Lady Eve Lecture - 10/27/2006

Jonathan Dimbleby: So would you please welcome Eric Schlosser to present the 2006 Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture…

(Applause)

Eric Schlosser: Thank you very much.

It is a real honour to be giving this speech marking the anniversary of the Soil Association, and it's wonderful to look out at a group of people who believe in the right things and are being proven right.

What was once thought to be a marginal fringe movement – an eccentric, odd movement – the movement on behalf of organic food – is now being embraced by the mainstream. And McDonald's is now selling organic milk – who would have thought?

So I think that Patrick and all the supporters of the Soil Association are to be congratulated, but the victory is far from complete. And it would be a pity if this important movement now splinters and turns on itself at the very moment when it stands to have its greatest influence in the United Kingdom. And not only here, but increasingly throughout the West.

For decades, the Soil Association has been seeking influence and the question today is – how can this organisation actually wield influence and what sort of compromises to its core values must it be forced to make?

So tonight I'm going to talk about the threat posed by industrial agriculture – the movement that is growing not only here but throughout the West to oppose this industrial system. And I'm going to make some suggestions about some of the next steps that can be taken.

There are some profound limitations to the whole concept of organic. Is it really worthwhile to buy an organic apple in London if that apple was grown in China or in Chile or even in Washington State? My answer would be no. It makes no sense. So we have to think about something much more, and much bigger than organic.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about two ideas that we hear a great deal about. Individual choice and personal responsibility. We hear this a great deal from the industry itself.

First of all, I want you to keep in mind that nothing I'm going to say tonight is the final word on this subject and none of it is the definitive truth. Although I wish it were.

I start this evening, and I start all of my work with full knowledge of my own limitations and fallibility. I know all too well that I'm not pure. If I were pure, I wouldn't be here tonight. I would not have flown to London on that big British Airways jet to give this speech to you tonight or to attend the opening of a film in London.

I'd like to think – I'd really like to think – that what I have to say to you is so important, and the work I'm doing is so important, that it justifies the tons of carbon released into the upper atmosphere during my flight.

But I'd have a very hard time proving that point. And, no, I didn't purchase any carbon credits to offset my airline flight. I think that George Monbiot is entirely correct in comparing the purchase of carbon credits to the indulgences that were sold to the wealthy in the Middle Ages in which you could pay money to the church to offset your sins.

I am here as a sinner. And that is the starting point, and there maybe someone in this audience tonight who is pure – who lives a life completely free of compromise, free of contradiction and totally free of hypocrisy. And if you are here tonight, I'd prefer not to meet you…

(Laughter)

It would be too hard to bear. But for the last 25 years, we have been fed this message from industry about personal freedom, personal responsibility and I believe in those things, and my work has tried to encourage those things. And I may be guilty as well of over stressing those things.

The idea that every purchase is like a vote. The idea that we all need to be responsible consumers. That's true. But it leads us to think that we need to be morally pure and that ideally as consumers we're going to change the world.

But that's a delusion. That's a complete delusion. Missing from this public debate too often are some other ideas. The notion of corporate responsibility. And the notion of collective responsibility. The problems that we face right now are not due to individual faults. They are due to big systems – industrial systems.

And without taking a systematic approach to these problems, there really is no hope for change. We are not, as consumers, going to shop our way out of this. Every single one of you in this room can move to Devon and go off the grid and use solar power and grow your own food. But if the government of my country continues to deny the reality of global warming. And if the government of China continues to buy coal-fired power plants, it's not going to make any difference. And every single person in London could do that and move to Devon and live off the land, although I think the people in Devon wouldn't be too happy about that.

(Laughter)

So we really shouldn't be allowing this debate to degenerate to an issue of who is purer than whom. The last time I was in England, I had the opportunity to debate with the president of McDonald's UK on television. And we had a chance to talk before the debate. He was a lovely guy. He really was – I liked him. He has his point of view. I have my point of view. We disagree. It's not personal, because he could be replaced tomorrow.

And the core values, and the core operating system in McDonald's isn't going to change. This isn't about good people, virtuous people versus bad, mean people. We are talking about systems – huge systems.

The large agri-business firms and the fast food chains like to stress this notion of personal choice and personal responsibility. But how are these choices even being formed?

It's almost six years since Fast Food Nation was published. In the six years since the book was published, the McDonald's corporation has spent roughly $18-20 billion simply on marketing and advertising. $18-20 billion putting forth one point of view. I can tell you that the marketing budget for my book was somewhat less than that. And I can tell you that the marketing budget of the Soil Association is much less than that as well.

So in the realm of ideas, in the debate over ideas, is it a fair fight? I don't think so. So before we begin to argue about personal choice, we really have to understand the context in which these choices are being made. The culture that is forming these choices, and we are doing our best to change that culture, but there are very, very big concentrated powers that have more influence.

And it is incredible how successful the Soil Association has been in pushing this society in a different direction given the power and the influence and the organisational skills of the organisations up against it.

So while it's easy to feel virtuous and self-righteous, and it's easy to denounce those who disagree with you, I think it's counter productive. None of us are pure, and we aren't going to change any of this with our purchasing.

It's important to remember that the founders of the Soil Association and the pioneers of the organic movement didn't have a narrow view of the world. On the contrary, their thinking was truly holistic. The interconnectedness of all things was at the heart of their philosophy. Lady Balfour, Sir Albert Howard, Robert McCarrison, Jerome Rodale – all of them were rebelling against a simplistic, mechanistic view of how food should be produced.

Their interest in the soil was literal, but it was also metaphorical. The importance of the soil was integrally linked to the cycle of life, birth, death, regeneration. They cared about the soil a great deal, hence the name of this wonderful organisation. But they cared about so much more than that.

Sixty years ago in England, farmers were being driven off the land by the pressure to mechanise, by the pressure to specialise, by the pressure to use the latest synthetic fertilisers. The founders of the organic movement rebelled against any purely technological view of agriculture. They rebelled against this drive to control and to dominate nature. They rebelled against attitudes that seemed completely at odds with millennia of human experience.

They believed that what you put in the soil winds up in the crops that grow in that soil, winds up in the animals that eat those crops, winds up in the people that eat those animals, and ultimately everything – everything returns to the soil. As all of us will one day return to the soil.

The world view of the founders of this movement was profoundly humble. It was founded upon a reverence for nature, a humility before nature, and a deep scepticism about the latest scientific innovations and technological inventions. They believed that we must work with nature, and not attempt to conquer nature.

Yes, they cared about the soil and would have been delighted by the recent growth of organic production, but they cared about much more important things than dirt. They cared about preserving the ecology of the countryside and the culture of rural life and the independence of small farmers.

And I'm going to quote from Sir Albert Howard's Agricultural Testament – they were thinking about much bigger things than just the organisms in the soil. Quote – "The Roman Empire lasted for 11 centuries. How long will the supremacy of the West endure? The answer ultimately depends on the wisdom and the courage of all of us in dealing with things that matter." They were concerned with big things. The fate of our civilisations.

Now, the system that they opposed in the first half of the twentieth century that gave rise to the Soil Association, unfortunately gained unprecedented power during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1946, the great threat seemed to be government policies encouraging large scale corporate agriculture, government policies and chemical companies encouraging the use of various poisons on the land.

Little did Lady Eve know in 1946 that two years after founding her little association that a pair of brothers in San Bernardino, California, the McDonald brothers to be exact, would unleash a new, extraordinarily powerful force that would transform agriculture worldwide, that would transform how crops are produced, how animals are raised, how the land is treated, and the very foods that we eat.

Now the culture of southern California in the late 1940s was worlds away from that of rural England at the same time. Indeed Los Angeles was the first city in the world to be formed by the automobile. And the values in southern California were very much linked to that of the automobile. There was incredible emphasis on speed and convenience. And Los Angeles at the time was also the heart of America's aerospace industry.

So, more than anywhere else perhaps in the United States, there was a blind worship of science – an undimmed faith in the possibilities of technology. Now Walt Disney just happened to be there at the same time and Disney became a great populariser of this idea of a better future, better living through chemistry, and the power of science.

According to the Disney version, we would someday all live in plastic houses. We would have flying cars and nuclear powered everything. As a matter of fact, it was Disney who produced one of the great works of propaganda on behalf of nuclear power, a children's documentary called 'Our friend, the atom'. And I sometimes wonder if your Prime Minister may have seen that when he was a small boy.

(Laughter)

So this is the culture that created the fast food industry, and the fast food industry was deeply influenced by all these notions of science. The McDonald brothers' great innovation was to bring the factory system to the production of restaurant food. To bring factory-motored production to the restaurant kitchen. What were the values? Cheapness, efficiency, speed, uniformity, conformity.

Ray Kroc, who bought out the McDonald brothers, a very tough businessman. Ray Kroc, the founder of the McDonald's Corporation, gave a talk in which he really spelled out the core values of this new system, the operating system that survives to this day. And here's the quote: "We have found out that we cannot trust some people who are non-conformists. We will making conformists out of them in a hurry. The organisation cannot trust the individual. The individual must trust the organisation."

This fast food system is about uniformity, conformity, control. Everything tasting the same at every location. Now, when there were just a few McDonald's, this didn't have a big impact on the United States and a negligible impact on our agricultural production.

Today, there are about 30,000 McDonald's restaurants, about half of them in the United States. And McDonald's today in the United States is the biggest purchaser of beef, biggest purchaser of pork, of potatoes, of chicken, of lettuce and apples. It is essentially the biggest purchaser of the staple foods that Americans consume. It's also the biggest purchaser of agricultural products in France, and I think in the United Kingdom as well.

And this company, and the companies who began to imitate its practices, promoted the centralisation and industrialisation of agriculture and particularly of livestock production. Cheapness, efficiency, speed. When McDonald's decided to use frozen hamburger patties instead of fresh ground beef, in the United States it went from 175 meat suppliers to five, centralising production.

This system changed how animals are raised, it changed the animals themselves. Today it is not uncommon to find 100,000 cattle in a single American feed line. We have been eating beef for millennia, we have never eaten beef raised in such conditions.

There are tens of thousands of chickens in a single poultry house. Tens of thousands of hogs being raised in one building. These hogs have been bred to be lean, bred to be uniform in size. These hogs can no longer survive in the wild. They are crammed so closely together, they are being given massive, massive amounts of antibiotics, not only to encourage them to grow faster, but to allow them to survive in these conditions similar to that of medieval cities. Animals living in one another's waste.

We have turned sentient creatures into industrial commodities in the interests of efficiency and cheapness and speed. And human beings are now being fitted into this enormous machine. The triumph of the fast food system has resulted in wages being slashed, in unions being broken, in workers being turned into totally interchangeable, anonymous and disposable commodities. Again, in the interests of efficiency and cheapness and speed. In the interests of everything the same, everywhere the same.

Even our cities and towns are beginning to look the same. And a McDonald's slogan from a few years ago I think says it perfectly. Their goal – quote "One taste worldwide". That is the system that has triumphed in the last 60 years, in the period perfectly coinciding with the creation of the Soil Association.

So what have been some of the impacts of this system? Well cheap food in its current form may be profitable for some companies, but it has proven extraordinarily costly for society as a whole. What has this system brought us? It has brought us livestock being treated cruelly and inhumanely.

Hogs are believed to be more intelligent than dogs, and if you see how they are living in these factory farms, you would wonder how any system could treat sensitive creatures this way.

And the waste from our factory farms in the United States is unprecedented. In the United States, perhaps three trillion pounds of manure are being created by these factory farms. Our cattle used to wander the prairie and deposit their manure and in this ecological system, the manure would fertilise the prairie and the cattle would walk on.

Today there are literally enormous mountains of manure being created, and these cattle and these hogs are living in their own filth. These factory farms are now creating ten times the waste of the humans in the United States. Ten times the amount. And this waste is not being treated in sophisticated waste treatment plants. It is being dumped into these pools, euphemistically known as lagoons. And these factory farms have become perhaps the number one cause of water pollution in the United States.

Now the growth hormones being given to these cattle are now winding up in our water and our water systems, and studies have found that fish downstream from big feedlots in the United States have deformed sexual organs because of the hormones being excreted by the manure and then into the water and then into the fish.

We have also seen a huge rise in food borne illness over the last 30-40 years, coinciding with this industrial agriculture. Now this would seem counter-intuitive as we are applying the latest science and technology to the production of food, you would think it were becoming safer, not more dangerous. And yet roughly 76 million Americans are sickened by food poisoning every year.

This centralised, industrialised system is perfect for taking very dangerous pathogens and spreading them far and wide. It used to be if you bought a hamburger 30 or 40 years ago, that hamburger contained pieces of one cow or one steer because it came from a little butcher's shop or it came from a little processing plant. Well processing plants are now putting out a million pounds of ground beef a day in the United States and the typical fast food hamburger – that one little patty – contains pieces of a thousand or thousands of different cattle.

In the United States, those cattle may have come from as many as five different countries. This is a different thing. This is a new kind of food. And if one of those cows or one of those steers had a dangerous infection, it's a perfect way to contaminate all of the meat.

This is a new food, a fundamentally new food. And it's believed (there was a Danish study that came out this year) that the rise in breast cancer in the United States, and the higher incidence of prostate cancer in the United States, as compared to the EU, is due to the hormone residues in our meat. There are all new and unexpected forms of disease. We mentioned BSE earlier this evening. But this mutant form of e. coli 0157H7, is believed to have been caused by over use of antibiotics in feedlots and the result of cattle being fed grain instead of grass.

So in my book, I write about how the manure is getting into the meat. I use the phrase 'There is shit in the meat'. Recently in the last few weeks we have found in the United States there is now shit in the spinach. We have had a major outbreak of e. coli poisoning – 200 people sickened in 20 states through the consumption of spinach. It's likely that this spinach was contaminated with run off from cattle who were nearby carrying this dangerous e. coli and the new industrialisation of spinach and lettuce production has made these vegetables into an ideal vector for spreading disease.

This packaged lettuce may be like a fast food hamburger. Pieces of hundred different heads of lettuce all washed together, thousands of heads of lettuce all washed together in the same sink and packaged and sent throughout the United States and even sent overseas. So the convenience of having some company wash your lettuce or wash your spinach for you may now have to be balanced against the threat of getting a lethal illness from that industrialised produce.

As Mr Dimbleby mentioned, we've also seen the impact on consumers. The obesity epidemic from this industrial food. This food that has been carefully manipulated and designed to sell with its fat content and its salt content and its sugar content and its calories carefully calibrated to make you eat it and want it, and want to eat more of it.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States estimates that one out of every three children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes from being obese, and among the children of the poor, one out of every two. One out of every two black or Latino children is now expected in the United States to develop diabetes. This is a disastrous, disastrous system.

We have also developed a rural underclass, and the rural life that used to be part of the heart of what we thought to be America, the heartland of America, is now overrun with poverty, with drug dealing, with illegal immigrants being completely exploited on the land.

The landscape has become an alienating landscape, one that is everywhere the same and creating a sense of depression, and when you look at the school shootings in the United States, and it's remarkable how frequently they happen to be occurring in Colorado which was the setting of Fast Food Nation, I think there is a connection between this plastic, plastic landscape we are creating and feelings of alienation and anger and disassociation.

Lastly, the impact of this industrial system on the soil in the United States, and again, soil not only as something literally important, but soil as a metaphor. Every year, 44 billion pounds of fertiliser are applied in the United States, and many of these nitrogen fertilisers contain heavy metals like cadmium and lead and much of the waste from the factory farms that is being spread on the land contains arsenic. This contamination, this profound contamination of the soils of the United States is a perfect symbol of the legacy of this industrial agriculture.

So this is a very bleak picture. And yet, I remain optimistic, and when people hear this they think I must be smoking something or I must be completely delusional. But I've seen in the last 5-10 years how well-educated people, how well-to-do people are changing their eating habits. They're not going to McDonald's, they're not buying fast food, they're learning about food. We have celebrity chefs. We have more obsession with food probably among the well-educated now than ever before and change has occurred. Undoubtedly. And it's good.

But that change needs to be expanded and it needs to be expanded to the people in society who are poor and the people who have been cut off from information. And your purchasing power as a consumer will only go so far. There need to be fundamental, systematic changes.

The twentieth century was marked by a struggle against totalitarian forms of state power. Some argue that the twenty-first century is going to be marked by the struggle between the West and Islam. I don't buy into that. I think the great struggle of this century is going to be against totalitarian forms of corporate power, against unchecked greed and corporate power.

Now a hundred years ago in the United States we had a very similar economy in which every sector of our economy was controlled by a handful of trusts, but over a generation, they were broken up, and we had a relatively competitive economy as recently as the 1970s.

In the last 25 years, one sector after another has been taken over by two or three companies and some sectors have been privatised in a way that there's really only one company, such as Halliburton, supplying our warfare needs.

Ironically in the last 25 years, we have seen a huge growth in the rhetoric of free market combined with one market after another being captured by two or three companies.

Recently we've seen in the United States how companies are acting like sovereign states. Hewlett Packard was clearly operating its own intelligence agency spying on journalists, trying to plant spies at newspapers, and I have seen myself how large companies now have their own propaganda ministries spreading disinformation.

So I would argue very soon it will not matter if your fields are organic if the seeds are only being sold by two or three companies, and the animals are being processed by only two or three companies, and the supermarkets are all owned by two or three companies.

Right now, 80% of the supermarkets in the United Kingdom – 80% of the food is controlled by the four largest supermarket companies. And what may be cheaper for consumers is disastrous for producers, for farmers, because they are not getting a fair price for their products. And through slotting fees and promotional fees and private labels, the supermarkets in this country wield much too much power over what is consumed here.

Now I'm not calling for a return to any Marxism Leninism – that was a disastrous system and it was disastrous because of so much centralised power in the state. But I believe there are all sorts of similar dangers from too much centralised power in a handful of corporations.

Right now in the United States, our foreign policy, our energy policy, and as we see in the war in Iraq, even our foreign policy is being guided by a handful of very large corporations. When you look at the problems that we are facing now, I believe that arrogance – arrogance got us into this predicament, and arrogance will not get us out of it.

We cannot separate our goal, our ultimate goal, by the manner in which we pursue it. So what I'm hoping to see is a movement marked by reverence for the land, respect for the animals upon it, and compassion for everyone in society. And by trying to live that way, I think in some small way, we will achieve change.

We are all connected, whether we like it or not. We are all connected. And I want to end with a quote from the botanist Paul Sears, who was very much in the 1930s a believer in all the things that the Soil Association came to embody.

Here's the quote: "All renewable resources are linked into a common pattern of relationship. We can save any one of them only with measures that will save them all."

And we are part of the whole that now must be saved.

Thank you.

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