Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [56]
If an American corporation wants to know whether it would be profitable to enter a certain market, it turns to one of 100 or so U.S. agricultural attachés in foreign countries. These government employees first make sure the company’s product can legally be imported, then call in “professional taste panels” to see if it is acceptable to local tastes. If the company’s product makes it past these steps, the FAS helps sponsor a market test.
In addition, the FAS sponsors exhibits around the world for the benefit of U.S. producers. One favorite exhibit is a full-scale reproduction of an American supermarket. Since the United States exports 44 percent of all the wheat in the world trade, the FAS also helps sponsor schools to teach people how to cook with wheat where it is not a traditional food. In Japan the FAS has sponsored a beef campaign, noting that it is “aimed at better-class hotels and restaurants catering to the tourist trade.”9 Its efforts there have also helped to account for the success of fast-food outlets like McDonald’s, 90 percent of whose ingredients are imported. Although American-style fast-food outlets began operating in Japan only in 1970, by the end of the decade these chains had taken over a substantial portion of all such sales, displacing many traditional rice, fish, and noodle bars.
Our export strategy thus rests not on shipping our food to a world of hungry people, but on molding the tastes and habits of a relatively small class of people able to afford imported food, making them dependent on products and styles that they never wanted before. American policymakers are encouraging other countries to become more and more food-dependent on the United States, and the United States itself is becoming more and more economically dependent on food exports. Reading the FAS material, one would think that the survival of our nation rested on its success in creating one more hamburger lover in the world.
Meat Imports
We hear almost exclusively about the export side of our agricultural trade. Few Americans are aware that we are also among the world’s top agricultural importers. For every dollar our agricultural exports earn we pay out close to 50 cents importing food and other farm products. About one-quarter of those imports are meat and other livestock products, worth almost $4 billion in 1979.10
Less than six percent of the meat we ate over the last decade was imported. While small in relation to total U.S. consumption, it represents an enormous food resource in relation to the needs of people in some of the countries where it is produced.
As I was finishing this book I received a letter from Sue Pohl of Hillsdale, Michigan. In the early 1970s she lived with her two children in Honduras. “While I was there I experienced the damage our meat-eating habits can do,” she wrote. “In 1973 President Nixon increased the quota of imported meat to keep U.S. meat prices down. Instantly many kinds of meat disappeared from our local market, including liver, which I relied on for my iron in our limited diet. (Eggs were in chronically short supply and had to be saved for the children.) So great was the greed of the Honduran meat producers that the government had to issue a decree that a certain percentage of meat must be reserved for the country’s own people.”
In exporting the Great American Steak Religion we are exporting a desire for the impossible. The earth could never provide the majority of its people with the grain-fed-meat-centered diet that Americans take for granted. If everyone in the world were to eat the typical American diet, the acreage under cultivation worldwide today would have to double.
4.
Democracy at Stake
I HAVE TALKED of the resources and outright subsidies hidden in our cheap-grain-fed meat and how we are promoting this pattern