriculture that values profits over people and the environment is careening toward a food-insecure future. Food wealth needs to be available to everyone, and people—farmers, workers, packers, and eaters—need to be at the center of the problem-solving.

The pitfalls of a food system dictated by big money and consolidation are not novel. Meat’s consolidation problem is decades old. After five decades of mass consolidation, a tight grip on the markets exists. In beef, the top four packers control more than 80% of the industry, while the top firms in poultry have more than half and pork’s largest producers dominate 70%.

I’ve dug into the challengers making a dent in industrialized and consolidated agriculture’s grip on America’s food system. When the pandemic hit, it tested the emerging alternative protein industry and its full cases of fakes by Beyond, Impossible, and their bevy of competitors, mostly from traditional meat-packers like Tyson, JBS, Smithfield, and Hormel. But then fears over meat supply shortages ahead of barbecue season led to a new round of panic buying into May 2020, and more shoppers reached for the vegan alternatives.

Plant-based foods sales at grocery stores, according to NielsenIQ, hit $900 million in retail sales in 2020. These alternatives started considerably outpacing total food sales during the pandemic, with refrigerated alternatives like Beyond and Impossible surging 240% during the spring peak of meat panic buying. The bump outpaced animal meat sales, which started to decline.

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If all you see with this is shifting consumer demand, take a step back. Plant-based still amounts to less than 1% of total U.S. meat sales. In 2021, sales stagnated. The movement is threatened by the same problem that the past decade’s push to localize change the food system has experienced. Local food systems can be just as fraught. For all the excitement, local food is still just 1.5% of total agricultural output, or the roughly $400 billion in agricultural commodities like corn, soy, wheat, and produce that U.S. producers sell annually.

So, what is good to eat? Food that actively works to build stronger and healthier communities, with workers who are treated justly and have a seat at the table. What’s grown isn’t just okay for the environment. It’s produced sustainably, with minimal inputs, and preferably in a way that replenishes soils and encourages biodiversity, without leaving behind waste and water pollution. This definition should exist at all ends of the supply chain, from ranch to slaughterhouse to distributor to retailer.

[Image: courtesy Simon & Schuster, Inc.]

Almost no meat in America is produced this way today. But there are several businesses, old and new, trying. Almost all the meat that is good to eat is sold for at-home use, which limits access to those who can spare convenience or pay a price for it. The meat is also rarely accessible at mainstream supermarkets. It needs to be sought out—which takes an obsessive ready to invest time in digging through the jargon and greenwashing. That’s not okay. Cut out problematic production and repurpose as much of the assets as possible. There’s not enough time or money to start completely from scratch.


Excerpted from Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat published by Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2022 by Chloe Sorvino.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristin Toussaint is the staff editor for Fast Company’s Impact section, covering climate change, labor, shareholder capitalism, and all sorts of innovations meant to improve the world. You can reach her at ktoussaint@fastcompany.com. More


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