Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat

by Chloe Sorvino

Overview

A shocking and unputdownable exposé of the United States meat industry and the growing disappointment of alternative meat producers that “is required reading for anyone who eats” (Christopher Leonard, New York Timesbestselling author).

Well before COVID-19 swept across the United States and the chairman of Tyson Foods infamously declared that the food supply chain was dangerously vulnerable, America’s meat industry was reaching a breaking point. Years of consolidation, price-fixing, and power grabs by elite industry insiders have harmed consumers and caused environmental destruction. And while that’s hurting us, it’s also making others rich.

Now, financial journalist Chloe Sorvino presents a “deeply informed and eye-opening” (Publishers Weekly) look at the meat industry and its future as its fundamental weaknesses are laid bare for all to see. With unprecedented access and groundbreaking research, Raw Deal investigates corporate greed, how climate change will upend our food production, and the limitations of local movements challenging the status quo.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982172053
Publisher:	Simon Element / Simon Acumen
Publication date:	11/05/2024
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food, drink, and agriculture at Forbes. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Fast Company, Financial Times, The New York Times, New York magazine, and many more. Find out more at ChloeSorvino.com and follow her on X @ChloeSorvino, Instagram @CSorvino, and LinkedIn.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Pandemic Catalyst 1

Section I The Industrial Grip

Chapter 1 How Goliath Got So Big 17

Chapter 2 Consolidation of Power 24

Chapter 3 Monopsony Just Doesn't Have the Same Ring to It 33

Chapter 4 The Human Cost of Eating Meat 46

Chapter 5 The JBS Takeover of Americas Meat 60

Chapter 6 JBS Goes to Washington 78

Chapter 7 How Big Is Too Big? 88

Section II Challenging the Industrial Meat Status Quo

Chapter 8 How Climate Change Will Upend Industrial Meat 103

Chapter 9 The Threat of Antibiotic Resistance 116

Chapter 10 Meat's Accessibility Gap 127

Section III Alternative Challengers

Chapter 11 Can Climate Crisis Reform Meat? 139

Chapter 12 Breeding a Better Chicken through Feed and Genetics 158

Chapter 13 The Dumb Money Driving the Plant-Based Boom 169

Chapter 14 Will Meatless Meat Actually Help the Earth? 186

Chapter 15 Lab-Grown Power Grab 199

Chapter 16 Sourcing Local Alternatives 213

Section IV Maximizing What We've Got

Chapter 17 An Independent Slaughter 227

Chapter 18 Bracing 236

Acknowledgments 265

Notes 269

Index 323

Editorial Reviews

Raw Deal is Chloe Sorvino’s deeply reported, firsthand account of how business imperatives drive the meat industry to mistreat workers, pollute the environment, fix prices, bribe, and manipulate the political process, all in the name of shareholder profits. She argues convincingly for holding this industry accountable and requiring it and other corporations to engage in social as well as fiduciary responsibility. Raw Deal is a must-read for anyone who cares about where our food comes from.

Marion Nestle

If you think you understand the meat industry, please think again. Chloe Sorvino provides a fascinating, gripping, and ultimately indispensable portrait of the powerful companies at the heart of our food system. This story is as shocking as it is revelatory, showing how the meat industry manipulates our political system, drives climate change, and hikes prices for American meals. This book is required reading for anyone who eats.

Christopher Leonard

A journalist who has spent nearly a decade covering food and agriculture for Forbes, Sorvino lays bare the inner workings of the meat industry with clear-eyed practicality—from the scale of the environmental cost of meat to the depths of corporate greed and consolidation of power.

Modern Farmer

Packed with a wide range of expert input, Raw Deal provides a firsthand look into a typically opaque industry and makes the case that changing our meat industry is both possible and necessary.

Civil Eats

Some meat-packers will hate this book, but it will force everybody to think. The big-is-fragile problem also applies to other industries such as electronic chips and baby formula.

Temple Grandin

Raw Deal is poised to become the next definitive authority on the current state of the broken food system in America and our desperate fight to curb climate change. Insightful as it is harrowing, what can often seem like an impossible hornet's nest to untangle is illuminated. Raw Deal will shake you into sharp presence while shining light on a road toward a decentralized, community-centered food system.

Camilla Marcus

Sorvino’s captivating discoveries convey the vulnerabilities of a powerful part of the food system and the effects of this broken industry.

Food Tank

Raw Deal is a meticulously researched account of what’s wrong with today’s meat industry and how we might overhaul it... What sets the book apart from many others in this genre is Sorvino’s excellent deep dive into how the world’s largest meat companies and retailers have been deploying illegal and irresponsible practices — including bribery, corruption and collusion — to grab, hold on to and expand power and profits at the expense of people and the planet.

Green Biz

This is a deeply informed and eye-opening call for change.

Publisher’s Weekly

09/12/2022

Forbes journalist Sorvino debuts with an in-depth study of the forces roiling the meat industry. Though the Covid-19 pandemic stoked fears of a nationwide meat shortage, Sorvino argues the problem goes back nearly 50 years. In the 1970s, the USDA subsidized agribusiness in America, stacking the odds against small-scale operations, and a wave of consolidation that began in the 1980s has resulted in a handful of companies controlling most of the beef, poultry, and pork industries. Soaring profits at Cargill, Tyson, JBS, and other conglomerates went to stock buybacks and corporate acquisitions, however, leaving plant workers to perform one of the most dangerous jobs in America for paltry wages. Sorvino also examines growing concerns over animal welfare and the environment, documents the challenges facing meat alternatives, and profiles activists including bison rancher Lucille Contreras, a member of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas whose Texas Tribal Buffalo Project “educates on healthy foods made using Indigenous techniques.” Ultimately, Sorvino advocates for “a patchwork of systems that prioritize communities and strengthen access to more nutritious, sustainably produced foods.” Though the book’s arcane legal and financial discussions are best suited to those with a background in the subject, this is a deeply informed and eye-opening call for change. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

If you think you understand the meat industry, please think again. Chloe Sorvino provides a fascinating, gripping, and ultimately indispensable portrait of the powerful companies at the heart of our food system. This story is as shocking as it is revelatory, showing how the meat industry manipulates our political system, drives climate change, and hikes prices for American meals. This book is required reading for anyone who eats.”

New York Times bestselling author Christopher Leonard

2022-10-11
A new exposé of the American meat industry.

Since Upton Sinclair’s 1906 bestseller, The Jungle, denunciations of the meat industry appear regularly, and they remain fully justified. A simple description of what happens when an animal enters a slaughterhouse will horrify most readers, and equally time-honored are journalists’ depictions of low-wage slaughterhouse work, which is gruesome, dangerous, and unhealthy. Sorvino, who runs the coverage of food, drink, and agriculture at Forbes, does not ignore these easy marks, but she aims higher, targeting multinational corporations, billionaires, global trade, climate change, soil destruction, and pollution. “Meat production has been a staple of the American economy, culture, and diet for generations,” she writes, “but industrial agriculture that values profits over people and the environment is careening toward a food-insecure future.” American farmers and meat processors benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, but their profits are a result of their cruel, assembly-line efficiency in factory farms or titanic feedlots, where the animals consume hyperdense feed, chemicals, and antibiotics to boost their weight before slaughter. Research reveals strong evidence that processed food, including bacon, ham, hot dogs, and salami, can cause cancer. Readers will gnash their teeth at Sorvino’s vivid accounts of rapacious billionaires and the half-dozen mega-corporations that dominate the industry, pollute waterways, and exhaust farmland under the very gentle hand of government regulators. In the final section, the author explores a few solutions, but she is skeptical that alternative protein will ever upend traditional industrial systems. She describes a dozen entrepreneurs and their protein alternatives, but “meat alternatives accounted for 0.2 percent of 2020 grocery meat sales.” Money is rarely their main problem because this is a trendy field for venture capitalists (even the industry giants are researching this area), but investors nearly always value profit over saving the environment, and many of their products are far from organic, requiring industrial farmed inputs, chemicals, and pesticides.

Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.

Kirkus Reviews