The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business - Hardcover

Leonard, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1451645813 ISBN 13: 9781451645811

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2014

Synopsis

An investigative journalist takes you inside the corporate meat industry—a shocking, in-depth report every American should read.

The biggest takeover in American business that you’ve n ever heard of

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.

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 this title

About the Author

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, and The Meat Racket.

Reviews

“Before there is a chicken or an egg, there is Tyson.” In his eye-opener to the inner workings of the corporations that control and manipulate the nation’s meat supply, journalist Leonard reveals how these vertically integrated behemoths operate to the detriment of both farmers, who do the hard and risky work of raising animals, and consumers, who have actually fewer true choices when shopping in the grocery store or ordering at the local fast-food franchise. Putting human faces on economic statistics, Leonard documents the stories of exploited farmers, some of them Laotian immigrants seeking the American dream but driven to bankruptcy. Market control by these near monopolies has spread beyond chicken into pork and beef production as well. Leonard recounts the history of the Tyson family and how the generations have structured the corporation’s exponential growth over the past decades, an expansion that even the American government appears powerless to rein in. --Mark Knoblauch

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1451645813
• ISBN 13: 9781451645811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384