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Covid-19 puts the conflict between corporate interests and public health in stark relief.

The Washington Post tells us that President Trump signed an executive order to force meat processing plants to stay open—“to head off shortages in the nation’s food supply chains”—despite the risk posted to workers from Covid-19.

Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to classify meat plants as essential infrastructure that must remain open. Under the order, the government will provide additional protective gear for employees as well as guidance.

What’s this about?  The Counter explains this as the result of a public lobbying by John Tyson, chair of Tyson Foods (Big Meat) in his blog and in a full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times. I clipped the ad. It complains that health authorities are forcing closure of his plants putting the meat supply—never mind his workers—at risk:

In small communities around the country where we employ over 100,000 hard-working men and women, we’re being forced to shutter our doors. This means one thing – the food supply chain is vulnerable…millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain…We have a responsibility to feed our country. It is as essential as healthcare….Our plants must remain operational so that we can supply food to our families in America. This is a delicate balance because Tyson Foods places team member safety as our top priority.

To this last statement, one can only respond: yeah, right.

Tyson is one of the meat Big Four along with JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield.  These hold about an 80% share of  the US meat supply chain, worth more than $50 billion a year.  This is a highly concentrated industry; problems have a disproportionate impact.

But let’s talk about worker safety.

Food Dive is keeping track of meat plant closures

A Washington Post investigation found plenty of evidence that Tyson, JBS, and Smithfield told workers to stay on the job when sick.  Workers at one Smithfield pork plant have sued the company on the grounds that they were threatened with disciplinary action if they covered their faces when coughing or sneezing as they might miss some meat on the line.  Smithfield denies these allegations.  In one court challenge, however, meatpacking workers have won.  The courts ordered Smithfield to comply with public health guidelines at a pork plant.

I’m guessing more lawsuits are to come.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and CDC have issued new safety guidance—voluntary, of course—for meatpackers.

OSHA and the Department of Labor make it clear that the president’s order trumps (sorry) the authority of state and local health departments to shut down meat plants.  Too bad if the plants are viral epicenters and put workers—and their families and community menbers—at risk.

And USDA isn’t helping.   It is allowing more crowding of workers at chicken processing plants.

Here’s what the American Meat Institute says about what this industry does for its workers.  Average salaries?  $25,000 annually.

What power do such low-wage workers have?  The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents meatpacking employees, says 72 workers have died, and 5322 are ill from Covid-19.  It lobbies on their behalf, but does not have much power.

Why?  It’s worth reading the history of this organization.

Today, workers have lost power at the bargaining table. Giant meatpacking and food companies are more determined than ever to keep labor costs as low as possible and production as high as possible. This means hiring cheap labor, maintaining intolerably high line speeds, demanding cuts in wages and benefits from unionized facilities…Other companies actively exploit our broken immigration system, purposely recruiting and hiring undocumented immigrants to create a disposable workforce. These immigrants often don’t speak English and aren’t aware of labor laws or their rights on the job. It’s a vulnerable, easily-intimidated workforce too afraid to speak out…This has resulted in an industry where workers have less bargaining power, where it’s becoming harder and harder to earn enough to support families, and where it’s becoming less safe to work.

Covid-19 confirms these points.

I consider this an American tragedy.

The crisis caused by Covid-19 reveals deep flaws in America’s health care system but also in its food system.  The food system flaws are showing up first in the meat industry, reliant as it is on a low-wage, immigrant work force.

Cattlemen estimate virus-induced losses at more than $14 billion

Using existing market data and futures market data, the total actual and future impact is forecast to exceed $14.6 billion, broken out by sector in the table below.

U.S. Food Supply Chain Is Strained as Virus Spreads

The nation’s food supply chain is showing signs of strain, as increasing numbers of workers are falling ill with the coronavirus in meat processing plants, warehouses and grocery stores.  The spread of the virus through the food and grocery industry is expected to cause disruptions in production and distribution of certain products like pork, industry executives, labor unions and analysts have warned in recent days. The issues follow nearly a month of stockpiling of food and other essentials by panicked shoppers that have tested supply networks as never before.

COVID-19 cases in Iowa packing plants a big part of 389 new cases, state’s largest single-day increase

Iowa had its largest single-day increase in COVID-19 cases Sunday, driven largely by new positive tests at meatpacking plants. State officials said 261 of the 389 new cases of COVID-19 reported Sunday were discovered as part of testing done at Iowa meat processing plants.

The food chain’s weakest link: slaughterhouses

Yet meat plants, honed over decades for maximum efficiency and profit, have become major “hot spots” for the coronavirus pandemic, with some reporting widespread illnesses among their workers. The health crisis has revealed how these plants are becoming the weakest link in the nation’s food supply chain, posing a serious challenge to meat production.

South Dakota Meat Plant Is Now Country’s Biggest Coronavirus Hot Spot

That all appeared to be in jeopardy this week, when the Smithfield plant became the nation’s largest single-source coronavirus hot spot. Its employees now make up about 44 percent of the diagnoses in South Dakota, and a team of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has traveled there to assess how the outbreak spiraled out of control. Smithfield is the latest meat processing facility to close in the face of the coronavirus.  The startling toll on the workers has drawn criticism from union leaders who say the facility’s owners waited too long to introduce safety measures, and instead encouraged employees to meet the demand for their products that has surged amid the pandemic.

Smithfield Foods Shuts U.S. Bacon, Ham Plants as Coronavirus Hits Meat Sector

Smithfield, owned by China’s WH Group Ltd, is shuttering a plant that processes bacon and sausage in Cudahy, Wisconsin, for two weeks, according to a statement. A facility in Martin City, Missouri, that processes spiral and smoked hams will also close.  The Missouri plant, which employs more than 400 people, processes pork from the Smithfield slaughterhouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that the company closed indefinitely. More than 200 employees became infected with the coronavirus at the South Dakota slaughterhouse, which produces 4% to 5% of the nation’s pork.

US Pork Farmers Panic as Virus Ruins Hopes for Great Year

Instead, restaurant closures due to the coronavirus have contributed to an estimated $5 billion in losses for the industry, and almost overnight millions of hogs stacking up on farms now have little value. Some farmers have resorted to killing piglets because plunging sales mean there is no room to hold additional animals in increasingly cramped conditions.

Poor Conditions at Meatpacking Plants Have Long Put Workers at Risk. The Pandemic Makes it Much Worse

The meat processing industry, where workers toil shoulder to shoulder in crowded, enclosed spaces, has been battered by the novel coronavirus in recent days. Multiple plants have closed after several thousand workers fell ill and tested positive for COVID-19 and a dozen have died—including three other workers at the JBS plant in Greeley, one at a Cargill plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, four at a Tyson plant in Camilla, Georgia, two at another Tyson plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, one at another JBS plant in Souderton, Pennsylvania, and one at the Smithfield  pork factory in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. As of Wednesday, the Smithfield plant had become the country’s top COVID hotspot, with more than 640 cases linked to the plant.

Corporate focus on profits literally kills workers

The circumstances that engulfed the Sioux Falls pork plant are illustrative of many things: political denial, corporate greed, a Trumpist skepticism toward experts. But the Smithfield plant also epitomizes the stark differences between many wage earners and the professionals of the so-called information economy….The nation needs a stronger social safety net that includes, among other things, paid sick leave and parental leave, guaranteed health care and assistance for child care.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler on unprotected workers and meat inspectors

• You cannot slaughter animals without workers to do the work, and you cannot sell meat without inspectors.
• We need to protect both workers and inspectors or we will see more plants shutter and our grocery stores empty.
• Forcing workers and inspectors to work unprotected is not the answer

Resource

The Counter has a nifty interactive map of closed meatpacking plants as part of a useful Q and A (go to the link to use the interactive parts).

I could not keep up with the number of e-mails I got last week with the subject line “Have you seen this?”

“This” referred to an opinion piece in JAMA entitled Backlash Over Meat Dietary Recommendations Raises Questions About Corporate Ties to Nutrition Scientists.

Definitely up my alley.

The article describes the outraged reaction to a series of papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine last year arguing that recommendations to eat less meat are unfounded (I posted about this at the time).  Some of the investigators involved in the meat papers turned out to have undisclosed ties to meat industry interests.

The JAMA article points out that the most outraged objections to the Annals papers came from investigators who have plenty of industry ties (plant-based) of their own.

My book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, provides loads of evidence for a basic observation: research funded by food companies, regardless of the particular food studied, tends to produce results favorable to the sponsor’s interests.

It also describes how industry influence occurs at an unconscious level; recipients are unaware that they are being influenced.

How the influence gets expressed is also the subject of research.  Bias most frequently turns up in the framing of the research question.  It also turns up frequently in the interpretation of results.

Here is an example from a study of a healthy plant food—walnuts.

The study: Effect of a 2-year diet intervention with walnuts on cognitive decline. The Walnuts And Healthy Aging (WAHA) study: a randomized controlled trial.  Aleix Sala-Vila, Cinta Valls-Pedret, Sujatha Rajaram, Nina Coll-Padrós, Montserrat Cofán, Mercè Serra-Mir,  Ana M Pérez-Heras, Irene Roth, Tania M Freitas-Simoes, Mónica Doménech, Carlos Calvo, Anna López-Illamola, Edward Bitok, Natalie K Buxton, Lynnley Huey, Adam Arechiga, Keiji Oda, Grace J Lee, Dolores Corella, Lídia Vaqué-Alcázar, Roser Sala-Llonch, David Bartrés-Faz, Joan Sabaté, and Emilio Ros1.  Am J Clin Nutr 2020;00:1–11.

Conclusions: Walnut supplementation for 2 y had no effect on cognition in healthy elders. However, brain fMRI and post hoc analyses by site suggest that walnuts might delay cognitive decline in subgroups at higher risk. These encouraging but inconclusive results warrant further investigation.

Conflicts of Interest: AS-V, SR, JS, and ER have received research funding through their institutions from the California Walnut Commission, Folsom, CA, USA. JS and ER were nonpaid members of the California Walnut Commission Scientific Advisory Council. ER was a paid member of the California Walnut Commission Health Research Advisory Group. JS has received honoraria from the California Walnut Commission for presentations.  AS-V has received support from the CaliforniaWalnut Commission to attend professional meetings. All other authors report no conflicts of interest.

Comment: This looks to me like a classic example of interpretation bias.  Although the study showed no effect of walnut supplementation, the authors interpret its overall results as encouraging.  This is putting a positive spin on null results.

Walnuts—and other kinds of nuts—are plant foods with healthy fats.  Why does the California Walnut Commission need to do this?  So you will buy walnuts rather than hazelnuts, pecans, or macadamia nuts (all of which are sponsoring their own positive-result studies).  Studies like these are mostly about marketing.

Questions of whether meat is healthy or unhealthy—and, if unhealthy, at what level of intake—are about much more than marketing.   They need to be studied as objectively as possible.  It’s best to keep industry influence far away from such studies.

Even if the science is done well from start to finish, researchers’ ties to food company sponsors give the appearance of conflicted interests.  Such ties are best avoided from the get-go.

Follow-up

• A detailed analysis of the JAMA piece by the anonymous CarbSane blog
• Naomi Oreske’s comment in Scientific American
• Texas A&M’s letter to Harvard requesting an investigation of faculty belonging to True Health Initiative (who complained about the meat guidelines)
• Texas A&M’s Chancellor Calls on Harvard to Look Into Faculty’s Beef-science Ethics (AgDaily)
• Beef with Harvard (Inside Higher Ed)
• From Beef to Bots? Harvard Professors Mired in Debate over Spam Emails, Industry-Funded Research (Harvard Crimson)
• Conflict of Interest in the Post-Truth Era: What Is It, Now? (David Katz)
• Processed Meat “Guidelines:” Why the Exceptional Reaction? (David Katz)
• Tobacco, Soda, and the Beef with Truth (David Katz)
• Massive Meat Mayhem, Part 3 (ConscienHealth)
• Perspective: Red and Processed Meats and Health Risks: How Strong Is the Evidence? (Frank Hu et al)

I’ve been seeing lots of books about meat lately.  Here are two recent ones.

Josh Berson.  The Meat Question: Animals, Humans, and the Deep History of Food.  MIT Press, 2019.

The author is an Australian social scientist, a vegan, who has produced a deep dive into the history of the use of meat as food and as cultural symbol.  As he puts it,

The aim of this book is to unpack what I’ve come to call the Meat Question–Should humans be eating meat, and if so who, and what kinds, and how much?–in the most comprehensive way possible.  The perspective…is deep deep in that it encompasses the history of human meat eating and human relationships with other gregarious vertebrates over a span of more than 2 million years.  (p. 2)

This [book’s] perspective is centered on my conviction that the economic violence of meat has less to do with who can and cannot afford it than with how meat serves to prop up a system of asymmetric benefits from all forms of human activity, not just that related to food.  Growing demand for meat is not simply an outcome of growing affluence.  It is a symptom of the inequality and oppression that have accompanied that affluence. (p. 294)

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft.  Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food.  University of California Press, 2019.

This book examines the brand-new industry creating lab-based meat.  These products are not yet on the market but are of such enormous public and economic interest that they are well worth book-length treatment.

This book tells the story of what I found, and what I did not find, in the course of my time in the small, strange world of cultured meat, during what seemed to be the early years of an emerging technology.  I expected to spend time in laboratories…This did happen in some measure, but for the most part I found myself with very little laboratory science to observe and a great many public conversations about cultured meat to participate in and sort through.  (p. 15)

But cultured meat, too, raises moral questions.  Not questions about our moral regard for harvested cells, but questions about the implications cultured meat may hold for our moral regard for animals….It is relatively easy to see how cultured meat would or would not suit different philosophical arguments for animal protection….But assuming that cultured meat leads to abolition of animal agriculture, it will change our sense of what these creatures, these nonhuman animals, are doing in the world. (p. 133)

Both of these books deal with the moral, philosophical, cultural, historical, and socioeconomic implications of meat-eating, although from quite different perspectives.

Just in time for Halloween, the zombie is back.

I can hardly believe that the deeply discredited Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF)is on the attack again with another one of its snarky full-page ads in the New York Times (Monday, October 28).

The Center is infamous for secrecy about who pays for such things.

In this case, it’s easy to guess that the meat industry must behind it.  The most likely candidate is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) on the basis of its already aggressive campaign against plant-based meat alternatives (see below).

If beef producers are hiring the Center for Consumer Freedom, you know that their industry is in real trouble.

If they are employing the CCF, they deserve to be in trouble.

NCBA Lobbying

• Introduction of legislation against plant-based meat alternatives
• Summary of “The Real Marketing Edible Artificials Truthfully (MEAT) Act of 2019”
• The NCBA ‘‘Real Marketing Edible Artificials Truthfully Act of 2019’’ or the ‘‘Real MEAT
  Act of 2019.’’

CleanFoodFacts.com:  Does it exist?  I can’t find it online.

FoodNavigator-USA has a report of the press release for this, and the Center’s vague discussion of where the funding comes from.

The press release from the Annals of Internal Medicine arrived last week under embargo, sent to me by several reporters: “New guidelines: No need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health.”

The press announcement was accompanied by 5 review papers, a sixth with this recommendation, and an editorial.  These are posted on the website of their publisher, the American College of Physicians, implying this organization’s endorsement of this guideline.

Collectively, these papers challenge dietary advice to eat less processed meat and red meat on the grounds of inadequate science.

These papers argue:

• Eliminating processed and red meat from the diet may reduce disease risks but the effects are small and evidence for them is of low quality and low certainty.
• Omnivores are unwilling to eat less meat.
• If you continue to think eating meat is bad for you in the face of this evidence, you are a victim of the “the less you know, the more you hold to your beliefs” syndrome.
• You can ignore dietary guidelines (regardless of source) and continuing eating meat as you always have.

This is a good example of what I call nutritional nihilism, an approach that insists that because observational studies are based on self-reported information and necessarily flawed, their conclusions are unscientific and should be discounted.  Therefore, because we can’t do more rigorous studies, we should not advise the public about diets best for health or the environment.

I have several concerns about all this:

• Yes, the effects are small but that is true of nutrition studies in general.  The small effects show benefits from eating less meat.  The authors could easily have interpreted their work as suggesting that eating less meat might be useful.  This is an example of interpretation bias.
• The authors took a strictly science-based approach to a problem strongly affected by social, economic, and political factors and values.
• The studies look at previous studies that compared people who eat meat to those who eat less. The authors excluded studies of vegetarians compared to meat-eaters.
• They look at meat outside its context of calories.
• The authors did not look at the totality of the evidence; they excluded laboratory and animal studies that can be more closely controlled.
• They excluded studies of environmental impact, which has a significant bearing on human dietary practices (meat production adds more greenhouse gases than vegetable production).
• The conclusions fall into the category of “everything you thought you knew about nutrition is wrong.”  This rarely happens.  Science usually works incrementally, not in one enormous reversal like this.

Do the authors really believe that all those other committees and commissions urging less meat were wrong and continue to be wrong?   Their strictly science-based approach seems unrealistic.

The papers come across to me as a concerted attack on dietary guidelines (national and international), on nutrition science in general, and on nutritional epidemiology in particular.

The meat industry and its supporters will love them.

Attacks on the quality of nutrition research have been coming from many sources lately: the food industry, of course, but also statisticians (John Ioannidis at Stanford is making a career of this), and some scientists (usually with ties to food companies).  The criticisms themselves are not new.

What is new is the vehemence and level of effort to discredit observational studies, particularly those based on self-reports of dietary intake.  Yes, nutritional epidemiology has flaws, but the methods have been useful in many instances, as argued convincingly by two of its leading practitioners.

In looking at nutrition research, I think it is essential to evaluate the totality of information available: laboratory, animal, human epidemiology and clinical studies—and to do this in the context of what people actually eat and the number of calories they consume, as well as adding in a hefty dose of common sense.

Common sense is what’s missing in these studies.  Do the authors really believe that:

• Meat eaters are healthier than vegetarians?
• Eating more meat is better for health?
• Meat eaters are less obese and have less heart disease and cancer than those who eat less?

If not, the conclusions make no sense.

Most of the authors report no financial ties to the food industry.  I would love to know the back story about why they chose to do these studies and to interpret them in this way.

Reactions (I will be adding to this list as they come in)

• The Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Department issued a statement
• The True Health Initiative (THI) issued a press release outlining its concerns (the link is here)
• THI council members sent a letter to the journal editor stating objections (the link)
• THI collected quotes from members of its council and others (including mine)
• THI also produced graphics.  Here is one example.

• David Katz weighs in
• New York Times: 5 things you should know
• New York Times coverage: “Eat less meat, scientists said.  Now some believe that was bad advice.”
• From Dean Ornish
• Consumer Reports (I’m quoted)
• From the World Cancer Research Fund
• Vox’s crystal clear explanation
• NPR’s The Salt’s excellent analysis
• Aaron Carroll’s follow-up to his editorial

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, explains in The Atlantic Why It’s Immigrants Who Pack Your Meat.

You really should read the whole thing.  It’s a powerful indictment.  Here are a few excerpts. 

• The immigration raid last week at seven poultry plants in rural Mississippi was a perfect symbol of the Trump administration’s racism, lies, hypocrisy, and contempt for the poor. It was also a case study in how an industry with a long history of defying the law has managed to shift the blame and punishment onto workers.
• What Trump has described as an immigrant “invasion” was actually a corporate recruitment drive for poor, vulnerable, undocumented, often desperate workers.
• The immigrant workers arrested in Mississippi the other day were earning about $12.50 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, during the late 1970s, the wages of meatpacking workers in Iowa and Colorado were about $50 an hour.
• Over the years, I’ve spent time with countless farmworkers and meatpacking workers who entered the United States without proper documentation. Almost all of them were hardworking and deeply religious. They had taken enormous risks and suffered great hardships on behalf of their families. Today workers like them are the bedrock of our food system. And they are now being scapegoated, hunted down, and terrorized at the direction of a president who inherited about $400 million from his father, watches television all day, and employs undocumented immigrants at his golf resorts.

Joshua Specht.  Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America. Princeton University Press, 2019.

This is an enlightening, engrossing, and eminently readable cultural history of the beef industry in the United States, from the replacement of bison (and Native Americans) from the Great Plains to Big Meat to consumer concerns about the effects of beef on health and the environment.  What I so admire about this book is how it never loses sight of the big picture—the critical social and political forces that promoted the beef industry and made beef an icon of American society.

Specht summarizes big-picture aspects in his introduction:

The cattle-beef complex was the product of small debates, struggles, and fights over keeping one’s job, protecting a home, or making a dollar.  Ultimately, these were contests over what our food system should look like and how our society should be organized.  Low prices and sanitary meat at the expense of all else won out.  It was a system predicated on land dispossession, low wages, animal abuse, rancher impoverishment, and environmental degradation.  But it also democratized beef; hungry consumers could eat what they want3ed, and it tasted good.  Railroads, refrigeration, and capital made this system possible, but politics and struggle determined its contours (p.20).

Specht describes how the establishment of cattle ranching—e,g,, winning the West— meant the destruction of bison (and, therefore, Native American livelihoods).  Ranchers had to contend with the displaced and understandably angry Indians, of course, but also winter, drought, barbed wire, and theft.  Specht explains the political maneuvering that brought us to today’s highly consolidated, industrialized beef industry, controlled by just four companies, and producing most beef in CAFOs (controlled animal feeding operations) infamous for mistreatment of animals and environmental pollution.  How did this happen?

The refrigerator car and the managerial revolution explains how a small group of firms could dominate a world in which cattle were slaughtered in one place and eaten a continent or n ocean away, but the meatpackers’ victories over labor, the railroads, and local butchers explain how this state of affairs went from one that horrified people—pale grey meat in stuffy railcars—to one that was accepted as not only natural and inevitable, but laudable.  The key to the meatpackers’ success was that they would align their cause, centralized mass production of meat, with the interests of consumers (p. 178).

The interests of consumers?  Cheap meat.  As long as the present system keeps the price of meat affordable, it will be hard to mobilize public support for reforming the system.

This book is a welcome addition to the library of  books on the meaning of meat in America life, of which my favorites are Orville Schell’s Modern Meat (Random House, 1984) and Betty Fussell’s Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef (Harcourt, 2008).  Schell’s book predated Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, but covered much of the same territory.  Fussell’s is a cultural history.  Specht cites neither.  I commend them to his attention.

Earlier this year, the Lancet published two lengthy treatises arguing that the externalized costs of industrial meat production are unsustainable, and that halving current meat consumption must be a priority for improving human health and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.*  It’s too bad these reports came out too late to be included in Specht’s analysis.  I would love to hear his comments on them.

* The two Lancet reports from January 2019 are:

• Willett W, Rockström J, Loken B, Springmann M, Lang T, Vermeulen S, et al. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet. 2019;393:447–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.
• Swinburn BA, Kraak VI, Allender S, Atkins VJ, Baker PI, Bogard JR, et al. The Global syndemic of obesity, undernutrition, and climate change: The Lancet Commission report. Lancet. 2019;393:791–846. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736 (18)32822-8.