We Eat Unwell and Expensively

Covid-19 has exposed our food system's biggest problems

I missed writing a newsletter last week because my house was hit with food poisoning. We were a little worried it was Covid-19, but it was not. My case was minor and didn’t last, but my partner, Samir, had to go to the hospital and took some days to recover. It (most likely) happened because we ate beef tacos.

I have a troubled, constantly changing relationship to meat eating. I was a vegetarian for a time in college and I give meat up occasionally. I’d like to say it is for good, moral, noble reasons, but most often it happens because I’m confronted by the consequences of meat eating in ways I can’t ignore. Since moving back to Arkansas, I’ve seen too many pigs, cows, and goats being adorable, lounging under trees and playing in mud, to be able to comfortably eat them, especially pigs. But about once a month I really crave red meat, and so I give in. Hence the tacos.

The big picture problems with the current meat industry are many. We’ve known about the dangers of E. coli in big meat packing plants, or should have known, since at least Fast Food Nation. E. coli infections happen when slaughter houses move too quickly and feces gets in the meat. But there are other problems for human health that come from the food we feed our animals and the antibiotics we give them.

Even if you don’t care about how cute animals are or risks to human health, think of the planet. The New York Times published a comprehensive guide last year about the global warming consequences of our culinary habits. Plant-based diets have the lowest carbon footprints, but the worst offender, by far, is red meat.

There’s a persistent misperception that caring about animal suffering robs attention from human suffering, but research shows that the people who care about one tend to also care about the other: empathy isn’t a zero sum game. More than that, the fate of humans and animals are often entwined. This is obvious when it comes to pets, but it has also proven true when it comes to how we raise, slaughter, and eat our animals. (The very existence of this new coronavirus should prove that.) Meatpacking plants have become hotspots for Covid-19 in part because they’re already terrible, dangerous places to work.

Under our current system, farmers who raise animals are also underpaid and undervalued. I wrote about this nine years ago, and not much has changed. Almost all of it can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan, who fundamentally changed the way our government and our society operates in ways few people really see. In the case of our food system, as in many other areas of life, the Reagan administration’s lax anti-trust policy has allowed for massive corporate consolidation. Once, farmers took their animals to market to a competitive auction, but there are fewer buyers now and tight contracts that lock in farmers and favor the big industries. The pool of buyers has shrunk so sharply that the little guys have almost no power in the marketplace, and almost all of our food is funneled through a handful of powerful corporations. This means that farmers struggle to make ends meet, and, on the other end, it means that stores can be empty, prices spike, and people can go hungry even while milk is dumped and crops are destroyed elsewhere. It also means that problems, like bacteria, spread quickly through the whole supply.

This isn’t really the natural result of free-market capitalism as much as it is the political choices we’ve made and what we’ve decided to favor and emphasize as a society. The pandemic has shown the faults in our current system and widened them. Like many things from the before, it was never going to last, and it may be time for it to end.

What I’m Reading:

In light of this week’s topic, two of the writers I admire most on this are Ted Genoways and Christopher Leonard, and you should check them out.

What I’m Recommending:

I cook a lot of food and so pay a lot of attention to recipes, and so I am very obsessed when a fight breaks out in the food writer world. A Times columnist, Alison Roman, had a (well-deserved) backlash a couple of weeks ago. If you want to know what happened, this Eater essay by Navneet Alang is the best round-up I’ve seen of what happened and why, although the whole thing inspired many great pieces. The problem is not limited to Roman. She may not even be the worst offender in the Times. But in the interest of thinking more about how food and equity, I want to recommend this cookbook, Indian-ish, by Priya Krishna. You can also find her on Bon Appetit.

Cute Animal Pic of the Week:

A good samaritan found this puppy traveling solo in the middle of a country road. He’s only about three weeks now and obviously too young to be separated from his mother. I don’t know what happened or how he came to be there, but I know he’s being taken care of now. Cross your fingers that he makes it. We named him Potato, but that’s only because that’s exactly what he looks like: a chunky little spud. If you want to see exclusive footage of Potato over the next few weeks, you have to sign up for my nonprofit’s Patreon.