The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [128]
Nation contrasted this industrial model with its polar opposite, what he calls “artisanal production,” where the competitive strategy is based on selling something special rather than being the least-cost producer of a commodity. Stressing that “productivity and profits are two entirely different concepts,” Nation suggests that even a small producer can be profitable so long as he’s selling an exceptional product and keeping his expenses down. Yet this artisanal model works only so long as it doesn’t attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respect. It must not try to replace skilled labor with capital; it must not grow for the sake of growth; it should not strive for uniformity in its products but rather make a virtue of variation and seasonality; it shouldn’t invest capital to reach national markets but rather should focus on local markets, relying on reputation and word of mouth rather than on advertising; and lastly, it should rely as much as possible on free solar energy rather than costly fossil fuels.
“The biggest problem with alternative agriculture today,” Nation writes, “is that it seeks to incorporate bits and pieces of the industrial model and bits and pieces of the artisanal model. This will not work…. In the middle of the road, you get the worst of both worlds.”
Nation’s column had helped Joel understand why his broiler business was more profitable than his beef or pork business. Since he could process the chickens himself, the product was artisanal from start to finish; his beef and pork, on the other hand, had to pass through an industrial processing plant, adding to his costs and shrinking his margins.
No one needed to spell it out, but the Porter/Nation theory also helped explain Bev’s current predicament. He had built an artisanal meat plant, designed to custom-process pastured livestock humanely and scrupulously, no more than a few dozen animals a day. But his artisanal enterprise was being forced to conform to a USDA regulatory system that is based on an industrial model—indeed, that was created in response to the industrial abuses Upton Sinclair chronicled in The Jungle. The federal regulatory regime is expressly designed for a large slaughterhouse operated by unskilled and indifferent workers killing and cutting as many as four hundred feedlot animals an hour. The volume of such an operation can easily cover the costs of things like a dedicated restroom for the inspector, or elaborate machinery to steam clean (or irradiate) carcasses presumed to carry E. coli. The specifications and costly technologies implicitly assume that the animals being processed have been living in filth and eating corn rather than grass. The industrial packing plant where number 534 met his end can take a steer from knocker to boxed beef for about fifty dollars a head; it would cost nearly ten times as much to process him in a custom facility like this. The industrial and artisanal economies clash right here in Bev’s packing plant, and sadly, it’s not hard to guess which one will ultimately prevail.
2. THURSDAY MORNING
I WOKE to the sound of Joel’s brother Art’s panel truck noisily backing up to the salesroom door. The clock said 5:45 A.M. Thursday is delivery day, and Art likes to start staging orders and organizing his truck before any of the other farmers he makes deliveries for shows up. I threw on some clothes and dashed out to meet him. Art is five years older than Joel and, on first impression, a very different sort of character: not nearly so sunny or expansive, more grounded in the world as it is and perhaps as a result, prone to flashes of crankiness I’ve never observed in Joel. But then, Art works in a less pastoral world, one in which he has to contend with city traffic and overzealous meter maids as well as the occasional temperamental chef. Compared to his brother’s revolutionary zeal, Art seems to have passed the point of believing that this world, or for that matter the human soul,