What the new studies REALLY say about red and processed meat

New studies this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine have generated much fiery news coverage.

For example, Time's headline says: "Should You Stop Eating Red Meat? A New Paper Has a Controversial Answer." As always, the nutrition reporter portrays nutrition science as fickle, endlessly reversing itself.

It's not true. The actual scientific content in the new studies confirms what we already knew.

The best available evidence suggests that reducing red and processed meat consumption will reduce risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

It always is the case that nutrition scientists and communicators must accomplish two tasks: 

1. understand the available evidence; and 
2. reflect on what burden of proof should be used for nutrition policy decision making.

The new studies made atypical decisions about Task #2. For reasons that are not clear to me -- perhaps out of a scientific sense of caution or perhaps out of a bias in favor of red and processed meat -- they ramped up the burden of proof that they apply to recommendations that advise less red and processed meat. Citing research guidelines that give highest scores for pharmaceutical trials [edited slightly 4pm], they rate most of the available evidence in any direction as weak. This is not how I would have communicated the evidence. In my view, it is understandable that randomized control trials cannot be widely used on this topic, because one would have to wait too long for a sufficient number of cancers or heart attacks attributable to a meat intake intervention in a well-powered study. So, I have long accepted cohort and observational studies as the best available evidence on this topic. The new studies do pretty much the same, but they label each piece of evidence as "weak." They are free to apply these labels, and I feel free to ignore these labels.

Turning to Task #1, the studies confirm what I already knew. For example, here are my statistical interpretation sentences for several main results from the new studies.

On average, reducing weekly unprocessed red meat intake by 3 servings is associated with:

• 7% lower risk of death, 
• 10% lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease,
• 6% lower risk of stroke,
• 10% lower risk of type 2 diabetes,
• 7% lower risk of death from cancer.

The list of results continues for processed meat.

If you want to describe these effects as "small" and you want dietary changes that reduce your risk by twice as much, then knock yourself out. You may reduce your red meat intake by perhaps approximately [note: qualifying adjective added 4pm] 6 servings.

I recognize that these results are accompanied by blistering disparagement of recommendations to eat less red and processed meat, but I don't trust these authors enough to place credence on their rhetorical choices. Their scientific results are what matters. 

Reading these scientific results, even acknowledging the limits of our knowledge, I will continue to support existing recommendations to eat less red and processed meat. No better evidence exists.

Federal government's beef checkoff program buys advertising to discourage grocers from stocking plant-based alternatives

The federal government's beef checkoff program this week is running advertisements in GroceryDive, a trade news site, targeting grocery retailers with claims that disparage new plant-based alternatives.

"Despite the placement of beef substitutes in the meat case," the ad says, "these products aren’t generating sales like the authentic beef products they share the case with." 

Yet, a savvy reader may think the ad itself indicates a high level of concern among beef checkoff program leaders.

The beef checkoff program is a public-private partnership, managed by a board appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture and funded by a mandatory assessment on beef producers, using the federal government's power of taxation. Checkoff marketing campaigns must be approved in writing by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). Checkoff advertisements to promote beef have legal status as "government speech," just like government public interest messages to promote public health.

Earlier this year, Republican Sen. Mike Lee (UT) and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker (NJ) re-introduced their legislation, the Opportunities for Fairness in Farming Act of 2019 (OFF Act), which would make several reforms in federal checkoff programs:

• Prevent checkoff programs from contracting with organizations that lobby. The current practice has an unseemly circularity, as the federal government enforces the collection of checkoff money, which then goes to industry organizations that lobby (mostly but not entirely with non-checkoff dollars) to influence federal regulatory and marketing policies;
• Require transparency through publication of checkoff program budgets and expenditures; and
• Establish standards that prohibit anti-competitive behavior, such as using federal checkoff money to disparage other legitimate American food businesses in the marketplace, as the GroceryDive advertisement did this week.

These reforms seem reasonable to me.

Should the federal government stop encouraging Americans to eat more beef, pork, and cheese?

The question for this new video (third in a series) is: Should the federal government stop encouraging Americans to eat more beef, pork, and cheese?

For more information about reform of the federal commodity checkoff programs discussed in this video, see the bipartisan Opportunities for Fairness in Farming Act of 2017, introduced last year by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Cory Booker (D-NJ).

 
Parke Wilde - Federal Commodity Checkoff Programs from Tufts Friedman School on Vimeo.

Consumers who value nutrition, animal welfare, and the environment tend to purchase less beef

New research released yesterday from leading agricultural economists Glynn Tonsor, Jayson Lusk, and Ted Schroeder finds that growing media coverage and consumer concern about climate change and the environment would lead to lower demand for beef.

The new report somewhat pushes back against a long tradition of economic research emphasizing prices as a key determinant of consumer demand. The authors, economists at Kansas State and Purdue, show that the impact of beef prices has declined over the years. They find that pork and chicken prices affect beef demand less than one might expect from prior research. They argue that media coverage, consumer demographics, and consumer "values" may matter more.

The study is based in part on consumer survey data and in part on an econometric analysis of beef sales data, market prices, and indices of media coverage for many topics.

The survey analysis found that consumers who value convenience, taste, and appearance have higher demand for ground beef. By contrast, consumers who value nutrition, animal welfare, naturalness, and the environment have lower demand for ground beef.

Source: Tonsor, Lusk, and Schroeder, 2018.

The econometric analysis found that beef demand declined in the 1990s and again in the Great Recession, but it has been rebounding recently from 2011-2017. In older years, much of the coverage in the media data concerned nutrient content issues such as zinc and protein. In recent years, the leading topic in the data is climate change. The study reported elasticities, showing the percentage change in quantity demanded in response to each 10% change in an explanatory variable. In recent years, each 10% increase in coverage of beef taste, tenderness and flavor was associated with a 5% increase in beef demand. By contrast, each 10% increase in coverage of climate change was associated with a 2% reduction in beef demand.

The study paid attention to the amount of media coverage, and to variation from one month to the next. Although media coverage of climate change was high in recent years, it did not jump around much from one month to the next. So, the study could not show definitively whether climate change coverage will strongly influence future changes in beef demand. Much depends on whether media coverage of climate change stays constant or increases over time.

The findings about environmental values and climate change are notable, because consumers may become more aware in the next several years that climate change is a critical global challenge. The journal Climatic Science reported in 2014 that reduced beef and dairy consumption is "indispensable for reaching the 2 °C target with a high probability, unless unprecedented advances in technology take place."

The findings about nutrition also are interesting. There is strong evidence to recommend reduced consumption of some meat products, such as processed meat. The nutrition science community has a vigorous ongoing debate about recommendations about meat intake more broadly. The most recent Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report recommended a healthy dietary pattern that is higher in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and several other components, and "lower in red and processed meat."

The beef demand report released yesterday was funded by the Cattlemen's Beef Board, one of several major federal government checkoff partnerships designed to increase consumer demand for beef, pork, and dairy products. These checkoff programs were established by Congress, are overseen by USDA, managed by an industry board, and funded by a mandatory assessment or tax on producers. The federal government enforces collection of the assessment. With total funding of more than half a billion dollars annually, these boards are much larger than any federal initiatives to promote healthy eating or consumer lifestyle change to protect the environment.

The Cattlemen's Beef Board and its primary contractor, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), heard preliminary results in 2017 and were "invited to provide feedback guiding the remainder of the project." In the final report, the authors advise the industry on how to keep increasing beef demand.

Because the study found that values and consumer demographics, rather than prices, were key determinants beef demand, they advised the industry to focus on "sources of current demand strength." For example, the authors advised the industry to market beef to African-American and Hispanic consumers:

One specific household characteristic of note is how African-American and Hispanic residents exhibit strong desire for beef. As the share of the U.S. population comprised of these two races is projected to grow refined focus on specific desires of these groups is warranted.

As an economist in a nutrition school, I think the federal government's semi-public checkoff programs should avoid that approach [edited Feb 1], during a time of great concern about health disparities for Americans of different races and ethnicities. But, one can see how the analysis would tempt the beef industry to consider this approach.

On the flip side, the authors advise the industry on how to address "drivers of weakening demand":

Issues including safety and climate were found as current demand detriments. Ultimately the feasibility of impacting these areas must be considered before final decisions regarding industry investment are made.

As the climate changes, it is conceivable that media coverage will ignore the impact of food choices, and that consumer awareness will be stagnant. It also is possible that more sectors of the media will  take climate change seriously, and more consumers will come to appreciate the flavors and nourishment of lower-carbon food choices. In this second scenario, this study shows that the agricultural economy may need to accept and adapt to a reduction in per capita beef demand.

Even the beef checkoff program links environmental sustainability and dietary guidance

Should the Dietary Guidelines for Americans address environmental sustainability issues?

The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) report earlier this year included these issues in its executive summary, giving them far higher profile than they ever previously have had in the nation's most august dietary guidance process. The federal government uses this DGAC report as one input into the official guidelines, which will be released later this year.

Here is the sober and sensible passage of the DGAC report that generates all the fuss:

The major findings regarding sustainable diets were that a diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet. This pattern of eating can be achieved through a variety of dietary patterns, including the Healthy U.S.-style Pattern, the Healthy Mediterranean-style Pattern, and the Healthy Vegetarian Pattern. All of these dietary patterns are aligned with lower environmental impacts and provide options that can be adopted by the U.S. population. Current evidence shows that the average U.S. diet has a larger environmental impact in terms of increased greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, and energy use, compared to the above dietary patterns. This is because the current U.S. population intake of animal-based foods is higher and plant-based foods are lower, than proposed in these three dietary patterns. Of note is that no food groups need to be eliminated completely to improve sustainability outcomes over the current status.

As Dan Charles reported for NPR in December, many in Congress are furious. More recently, Mike Hamm from Michigan State, who served as a consultant to the DGAC, summarized much of the controversy after the report's release.

One of the great things about the U.S. process of developing dietary guidelines is that the public comments are transparent. The DGAC report is generating thousands of comments from supporters and opponents alike.

For example, here is an excerpt from comment #1234, enraged about the inclusion of sustainability issues:

Are you crazy? This is supposed to be a free America - now you want to tell us what to eat, how to eat, how much tv to watch (what about the case of my husband who is disabled - television gives him something to do, yet you want to limit that??

I believe this goes too, too far, especially where you want us to limit meat due to climate sustainability. Climate change, global warming - whatever you have been told to call it so that low-info Americans believe whatever garbage you feed them - is made up. We all know it. Even the UN admitted it is for economic reasons to get rid of a capitalistic society and become socialist which has been proven time and time again to NOT work.

But, is it really so crazy to link sustainability and dietary guidance?

Here is part of comment #3359 from Kim Stackhouse with the federal government's beef checkoff program (the semi-public producer board that promotes increased beef consumption):

Ensuring a sustainable food supply is undoubtedly one of the greatest societal challenges we face. By 2050, we will need to produce 70 percent more food than we do today in order to feed the growing population.

Ensuring a sustainable food supply requires balancing efficient agricultural production with environmental, social and economic impacts. Only by looking holistically at food production practices can our food systems meet demand and minimize unintended consequences. The beef industry recognizes the important role it plays to produce food in a more sustainable manner and has committed to a journey toward more sustainable beef.

Setting aside the selective summary of the actual environmental evidence, these public comments are striking. Even the beef checkoff program acknowledges the value of "looking holistically at food production practices."

There is no doubt that Americans will be discussing environmental sustainability and dietary guidance together -- jointly -- for decades to come. In writing the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal health and agriculture departments may help clarify the evidence, or they may ignore the issue that everybody is thinking about. If they stick their heads in the sand, the public will just turn elsewhere for dietary guidance information that rightly considers the future of the environment.

The "Trouble with Antibiotics" in U.S. animal agriculture production

Frontline last night had an excellent report, the Trouble with Antibiotics, on the plausible link between dangerous antibiotic resistant diseases and the overuse of antibiotics in U.S. meat production.

Poultry and hog producers use large amounts of antibiotics even in healthy animals, as a growth promoter and to prevent disease. As bacteria evolve to become resistant to these antibiotics, we lose important tools for treating deadly diseases in humans, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

For readers who want to inspect the scientific evidence for themselves, here are some links to research mentioned in the Frontline report.

Jessica Rinsky, Lance Price (interviewed in the report), and colleagues found livestock-associated MRSA in workers from industrial livestock operations but not workers from antibiotic-free livestock operations.

Andrew Waters, Lance Price, and colleagues found that MRSA bacteria reaches meat on supermarket shelves.

Joan Casey, Brian Schwartz, and colleagues found in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that antibiotic-resistant bacteria cases in humans were geographically associated with the proximity of nearby meat producers in Pennsylvania. The Frontline interviewer did a great job questioning the scientists and explaining both the strengths and limits of this type of geographic association.

Concerned about the Frontline story, the federal government's National Pork Board has been scrambling to persuade people not to worry about this issue. Reuters reports today that the NPB is funding an online public information campaign to defend antibiotic use. The most damning part of the Reuters report alleges that the NPB is using search engine optimization (SEO) tools so that web users seeking information about antibiotics are directed to industry-friendly web sources.

Both Reuters and the Frontline report describe the pork board as an "industry" association, but the National Pork Board is a semi-public checkoff program. The U.S. Congress created this board, the Secretary of Agriculture appoints its members from a slate of candidates suggested by the industry, and the federal government uses its powers of taxation to collect the "mandatory assessment" -- a tax -- that funds this public information campaign. This is not a voluntary industry association. All pork board messages must be approved by the federal government as its own "government speech," so our government is complicit in this public information campaign to rebut the Frontline report.

The industry representatives interviewed in the Frontline report didn't really dispute any of the facts, but they engaged in a rhetorical game of shifting the burden of proof. They argued that no further regulation is needed, because there is not yet certain proof that some of the research associations represent true cause and effect. Since nothing is ever certain in this type of research, the industry representatives can feel safe that no level of evidence would ever clear their hurdle.

One of the best passages in the Frontline report was an interview with FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. The interviewer asked why FDA does not collect information about the quantity of antibiotics administered by meat producers. Though Hamburg squirmed under the question, she essentially confirmed that FDA wanted this information but could not get it because of industry opposition. In other words, the industry representatives say no action should be taken until we have certain proof, while simultaneously hindering access to the data needed to investigate the question.

The industry is pursuing some voluntary steps to reduce antibiotic use for the purpose of "growth promotion," but it has defined this term narrowly so that most antibiotic use even in healthy animals will still continue.

The Frontline report is strongly recommended. Now is the time for stronger measures to restrain the overuse of antibiotics in U.S. meat production.

Frontline, October 14, 2014.

Will the beef checkoff ever be reformed?

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said this week that he shares farmers' frustrations and will use his authority to make necessary changes to the beef checkoff program, according to a report in Beef this week.

The program, known formally as the Cattlemen's Beef Board (CBB), uses the federal government's powers of taxation to collect a mandatory assessment (a tax, essentially) from beef producers. The program is overseen by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). Most of the money is funneled to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA).

Vilsack made the statement at a meeting of the National Farmers Union (NFU). The farm organization listed the following changes that should be made to the checkoff program:

• The CBB must have the authority to carry out checkoff projects on its own, similar to other checkoff oversight boards.
• The CBB must be allowed to enter into checkoff contracts with non-policy organizations and private companies, such as ad agencies and public relations firms, in order to prevent policy-driven organizations from using checkoff dollars to fund overhead for political activity.
• The beef checkoff must be completely refundable.
• A referendum on the continuation of the beef checkoff must occur every five years, and NFU’s board recommended that USDA “consider rewriting the beef checkoff program” under the generic Commodity, Promotion, Research and Information Act of 1996.

I think USDA should adopt NFU's recommendations as soon as possible, seeking Congressional authorization if needed. It is ridiculous that such mild and obvious recommendations are even controversial.

Washington Monthly covers "government speech" and Big Beef

At the Washington Monthly, Siddhartha Mahanta describes the unusual coalition of animal welfare and conservative groups opposed to the federal government's semi-public beef checkoff program:

With liberals and conservatives for once in agreement, it’s time to have a barbeque. Big Beef subsidies. It’s what’s for dinner. 

This blog's previous coverage of checkoff controversies includes the Humane Society's earlier work on the sale of the pork checkoff's "Other White Meat" brand, and the results of my 2006 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that triggered the Humane Society's interest in this topic.

Maureen Ogle's history: In Meat We Trust

Maureen Ogle's new history of the meat industry is In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).  I enjoyed the many biographical summaries of leading industrial innovators (from Gustavus Swift to Coleman Natural Meats) and their critics (from Upton Sinclair to Michael Pollan and Michael Jacobson).

The book's most sound overall theme is that American consumers appear to demand contradictory things (perfect safety and environmental sustainability and yet low prices and massive quantities).  Ogle appeals to consumers to become more informed rather than throwing stones from afar.  In part, I think these contradictory demands arise because different consumers have always had different opinions, including sometimes well-motivated support for and concern about meat in general and industrial meat in particular.  Ogle instead treats these contradictory opinions as the ignorant and schizophrenic demand of a single personified American "we."  For example,

"If meat's American history tells us anything, it is that we Americans generally get what we want.  Meat three times a day? No problem.  Meat precut, deboned, and ready to cook?  There it is....  Organic, grass-fed, local pork and beef?  All yours, as long as you don't mind paying the price or taking the time to find it....  We're a complicated group, we Americans, and we struggle to reconcile our conflicting desires and passions."

In the end, Ogle ends up deeply skeptical of food system reformers and admiring of meat industry innovators: "So, thanks, Big Ag -- and the USDA and family and corporate farmers -- for giving us the cheap food that has nourished an extraordinary abundance of creative energy."  Here is a favorable review and interview by Chuck Jolley at Drovers Cattle Network.

Choices Magazine examines lean finely textured beef ('pink slime')

A recent theme issue in Choices Magazine, a publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), examined lean finely textured beef (LFTB), an ammonia-treated beef filler product widely known as 'pink slime.' 

To some extent, the authors of the theme overview, J. Ross Pruitt and Joshua D. Detre, share the beef industry's view that the long controversy over this beef product is unfair to the industry.

The use of the moniker “pink slime” is an example of how calling into question the safety and/or quality of a food product/production practice can do irreparable damage to the faith in the U.S. agricultural supply chain. As prices and markets continue to adjust due to the inability of ground beef suppliers to use LFTB, consumers are paying more per pound for ground beef. The LFTB case has impacts beyond the market price of ground beef, especially for the employees of BPI who lost their jobs and the communities who benefitted from the presence of BPI. While it is not yet clear if longer-term adjustments to the beef cattle industry will be tied back to the media scare over LFTB, it is evident that educating consumers about food production is a challenge not to be ignored.

At the same time, the theme issue includes plenty of grounds for thinking the industry could have handled this matter better.  For example, Erika K. Eckley and Roger A. McEowen review the history of the food disparagement laws, which BPI, the company responsible for LFTB, is using to sue ABC News following a feature story last year that criticized the product.  This review makes these food disparagement laws look like awful public policy, and the authors doubt BPI will succeed.

A long time-line of the history of 'pink slime,' on the Food Safety News website, recounts many low moments for this product, including a shipment of contaminated product that was the subject of an unsuccessful recall (apparently the product was sold before it could be recovered) and an occasion when the product generated complaints from food service workers because of strong ammonia smells.  Important early coverage included this article by Michael Moss at the New York Times in 2009.

The Council on Food, Agriculture, and Resource Economics (C-FARE), an AAEA outreach organization (for which I am a board member), is jointly sponsoring a media event and discussion on February 15 with the Federation of Animal Science Societies.

Upcoming event: Hack // Meat on Dec 7-9

During a period of time when food policy-making at the federal level seems nearly dysfunctional -- witness the continued absence of a farm bill! -- I have been reflecting on innovations in the private sector and in civil society.

Just for example, here is the announcement for an upcoming event in New York City:

Mark your calendar! From December 7 – 9, Food+Tech Connect, GRACE Communications and Applegate are bringing together technologists, entrepreneurs, creatives, policy experts, non-profit leaders and industry executives for Hack//Meat, the first-ever “meat hackathon” in New York City.

Over the course of the weekend, “steakholders” will work with teams to rapidly prototype innovative solutions to business and consumer education challenges in the way meat is produced, processed, distributed, sold and consumed. Our goal? We want to bring together the best and brightest minds to develop technologies and tools that help democratize meat. Some of the areas we will be tackling include:

Production: Develop tools to help small and medium sized ranchers more efficiently and sustainably manage their herds, process their meat and sell direct to consumers or wholesale buyers.

Health: Reimagine how technology can eliminate or minimize antibiotic use and improve animal health.

Processing: Design ways for processors to more easily demonstrate that they are complying with federal regulations, manage processing demand and access financing.

Distribution: Streamline the process of selling “non-choice” cuts of meat, and improve the efficiency and financial viability of getting meat from farm to buyer.

Foodservice: Make it easier and more affordable for restaurants and foodservice to source sustainable ingredients, as well as to manage supplier adherence to worker and animal welfare.

Consumption: Improve consumer insight research and education on the benefits of sustainable meat and nose-to-tail cooking.

Developers, designers, gamers, marketers, storytellers, academics, farmers, butchers, restaurateurs, policy experts and anyone who is in the business of meat is invited to participate. As always, you can be sure to expect great food, lots of learning and invaluable new connections. We also want to make sure teams are able to actualize your prototypes, so we’re offering cash prizes and consulting services to winning hacks.

Visit the Hack//Meat website to learn more about the event and for updates on additional prizes and judges. You can register for the event here.

Reactions to beef checkoff upheaval

The U.S. agricultural industry continues to react to the recent upheaval in the Cattlemen's Beef Board (CBB), the federal government's checkoff program for research and advertising to promote beef.

Larry Dreiling writes in the High Plains / Midwest Ag Journal:

Even though Cattlemen's Beef Board Chairman Tom Jones and CEO Tom Ramey have resigned in the aftermath of an eavesdropping scandal, there's still plenty of concern from several state livestock groups that the scandal has eroded the very purpose of the CBB.

The National Farmers Union suggested a complete separation of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the Beef Checkoff Program:

It is impossible to build a firewall strong enough when you have one organization that picks the members of the committees that make all of the funding decisions for the checkoff and are also involved in program evaluations. The ongoing firewall breaches are no longer allegations, but have been proven in a compliance audit review that has uncovered multiple financial irregularities and misappropriations of checkoff funds.

The U.S. Cattlemen's Association -- a competing trade association without the NCBA's heavy reliance on federal checkoff money -- published an editorial on Friday:

On July 1 the United States Cattlemen's Association (USCA) formally requested that the Secretary of Agriculture initiate a full investigation into circumstances surrounding the expanding contractor financial irregularities within the national mandatory beef checkoff as well as those circumstances surrounding the resignation of the Cattlemen's Beef Board (CBB) CEO. Since then, unfortunately, circumstances have grown even more serious with the resignation of the CBB Chairman, Tom Jones. It is unprecedented in beef checkoff history for the CBB chairman and chief executive officer to have been driven out of office. As USCA president, I want cattle producers to understand what USCA has discovered and what is behind USCA's decision to ask for the Secretary's intervention. Please become engaged in this very important process because what happens in the next few weeks will directly impact the future of the beef checkoff.

I spoke today (.mp3) with Don Atkinson, the farm news editor for the Voice of Southwest Agriculture (VSA), which is part of the Clear Channel radio networks, providing farm news coverage through affiliates in Oklahoma, Texas, and several other states. I have no idea what beef producers will want do next, but it does seem like the program needs to be changed. Cattlemen might want to convert the program to a private-sector program with voluntary contributions, or they might want to accept greater oversight and greater separation between the federal program and the NCBA.  Either option seems more reasonable than the status quo.

Coup d'etat in the beef industry: Tom Jones resigns as chairman of Cattlemen's Beef Board

Tom Jones resigned this week as chairman of the Cattlemen's Beef Board (CBB). This follows the resignation of Tom Ramey as CEO two weeks ago.

The CBB oversees the beef checkoff program, which uses the federal government's power of taxation to collect $70 to $80 million in mandatory assessments or taxes each year from beef producers, for use in research and promotion activities such as the advertisements with the slogan, "Beef. It's What's for Dinner."

The real power behind the throne has long been the industry's private-sector trade association, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), which serves as the principal contractor to the CBB, receiving most of the checkoff money, and which simultaneously controls most decision-making for the program.  The CBB had tried to re-organize the checkoff program to provide more accountability, but the NCBA opposed these changes.

The industry trade press has mostly been absent from duty.  The Rod Smith article for Feedstuffs about the Ramey resignation ignores the multi-million dollar questions about financial management, but spends whole paragraphs on an accusation that Ramey listened in on a conference call to which he was not invited.  That seems to me like a trivial matter.  Smith's brief today editorializes that Jones "was also caught up in the apparently now-failed maneuvers by the board's executive committee to restructure how beef checkoff programs are approved and funded by trying to pull the Federation of State Beef Councils out of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. (NCBA)."  I imagine most beef producers must be appalled at the anti-reform spin and will seek their information elsewhere.  Won't somebody in the trade press give this story the real investigation it deserves?  Or will it all be swept under the rug?

In his resignation letter today, Jones cites family concerns and also writes:

I am so sorry to the members of this Board who truly want what’s best for every producer.  Keep doing the right thing.  Doing what’s right is all that matters.  Some board members put their allegiance to their chosen association before their oath of obligation to serve all producers who pay the checkoff.  This is a dangerous position to take.  The checkoff program could benefit from positive change and it is difficult to work for that when your allegiance causes you to wear blinders to the change that is needed.  It will also be impossible to defend those attitudes if or when this program is challenged.

I have never in my life seen as much public defamation and misrepresentation as I’ve seen lately.  I know many of you as friends.  This kind of behavior is beneath us as people of agriculture.  When I see that kind of action, I look for the real purpose behind it.  More often than not, that purpose is fear – fear of change, fear of the future.  Fear may cause someone to want to hide the true issues, which are often based on the desire for money and power.  My resignation from this Board certainly won’t solve all of the issues before the Board.  You still have a lot of work to do and empty calls for “getting along” won’t get you anywhere.

The Agwired coverage mentions Jones' family reasons for resigning, but did not include these two sharp paragraphs. There is extensive coverage of recent events on the independent beefcheckoff blog.

Beef checkoff CEO Tom Ramey resigns

The Cattlemen's Beef Board (CBB) chief executive officer (CEO) Tom Ramey resigned this week, throwing the checkoff program into turmoil.

The independent beefcheckoff blog pointed out that, during Ramey's time as CEO, the beef board investigated billing errors and financial misappropriation by the industry's powerful trade association, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA):

On March 24 of this year, NCBA leadership filed charges of misconduct with the CBB Executive Committee against CBB leadership. The sequence of events speaks for itself. Who wins with this resignation? NOT checkoff-paying cattle producers.

Congress should hold hearings to investigate the beef checkoff program, DTN ag policy editor Chris Clayton suggested this week.  The beef checkoff is the semi-governmental program that collects a mandatory assessment or tax from beef producers and sponsors advertisements such as "Beef.  It's What's for Dinner."

Clayton describes the intensifying arguments between the CBB (which is appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture to oversee the checkoff funds) and the NCBA (which eventually receives about 90% of the checkoff program's $70-$80 million annual funding stream by serving as a contractor to carry out the program's operations).

Recent documents from the Cattlemen's Beef Board and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association reveal a wide-ranging rift over possible reforms and changes to the checkoff. Columnist Alan Guebert highlighted those problems last month, and posted related documents on his website.

Over the years, U.S. Food Policy has given extensive coverage to the strange world of federal government checkoff programs. For more information, see the long archives under the checkoff tag and, for a discussion of the tensions with federal dietary guidance, a 2006 article in the journal Obesity.

McWilliams and locavores

I will certainly read it, but, from the title, I'm not really looking forward to James McWilliams' new book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.

In a recent radio interview, McWilliams really objected to a certain kind of strictly dogmatic 100-mile-circle type food discipline. That seems like a true and fairly bland point. It would be good environmentalism if Americans ate food that has less processing, less meat, and comes from closer to home, on average, but that doesn't mean all food should come from right nearby.

In the meanwhile, Kerry Trueman's review at Eating Liberally certainly was fun. The lead sentence describes the book as "the literary equivalent of a turd blossom, the Texan term for a flower that pops up out of a cow patty."

Kerry reminds the reader of McWilliams' credulous New York Times piece about a study of trichinosis in free-range pork, which was the subject of an editor's note acknowledging that the study's Pork Board funding should have been mentioned.

She gives examples of McWilliams' "pointless ponderings": "What would happen to local traffic patterns if every consumer in Austin made daily trips in their SUVs to visit small local farms to buy locally produced food?" Hmm. I guess I never really wondered that. But, if I had, I would have agreed it was a bad idea.

And, generously, she draws out "the needle in McWilliams' hyperbolic, straw man-stuffed haystack." She says McWilliams' criticism of current meat consumption patterns hits home more strongly than does his caricature of locavores: "McWilliams evidently made the calculus that it would be more lucrative to demonize farmers' market fanatics than mindless meat eaters, but his opportunistic posturing ultimately overwhelms the more thoughtful analyses contained in this book."

I'm just glad McWilliams relented on the originally planned subtitle for the book: "How Locavores Are Endangering The Future of Food." With that title, I would have felt free to skip the book altogether.

JBS has abandoned its bid to take over National Beef Packing Co.

The world’s largest beef producer and packer, Brazilian-based JBS-Swift, announced it was abandoning its attempted takeover of the National Beef Packing Company. Last year JBS-Swift purchased Smithfield Foods’ beef business as well as majority shares in Italian and Australian beef companies. It had been in talks with the US Department of Justice trying to gain approval of its next takeover target, but now appears to be backing out. According to the Reuters article, JBS abandoned the takeover due to a “lack of satisfactory conditions.”

Since March 2008, the Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM)has aggressively opposed the JBS/National Beef merger on the grounds that it would exacerbate the distortions already evidenced in the U.S. cattle market and would strengthen JBS’ ability to use packer-owned cattle and other forms of captive supplies to manipulate prices paid to hundreds of thousands of independent cattle producers.

My, July 14, 2008 Epicurean Ideal post called "Meat conglomerates" showed my home-made graphic of the market hold that JBS would have potentially held had the merger had taken place.

What if checkoff programs were voluntary?

An interesting article in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics this May used experimental data from an economics laboratory to address the following question: what would happen if legal concerns prevented commodity checkoff programs from using the federal government's power of taxation to collect mandatory payments from producers?

It is generally assumed that advertising budgets for campaigns such as "Beef. It's What's for Dinner" and "Pork. The Other White Meat" would collapse if the producer payments were voluntary. The article by Kent Messer, Harry Kaiser, and William D. Schulze points out that certain clever types of auctions might enhance contributions even if they were voluntary.

For example, under a plan called the "provision point mechanism" (PPM), producers would offer voluntary payments, but they would only really have to pay if the total voluntary payments exceeded a fairly high threshold. If the threshold is not reached, everybody gets their money back, and the advertising campaign never happens. This mechanism seems to generate higher contributions than traditional voluntary payment plans do.

As an aside, readers of this blog will not be surprised that I disapproved of this paragraph:

One might question the social importance and magnitude of under-provision of advertising for generic commodities. However, contrast the public health impacts from the types of foods associated with the majority of branded advertising, such as soda, beer, chips, and candy, to the types of foods that now benefit from mandatory generic advertising, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, chicken, pork, beef, and milk. Not only do the generic commodities comprise the key nutritional elements of the United States Department of Agriculture food pyramid but these commodities also tend to be low in fat and salt (in comparison to branded snack foods and restaurant meals) and represent the bulk of what might be called the components of a healthy diet. If generic advertising for agricultural commodities collapses because mandatory programs are declared unconstitutional, the "Dancing Raisins" will be gone and the vast majority of ads for snacks will be for chips, cookies, and candy. Given important health problems such as obesity, juvenile diabetes, and osteoporosis, the under-funding of generic commodity advertising has serious public health consequences.

Years of previous coverage here (and here) cast doubt on the claim that checkoff advertising is largely consistent with federal dietary guidance. The dancing raisins comparison is misleading, since a tiny fraction of checkoff advertising is for fruits and vegetables, while much of the funding is for high fat beef and pork and cheese. I don't think there even is a federal checkoff program for raisins. Raisins are not mentioned in Becker's CRS report (.pdf). Perhaps those ads were from a California state level board? If you believe that the checkoff programs are mostly about skim milk, not cheese, you've been hoodwinked by the public relations. I am not sure where the "low fat" comment came from -- federal dietary guidance gives greatest importance to saturated fat rather than total fat, and the products covered by checkoff programs are disproportionally high contributors to saturated fat in U.S. diets, compared to foods not covered by checkoff programs. And, how could lower checkoff advertising possibly lead to obesity? This is a very, very bad paragraph.

I think the agricultural economics literature on checkoff programs would be stronger if it were less baldly apologetic on their behalf.

Beef packing industry consolidates further

As of April, 2007, the top four firms in the beef packing industry had 83.5% of the market share (.pdf). That's high enough to raise concerns about market power for both farmers (as cattle suppliers) and consumers (as beef food buyers).

Firm (number of animals slaughtered daily)
1. Tyson (36,000)
2. Cargill (28,300)
3. Swift & Co. (16,759)
4. National Beef Packing Co. (13,000)

Then, still in 2007, the Brazillian company JBS bought Swift. And kept on munching.

"Unbelievably," Gristmill reported in March this year, "the beef market is about to get dramatically more concentrated."

JBS ... signed deals to buy the fourth-biggest packer, National Beef Packing, as well as the beef-packing assets of hog giant Smithfield, the fifth-biggest beef packer.

If U.S. antitrust regulators wave the deals through -- and nothing in recent history suggests they won't -- JBS will control 33 percent of the market, Reuters reports. One company will slaughter one in three U.S. cows.

The environmental web magazine is worried, naturally. So are many cattle producers. And that's not all. This week, the sober policy outreach publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) had this to say:

The acquisition of the fourth and fifth largest U.S. beef packers (National and Smithfield, respectively) would push JBS Swift Group past Tyson Foods as the largest beef processor in the United States. It will also contribute to further consolidation in the already–highly–concentrated U.S. beef processing sector. Consequently, the purchase is certain to invite close scrutiny from the Department of Justice (DOJ) as well as from other participants at every level of the beef industry. The deal has already sparked high–level debate, with Sen. Herb Kohl (D–WI), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, penning a letter to the DOJ urging them to block the proposed acquisitions.

The expansion of JBS is notable not only for its possible effect on the horizontal structure of the beef processing industry but also because it involves a substantial degree of vertical integration. Five Rivers Ranch is the largest cattle feeding entity in the U.S., with a one–time feeding capacity of over 800,000 head. Having consolidated ownership and, presumably, management of the largest feeding and processing operations in the country would be an unprecedented arrangement for the industry. This development is quite likely to reinvigorate the debate over statutory restrictions on vertical control of livestock by packers.

Meat and climate change

ABC News last month offered a sharp, concise summary of the environmental case for eating 20 percent less meat. It draws on a collection of research outlined in the UN report, Livestock's Long Shadow.



Jeff Poor of the Business & Media institute has an almost helpless non-rebuttal to the ABC News piece. Poor has nothing to say on the substance of the case, but argues that there would be dire economic consequences. For support, he links to a brief (.doc) by Dan Otto and John Lawrence on the National Cattlemen's Beef Association website. With world markets at their current positions, Poor has a tough time raising the reader's fears of insufficient food demand.

Anna Lappé and the Small Planet Institute have a new related project, Take a Bite Out of Climate Change. I found most of the links in this post at their new blog, which is now added to the sidebar.

As an aside, I have been enjoying Lappé's 2006 book with Bryant Terry, Grub, which reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver's book in its combination of food system criticism and constructive menus and advice. Far from being pedantic in their environmentalism, Lappé and Terry make eating organically and locally seem totally fun. The menus are organized by season, accompanied by cool "soundtrack" recommendations for music to enjoy while cooking and eating.

Banning "downer" cattle? Allowing tests for BSE?

In February, after school children received shipments of meat from the plant that abused "downer" cattle, the Washington Post headline read, "USDA rejects 'downer' cow ban." At the time, U.S. Food Policy wrote:

Why would the meat industry even want a headline that says, "USDA Rejects 'Downer' Cow Ban"? Surely, only a small fraction of cows are healthy enough to walk through the plant gates but later collapse. In the midst of a crisis of public confidence in USDA oversight of the meat supply, this headline will confirm to most readers that USDA lacks the power and willpower to protect us and our schoolchildren. The headline strikes the same odd chord that readers will recall from earlier articles about USDA's action to prevent Creekstone Beef from voluntarily testing its own meat for the pathogen that causes "mad cow disease."

Today, the Post headline reads, "USDA to ban 'downer' beef." That's much better on "downer" cattle, but hold the celebration for a minute.

USDA is still pulling out the stops to press its legal case that Creekstone Beef should be forbidden to test Creekstone's own beef, voluntarily, and at the company's own expense. Sam Hannanel wrote May 9 for the Associated Press (via Modesto Bee):

The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority....

The agency argues that more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers. "They want to create false assurances," Justice Department attorney Eric Flesig-Greene told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Economists tend to believe that an economic actor's actions reveal a lot about his or her preferences and beliefs. Here's what I think USDA's actions imply about the beliefs of senior department decision-makers.

They don't believe there is a large risk of a BSE epidemic, with widespread cases of the human variant of mad cow disease (the officials are surely decent enough that they would, in that case, support more mandatory testing).

On the other hand, they don't believe the risk of finding a case of BSE is near zero either (the officials are clever enough that they would, in that case, allow Creekstone Beef to pursue its own quirky and pointless food safety testing strategy, and would prepare themselves for making sure true false positives were recognized as false).

Instead, the officials' actions seem to me most consistent with believing there are a handful of real cases of BSE out there in the beef cattle population, and that these cases will naturally die out without infecting new cattle over the next several years. Of course, if this were true, a handful of people would be subjected to risk of the deadly disease years after eating a cow whose infection was never discovered.