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about 12 years ago a guy by the name of Eric Schlosser was in Colorado Springs writing a book I got to know where at that time he wrote the book fast food nation which lit this country on fire about our food system why did he pick Colorado Springs well when he was a kid he went to the Sanborn ranch camp up on the mountain and he wow this is a beautiful place and so as a child he he found out that Colorado Springs was a beautiful place and in particularly the camp up on the mountain and so he kept coming back to Colorado Springs and any saw Colorado Springs evolved as a city and so when he was doing the book fast food nation this is this is what he saw I said in in the fast food restaurants of Colorado Springs behind the counters amid the plastic seats in the changing landscape outside the window you can see all the virtues and destructiveness of our fast food nation I chose Colorado Springs as a focal point for this book because the changes that have recently swept through the city are emblematic of those that fast food and the fast food mentality have encouraged throughout the United States countless other suburban communities in every part of the country could have been used to illustrate the same points the extraordinary growth of Colorado Springs neatly parallels that of the fast food industry during the last few decades the city's population is more than doubled subdivisions shopping malls chain restaurants are appearing in the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain in the plains rolling to the east the Rocky Mountain region as a whole has the fastest growing economy in the United States mixing high-tech service industries in a way that made to find America's workforce for years to come and new restaurants are opening there at a faster pace than anywhere else in the nation fast food is now so commonplace that it is acquired an air of inevitability as though it were somehow unavoidable a fact of modern life and yet the dominance of the fast food giants was no more preordained than the march of colonial split-level golf courses split-levels and golf courses main man man-made lakes across the deserts of the American West the political philosophy that now prevails in so much of the West with its demand for lower taxes smaller government and unbridled free-market stands in total contradiction to the region's true economic underpinnings in the petition the potato fields and processing plants of Idaho in the ranch lands east of colorado springs and the feedlots and slaughterhouses of the high plains you can see the effects of fast food on the nation's rural life its environment its workers in its health the fast food chains now stand atop a huge food industrial complex that has gained control of American agriculture during the 1980s large multinationals such as Cargill conagra 9bp were allowed to dominate one commodity market after another farmers and cattle ranchers are losing their independence essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness Giants or being forced off the land Wow since eric said these words we have lost ninety-eight percent of our pig producers over fifty percent of our of our ranchers 35,000 cattle feeding operations have gone out of business eighty-six percent of our dairy farmers are now gone and out of business and we have transitioned into an industrial agriculture Winona Hatter comes to us from food and water watch in Washington DC where she is the executive director I've known Winona about 15 years we started out together raising heck with meat packers and we've been at it and we've never given up and i'll tell you when Nona has really been a spark plug she has been the one with the ideas and the strategy and her organization has really executed unbelievably this organization and Wynonna are smart their strategic and they are not afraid of anything or anyone or any corporation they never back down and they never give up in this book food ah Polly is a awesome follow-up to what Eric Schlosser described as the problem when Nona continues to talk about but even better she's talking about solutions how do we fix this mess welcome well it is terrific to be here in Colorado Springs and i have to say that mike is a real visionary and he is a really unusual person and that he was not willing to back down to the meat packers and he took it all the way to the end and i tried to ruin him and he's come back with ranch foods direct and it's an amazing local food operation and i really appreciate the invitation to be here tonight so i got interested in food because i grew up on the farm when I was 11 my parents decided that it was time to get back to the farm they were missionaries and they didn't have a whole lot of money so we ended up on this really really funky farm about 45 miles from washington DC up in the Blue Ridge Mountains but you know in those days DC wasn't what it is today in fact it would take us about an hour and a half an hour and 45 minutes if you wanted to go in to the city because there were all back roads of course today it takes about that long to get out to my farm because of all of the hideous traffic and I was really lucky I ended up inheriting that farm and my husband runs it as a community supported agriculture project feeding about 500 families in the DC area now I learned a lot on that farm I learned about how much work it is to squish potato bugs and to pluck chickens and to chop kindling because my dad didn't believe in our folks taking it easy and he never got around to putting the plumbing in that old farm house so I can tell you when i was 18 i was really happy to leave the farm but I kept going back and I think a lot of my values Willie came from that variants and it's why i am so fighting mad about what's been done to the family farmer now i decided and the the people that I work with its food and water watch our terrific staff we decided that it was really time to write a book that tells the history of how we ended up getting this dysfunctional food system because if we don't know where we've been we really don't know where we're going so I'm going to ask you to bear with me as I talk about a little bit of farm history and I think it's also the history about what's happened to our economy and why so many people are suffering today both farmers and a lot of urban workers so you'll remember in the 1920s that the financial services industry had been misbehaving kind of like they have recently and our nation within a horrible depression and no one was suffering more than farm families we lost about one out of six farms during a five year period leading up to the 1930s and when the Roosevelt administration came into office they wanted to do something to not only help urban people but to help family farmers and rural people about fifty four percent of our population lived in rural areas at that time in on farms and so during the first few days of the Roosevelt administration they were able to pass a farm bill and during the first few years of the Roosevelt administration they were able to institute a number of policies that actually made it affordable and profitable to form and that stabilized prices for consumers and many of these policies are things that we should reinstitute today they did things like queer grain reserved so that when it was the weather was terrible and crops failed that crops could be pulled out of a grain reserve that was actually stored in silos in farmer's fields they instituted a number of supply management programs that meant that there was not / production which is really one of the causes of farms going out of business because prices are low because there are too many crops they created programs to make it certain that farmers could actually make the cost of production which is one of the main problems that happens today when farmers and livestock growers can't actually get what it costs to produce whatever they're they're growing for food and these programs worked really really well and in fact during World War two the u.s. really provided food for the Allies and after the war was over and Europe was devastated and the colonial governments were fallen the US was still providing food for many nations around the world but something really changed during the war and I think we all know this from our history lessons the US had become an industrial powerhouse the center of Finance had moved from London to New York and there were a group of very prominent business leaders and political leaders that believed that the time for agriculture was over and that really what the United States needed to do was to put their resources towards a developing industry and a number of these business leaders got together and they created an organization called the committee for economic development and I have to tell you that before I wrote through opoly I'd never heard of this organization but as I read through a lot of the historical documents and reports that they did and the individuals that were involved in this organization I began to understand how the lobbying had taken place to really change the way we deal with agriculture in this country now some of the original organizers of the committee for Economic Development and originally they saw this as a volunteer organization for a number of gentlemen who met in clubs and I knew one another socially I'm talking about people like Paul Hoffman who went on to administer Minister the Marshall Plan in Europe under the Truman administration who was one of the directors of the UN Development Program and went on to be the president of the Ford Foundation and one of the architects of the Green Revolution there were a number of business leaders like this there was a gentleman who was on the cutting edge of research about how you change consumers minds and they believed that farm boys especially farm boys coming back from World War two should not inherit their families farms that really capital should replace labor that chemicals and technology can replace labor and the farm should be much much larger and that it didn't make sense to have all of these very small diversified farms that really more vertical integration and more global trade of food products with the future and you know I'm not suggesting that this is some kind of wild conspiracy I think this was just a situation where a group of prominent business leaders with a lot of resources and political connections got together and began to develop a strategy that was very effective over the first 15 years of the committee for economic developments existence 38 of its members held public office two of its members were actually presidents of the Federal Reserve Bank now they didn't able they weren't able to actually begin chipping away at the New Deal foreign policies until under the Eisenhower administration and there was a secretary of agriculture during this period named Ezra Benson and Ezra Benson was an idol log he believed that the New Deal farm policies that made a diversified family farming possible we're actually going to lead Twitter communism and you'll remember that this was the McCarthy era and that there was a lot of concern about a communist takeover of the u.s. it seems a long way ago now but he was able to begin chipping away at the policies that allowed farmers to make the cost of production in the 1960s the committee for economic development had become very prominent in fact the two co-chairs were also the presidents of the Ford company and Sears and Roebuck and they had recruited most of the economic departments of our most prominent universities many of our most important institutions like publishing houses and other large newspaper concerns really important institutions in our society and the committee for Economic Development worked with a number of The Economist's that were involved and they wrote a report called an adaptive plan for agriculture you can actually still look it up on the internet and see references to it and this this plan basically talked about why it was necessary to get rid of any of those policies that remained from the New Deal like the the grain reserve and the a reduced ability of farmers to make the cost of production and they believed that it was really necessary to get more labor out of rural areas and you know i would say basically a rural depopulation strategy even there they didn't call it that and they also talked about the future being in really the global trade of food products that it didn't make sense in a nation like the u.s. to be producing high volume or products like fruits and vegetables that take a lot of labor that the US should really be a grain powerhouse not a country that grew all of its own fruits and vegetables and produced all of its own products and this adaptive plan for agriculture actually got a lot of press it got a lot of coverage because of all of the institutions that were involved in it and it was distributed to members of Congress and it became kind of the the common belief that the New Deal AG programs needed to go but it took a couple more decades to get rid of the last vestiges the next really dramatic thing that happened in agriculture happened under the Nixon administration and it was really a protege of Ezra Benson who was the secretary of agriculture during that time and I think some of you might be old enough to remember Earl Butz anybody remember robots robots was quite a character for those of you who are young but you hear people kind of a snickering in fact he eventually got fired by the Ford found or by the Ford administration for making racial slurs and for having represented the u.s. in Rome in a food meeting and making selicia's remarks about the Pope a lewd remark so he was a real character and he believed that farmers needed to get big and get out or get out and he went around the country lecturing farmers telling them that they needed to borrow a lot of money they needed to buy a lot of equipment they needed to buy a lot of land and they needed to really start producing a lot of grains because the US was going to become a grain powerhouse and there was only one year in the 1970s that the u.s. was a grain powerhouse and that was right before the McGovern Nixon election when robots helped put together a big grain deal with the grain traders like Cargill and conagra they made two billion dollars on this grain deal and the price of bread went way up and in the US but the idea that robots presented to President Nixon and his inner circle is that this grain deal with the Soviet Union would make it possible for farmers to make more money and and they would vote for out Richard Nixon and he of course did win that election but what happened to family farmers is really heartbreaking because they did large numbers that farmers did bar a lot of money putting their farms up as collateral buying a lot equipment raising a lot of crops and there was massive overproduction and that meant that this was the period that we began to lose millions of forums in the 1930s it were about 6.8 million farms today we have under a million even though the USDA says we have more but they kind of fudged the numbers so the permanent agricultural crisis that we're still in today really began during the Nixon era now the 1970s a lot of things began to change in the US and one of the arguments that a lot of the largest economic make interest in the country made was that it was necessary for companies to get a lot bigger so that they could really compete with companies from countries like Japan and a group of these industries began raising money and looking for a candidate to really carry out both a deregulatory program and a program to get rid of antitrust law and a couple of these industries are agribusiness and the oil industry that were very instrumental in helping ronald reagan be elected and one of the first targets was that those antitrust laws that had worked really well of since the late 1940s because both political parties through those decades had really believed that it was important to have vigorous competition I mean after all we do have a economic system that's supposed to be based on competition and they believed that it was dangerous to have companies become too large because then they get too much political power but in the early
980s when the Reagan administration came into office one of the first things that they did was a point our logs to the Federal Trade Commission in the Department of Justice which are the two main agencies that oversee antitrust laws those are the laws of course that prevent monopolization and ensure that we have vigorous competition amongst our different industry competitors and they did exactly what you would expect came into office cut the budgets got rid of a whole departments stopped a lot of the investigations that were going on and I think probably most importantly for the long term dramatically narrowed the definition of what an antitrust violation is and we've really been living with this situation ever since then because our antitrust laws were really eviscerated at this time and we have not had strong antitrust enforcement even of the weak laws that are on the books since that period now what happens when companies get a lot bigger and a lot wealthier because when a company gets bigger it also gets wealthier it means that they have a lot more resources to spend on influencing public policy and that's exactly what happened in the nineteen beginning in the 1980s we began to see the weakening of our democracy and that public policy was being determined more and more through a system of legalized bribery campaign contributions and lobbying and the food industry was one of the industries that was most affected now going into the 1990s one of the things that was being discussed was trade rules a new set of trade rules that would encourage more global food trade and what happened is that Cargill the giant grain trader and big meat processors really big food company decided to put together a coalition of about a hundred food companies to really have an impact on the way that food policy was written for the WTO the World Trade Organization and the North America free trade agreement or NAFTA and what they hoped was at this coalition with a lot of different companies that really had different economic interests that the discussion could happen in this coalition and that they could come to an agreement and really have a unified approach to the the policies that they were advocating for these trade agreements and in the end they did and Cargill actually wrote the agreement on agriculture in their world trade organization with the idea in mind that food should be produced where it's cheapest to produce food where labor is cheapest where environmental laws are the weakest and this has had a very dramatic effect on our food system now once the US had become a party to the trade agreements there was a lot of pressure to get our farm policy completely in line with that trade policy and I always say that what Ronald Reagan began Bill Clinton Willie finished as far as really destroying the enforcement of antitrust law because not only was the Clinton administration one of the biggest boosters of these trade agreements that really are for the benefit of companies not people the Clinton administration really didn't enforce even the week antitrust laws on the books and in fact the the flurry of mergers and acquisitions really began under the Clinton administration and I think one of the most probably a detrimental our consolidation that we saw was with the media the mainstream media in the beginning of the Clinton administration there were 50 large media companies that had already begun consolidating by the end of the Clinton administration we had five major media companies left and it was really under the Clinton administration that began to the meatpacking industry began to really consolidate and of course the Clinton administration had a very strong relationship with companies like Tyson and Walmart and I'm going to talk about Tyson a little bit later so this had a really bad effect on our food system and the consolidation just began accelerating and the foreign policy in the 1996 farm bill really began to destroy what was left of family farms and what happened is that the the 1996 bill was called freedom to farm we all know that any piece of legislation that has freedom attached to it is probably really dangerous and it it deregulated foreign policy and eliminated what was left of those New Deal programs like the grain reserve that China's had a grain reserves since ad 54 got rid of the supply management mechanisms that meant that there was an overproduction because there are a lot of economic interest from grain traders to food processors who like overproduction because it means that they have access to cheaper inputs so they were able to just completely change foreign policy now very quickly farmers were beginning to call this legislation freedom to fail in the first couple of years after the bill passed and it took actually there's a very controversial took two years to pass the legislation the first couple of years the price of corn dropped by 50% the price of soy dropped by forty percent and farms were going out of business right and left because when there's overproduction it costs a lot of money to put in crops a lot of money is borrowed and if you can't even make back the cost of production after a year or two you're really sunk and so Congress in its wisdom rather than taking a look at the policies that they deregulated decided to use taxpayer money to prop up corn and and soy production and to make sure that farmers could kind of taught her on the edge of going out of business but continue to over produce so you know we always hear it's the farmers fault that they grow corn and soy which really is a lot of nonsense you know this is federal our foreign policy and so you know I've been talking about a lot of kind of heavy and boring farm policy I want to just talk a little bit about who really benefited from this deregulation and consolidation and I want to just do a kind of a real quick well I'd call it an exercise but it's you know it's more of a little test so I want to ask you who benefited the most from these cheap commodities and I'm going to read a list of brands and then I'm going to ask you to raise your hand if you've ever had one of these brands and I just want to want you to know that I would be raising my hand this is not not being the food police here and then I want to ask if anybody has an idea of why I might have listed this particular list of brands just to illustrate what consolidation has done okay Pepsi Mountain Dew aquafina sierra mist taza so be sliced Lipton propel Gatorade tropicana naked juice captain crunch and Jemima near East rice a roni pasta roni puffed wheat harvest crunch pasta roni puffed wheat oh I said that already crisp vitamin mother's lays Maui style ruffles Doritos Cheetos world gold sunchips sebert owns Cracker Jacks Chester's grandma's munchos smart food bacon it's Matador Hickory sticks hostess miss vickie's munchies true north anybody nobody has their hand up so where did I read that particular list of brands that's right and PepsiCo is the largest food company in the United States do you think that those products are food is that being kind of generous calling those products food well that's just you know I'm being kind of silly but this consolidation has meant that we basically have 20 companies food processing companies that control more than sixty percent of the brand's when you go into the grocery store so it looks like we have this you know great diversity and all of this wonderful products and all of the color when you go into the grocery store but really we have very little choice and these food companies have used their political power to dictate most of the rules about how our food is produced from the pesticides or children are exposed to to the fact that we have a weak labeling of four ingredients like genetically modified ingredients I mean every single thing about our food system has really been dictated by the small couple of companies the fact that our children are see on average just below 5,000 TV ads for junk food every year you know we don't hear much about the role of advertising in the obesity epidemic but they've figured out these companies that children at the age of three have brand identification and they want to attract children at a very young age to identify with that brand that they believe based on research they we'll buy throughout their lifetime and children are very important d terminators and who in what the family eats so you know I think that this is a really pretty draconian and especially when you consider that these companies have worked with food scientists to figure out how to create foods that are addicting a combination of fat sugar and salt and you've probably seen a lot of the recent coverage and books written about this but they actually figure it out that when people eat this combination that it triggers a hormone in the brain and they want to go back for more more and more and so this is really kind of the center of the problem with our food system but i will say that these food processors are not at the top of the heap at the real top of the heap are the grocery industry because we have a few chains that have enormous power over the food processing companies because of their need for volume we have four grocery chains that control in many markets rural markets suburban markets seventy to ninety percent of sales and overall they control about fifty percent of sales and Walmart is at the top of that food chain one out of three grocery dollars today is spent at walmart and walmart uses television advertising to hammer home everyday low prices so that people expect low prices even if it means very poor quality and the Walmart airs have as much wealth as the bottom forty percent of Americans and I think that's kind of a metaphor for what's wrong with our food system and what's happened to our economic system as more and more foods are produced in countries like China about fifty percent of the value of food products is in some years now actually produced overseas and I want to just devote a little time to picking on Tyson tonight because you know I think it's pretty shocking and you know I'm i guess i'm going to bite the hand that feeds us because i know bone appetit is a sponsor tonight but i think it's pretty shocking that bone appetit is using tyson to supply chicken to the university because you know we've done a lot of research at food and water watch at about the poultry industry and one of the things that I did in writing food ah Polly is I went and visited one of these poultry operations very few people in the poultry industry will speak out about the horrible conditions for the birds but for the workers too and there are a few people who are getting really fed up because these contract growers are literally serfs they actually refer to themselves as serfs they make an average of about twelve to fifteen thousand dollars because Tyson and the other you know small group of poultry growers have figure produce meat packers have figured out a system where the the grower actually has to build the the giant warehouse the grower is responsible for the waste that's generated in any lawsuit or any problem with spills and these well warehouse facilities have as many as 300,000 chickens in them I went into one of these facilities and I tell you I was so choked I don't know how you could even go in I mean I literally cannot even look at a piece of chicken since that time but what they've done is they play on the very poorest people in rural areas who have very few choices and who are often trying to save the family farm our USDA will guarantee the loans so that they can get a loan for this big chicken of facility and the grower usually puts up their property for collateral and then Tyson or whatever producer that we're talking about they earn the genetics of the birds they owned the chicks they actually bring the chicks takes about 45 days to raise a chick to be a broiler how they own the feed that is laced with antibiotics and arsenic in in many locations because arsenic actually accelerates the growth of poultry and kind of gives it at that nice pink quality that it has and and then the the industry representatives come and check on the birds and really are very involved in growing them now after about 45 days then the contract chicken catchers that the company contracts with I'll come in and I'll pick up all these birds that are crowded together and don't have enough room to turn around and pick them up by their feet and put them in the trucks that the Tyson owns and takes them down to the salt slaughter plant that Tyson owns the glower gets paid a based on how much weight the chickens have grown compared to how much feed Tyson has given the grower but the grower doesn't ever get to see how much the feed ways and they aren't allowed to be present when the birds are weighed they have to kind of take the industry's word about this and then the bird is slaughtered in this Tyson slaughter plant and Tyson along with some other meat producers has been lobbying the USDA to speed up the slaughter of birds so today birds are slaughtered a hundred and seventy-five birds per minute per minute and to get rid of the bacteria are the birds are dipped in different chemical baths like chlorine and usually trisodium phosphate so I say that bone appetit should not be using Tyson meat and so you know I really didn't write food opoly there just to be this bummer who talks about all of the problems and how lot in the food system is and how we really can't eat anything I really wrote food opoly to to make the case that yes we should vote with our fork we should go to ranch foods directon and by good meat we should go to local producers who are growing our fruits and vegetables but it's not enough to just vote with our fork we also need to vote with our boat and we need to begin to hold these people we elect accountable and I think it begins at the local level and I think it begins with a lot of the issues that are exciting people we've seen massive campaigns now around labeling genetically engineered food I think the industry overreached when they spent 60 million dollars to defeat proposition 37 in California and this year we've seen 35 states have some kind of campaigns to label genetically engineered food we've had legislation passing a state like Connecticut it's going to pass in Vermont we know the feds the FDA is now talking about some kind of labeling and I think more of this legislation or initiatives will pass like the initiative in Washington State and it's generated all this grassroots support and when people get involved in one campaign and win it inspires them to get involved in the next one and there are a lot of other issues to be working on and a lot of the political action that we need has to start at the community level right and you know you have some great issues here now I think the idea of the public market is absolutely brilliant because you know we need public space we need places that people can actually go get together can buy the healthy products that they need but that can have the the room and the opportunity to to talk to strategize and so I really support what you're doing and I think that Mayor Bach should I be ashamed of himself and that it's time for a some local campaigns around that issue so you know I think all this these political debates do start at the local level I think we have to pay a lot more attention to the state legislators though and I think that's one of the places that there's been a lot of weakness how the past several years and you know the state legislatures every ten years we district and we've had a lot of really bad gerrymandering in a lot of states and that's why we have a Congress that is completely dysfunctional the House of Representatives where we have a lot of members of Congress that I don't think are representative of the American people so I think it's all very exciting are the opportunities to take these kind of local issues to the next level to grow our homegrown candidates help them become leaders and get elected and really I see a lot of Hope amongst young people amongst people who are really mad and really want to take back our democracy because I think if we're really going to fix our food system we're going to have t
fix our democracy right and there are a lot of campaigns beginning to have a constitutional amendment to undo citizens united and I think that that's pretty exciting and the people working on a lot of these different issues can come together and that's how we're going to bring the change that's really necessary so I think I'm probably going over time but i want to thank you for the invitation ok thanks 10 I you
