[lofo List] New book looks at economic devastation in an Iowa meat-packing town

[Daryl Hepting <hepting@cs.uregina.ca>]

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-06-methland-meatpacking/

New book looks at economic devastation in an Iowa meat-packing town
BY TOM PHILPOTT
		
It’s become axiomatic that to peer deep into our reliance on fossil  
energy is to gaze upon human wreckage: bombed-out Baghdad slums,  
desolated Nigerian townships, or Appalachian communities eviscerated  
by the removal of mountaintops.

The food system has its own war zones, its own spaces of suffering and  
despair. Like the energy giants, food corporations generally manage  
these scenes off-stage, as hidden as possible from public view.  
Consider thousands of Florida tomato pickersliving in poverty and,  
occasionally, slavery; or meat-packing workers, toiling in conditions  
so dire that Human Rights Watch was not long ago moved to issue a  
damning report. Or consider the more banal, everyday indignities  
endured by low-wage workers at fast-food outlets, institutional  
kitchens, and grocery-selling retail giants like Wal-Mart, ably  
documented by writers like Eric Schlosser, Liza Featherstone, and  
Barbara Ehrenreich.

This week’s New York Times Book Review shines a hard light on one of  
those scenes, in Walter Kirns’ compelling review of Nick Reding’s book  
Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.

I have not gotten a copy of Reding’s book yet. If we believe Kirns,  
it’s a doozy. The book focuses on an Iowa town whose main legit  
business is a meat-packing plant. It’s chief underground activity,  
until recently, was the meth trade.The two are evidently intimately  
related. Writes Kirns:

The agricultural conglomerates that have gobbled up Oelwein and  
similar farm towns may feed the world, but they starve the folks who  
work for them, breeding a craving for synthetic stimulants that  
conveniently sap the appetite while enlarging the body’s capacity for  
toil. These offal-streaked Dickensian mills are also magnets for  
desperate immigrant laborers who, in some cases, blaze the smuggling  
trails that run up into the Corn Belt from Mexico, home to the gang  
lords who own the superlabs that, increasingly, dominate the meth trade.

“Vicious cycle” is not an adequate term. As Reding painstakingly  
presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of  
methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish  
dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer  
and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, wasted.

Reding is working in terrain mapped out by Osha Gray Davidson in his  
searing 1996 book Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural  
Ghetto, which surveyed the human wreckage of the 1980s farm crisis.  
Crushed between high debt loads and low crop prices, midwest farmers  
exited their fields by the hundreds of thousands in the 1980s. The  
small-town businesses that catered to them saw their profits vanish— 
and a social and economic crisis engulfed the Farm Belt, not unlike  
the ones that simultaneously gripped the great de-industrializing  
cities of the North. in Broken Heartland, Davidson documents the human  
costs: rising rates of alcoholism and child abuse; the paradox of  
hunger amid some of the globe’s most fertile soil.

In the years since, ownership of the Midwest’s farmland has  
consolidated dramatically—fewer and fewer farmers control ever larger  
tracts of land, with ever more expensive machines and inputs. And hog  
rearing and pork packing has become increasingly concentrated—with  
devastating effects on communities, as I saw during a 2007 trip to  
Iowa. The region’s towns continue their long decline. With prices of  
inputs like fertilizer and genetically modified seeds sky-high, a drop  
in corn and soy prices would almost surely bring a renewed era of  
misery. Even though it’s ultimately rooted in land, the Farm Belt’s  
economy is stunningly fragile.

The work of writers like Reding and Davidson is important, not because  
it tugs at the heartstrings or affirms lefty critiques of corporate- 
controlled agricultural. Policy makers should read it carefully.  
Heading into a an era of climate change, scarce oil, and intense  
global competition, do we really want a large chunk of our workforce  
deskilled and disgruntled, vulnerable to the false consolation of  
toxic substances? Do we really want our best farmland under the heel  
of a few transnational input suppliers, meatpackers, and grain traders?



Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a  
sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge  
Mountains of North Carolina. Follow Tom’s Twitter feed here.

--

Daryl H. Hepting, Ph.D.
Associate Professor  * Computer Science Department * CW 308.22
University of Regina * Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada S4S 0A2
dhh@cs.uregina.ca    * http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting
tel: (306) 585-5210  * fax: (306) 585-4745 * cell: (306) 596-6312

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