Food production in America largely goes unnoticed and unappreciated by those not involved in it, but for those in our country’s heartland it defines their lives. While there was once a broad region of independent farmers, the requirements of industrial farming and Wall Street have forced consolidation into just four companies, vertically integrated from seed to shelf, that control virtually all food production. We heard about “The Meat Racket” in an NPR interview in which 
Christopher Leonard described the rise of a near-feudal system and its larger implications for our food, our country, and ourselves. Clicking the link will take you to the Powells.com site for each book, and a visit to our shop will take you to these books and more in our extensive, in-shop lending library.
“The Meat Racket”
By Christopher Leonard
(From Christopher Leonard’s website) 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 1900’s 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.
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.
About the Author
Christopher Leonard is a Schmidt Family Foundation Fellow with The New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute in Washington, DC. He is the former national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press and a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He lives outside Washington, DC.
