The meat racket
The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business
By Christopher Leonard
Simon & Schuster.
(Disponible à la Bibliothèque de Westmount)
The American supermarket seems to represent the best in America: abundance, freedom, choice. But that turns out to be an illusion. The rotisserie chicken, the pepperoni, the cordon bleu, the frozen pot pie, and the bacon virtually all come from four companies.
In The Meat Racket, investigative reporter Christopher Leonard delivers the first-ever account of how a handful of companies have seized the nation’s meat supply. He shows how they built a system that puts farmers on the edge of bankruptcy, charges high prices to consumers, and returns the industry to the shape it had in the 1900s before the meat monopolists were broken up. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the greatest capitalist country in the world has an oligarchy controlling much of the food we eat and a high-tech sharecropping system to make that possible.
Forty years ago, more than thirty-six companies produced half of all the chicken Americans ate. Now there are only three that make that amount, and they control every aspect of the process, from the egg to the chicken to the chicken nugget. These companies are even able to raise meat prices for consumers while pushing down the price they pay to farmers. And tragically, big business and politics have derailed efforts to change the system.
Critique du Washington Post
Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a co-author of “All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.”
Leonard’s deeply reported narrative about how big business has come to rule the production of meat. Buy Bonici brand pepperoni, Lady Aster brand chicken cordon bleu or Wright Brand bacon — it doesn’t matter. They all come from the same company: Tyson. Leonard reports that about 95 percent of Americans eat chicken, which “means they almost certainly eat chicken produced by Tyson,” which means that this story affects us all. And as the title indicates, Leonard is a harsh critic of the system as it now operates, not so much because of what it might do to our health but because of what he believes it does to farmers.
Only a very good writer could turn a story about chickens, hogs and cattle into a thriller, and Leonard is that. He brings his characters to life.
In late January, I was flying home from San Diego. I was ravenous and quite grateful for my chicken salad. That is, until I began reading “The Meat Racket” by Christopher Leonard. The first chapter, titled “How Jerry Yandell Lost the Farm,” is about a couple trying to make a living farming chickens. The baby chicks delivered to them by the giant Tyson Foods began dying in bulk. “Their bodies were like soft, purple balloons by the time [Kanita Yandell] gathered them,” Leonard writes. “They fell apart to the touch, legs sloughing off the body. . . . It was like they were unraveling from the inside at a heated speed.”
Leonard is an evocative writer, and if disintegrating chickens don’t do you in, learning about a growth hormone called Zilmax, which Tyson used until about a year ago to make cattle “blow up like muscled balloons,” just might turn you vegetarian. According to a letter that Tyson wrote to its suppliers and that Leonard obtained, the company finally banned the drug’s use because “Zilmax might be causing paralysis in some cattle, and rendering others unable to walk.”
But the book isn’t an animal-welfare or dietary screed. These incidents are just part of Leonard’s deeply reported narrative about how big business has come to rule the production of meat. Buy Bonici brand pepperoni, Lady Aster brand chicken cordon bleu or Wright Brand bacon — it doesn’t matter. They all come from the same company: Tyson. Leonard reports that about 95 percent of Americans eat chicken, which “means they almost certainly eat chicken produced by Tyson,” which means that this story affects us all. And as the title indicates, Leonard is a harsh critic of the system as it now operates, not so much because of what it might do to our health but because of what he believes it does to farmers.
We know that it takes big companies to bring meat to the American table. What The Meat Racket shows is that this industrial system is rigged against all of us. In that sense, Leonard has exposed our heartland’s biggest scandal.
Critique du New York Times
“The Meat Racket” is primarily a book of reportage, the culmination of Leonard’s decade as a national agribusiness reporter, formerly for The Associated Press. In that time, he amassed a trove of information on Tyson Foods. He met all the players, from Don Tyson, who turned his father’s Arkansas chicken company into the behemoth it is today, down to small-time producers like Jerry and Kanita Yandell. And he also got them to talk. What separates “The Meat Racket” from every other book about food in America is that it manages to tell the story not from the safe remove of an outsider but from inside the fortress walls of Big Food itself, from the meeting rooms to the mega-barns.
The result is a book that at times burns slow and hot with outrage and at other times proceeds at the ecstatic pace of a thriller. In between, Leonard moves easily from everyday tragedies like that of Boonau Phouthavong — a Laotian immigrant who loses his farm — to Don Tyson’s decision to enter into pork production. What the company ultimately achieved is a level of control over American meat production so complete that, as Leonard puts it, “before there is a chicken or an egg, there is Tyson.”
Critique du Wall Street Journal