The True Price Tag of Meat

And in fact, meat is not just cheap, but getting cheaper. 50 years ago, in today’s dollars, beef cost more than 7 dollars a pound; today it costs about 5 dollars a pound. This is not a worldwide fact—the US offers meat at dramatically cheaper prices than other countries in the world. In Europe, meat prices are twice as high (beef tenderloin sells for about 29 per pound in Switzerland versus 17 in the US) while in parts of Asia, many residents can barely afford it.

Of course, the less expensive meat is, the more people eat it. The US is tied with Portugal as the world’s largest consumer of meat per capita, and according to the USDA, the average American eats 224.6 pounds of meat every year. Meat offers not just an easy and financially accessible source of meals, but a sense of identity for many Americans, who pride themselves on being meat-eaters or identify meat with some concept of Americanness. Historian and author Joshua Specht notes that in the 20th century, when American cultural myths about “cattle ranching and the American West” paired with the new widespread availability of fresh beef in the US, “it became the metric of success… for recent immigrants from Europe, [and] for the working class.”

The result was that industrial meat producers, from the very beginning, had a unique pressure they could apply to government and policy-makers.

“Meatpackers developed a playbook in the late 19th century that’s still deployed today,” says Sprecht. “One of those people, for instance, was Philip Danforth Armour, the founder of the meatpacking firm Armour and Co. He was called before the Senate, and the Senate asked him about using predatory pricing—bankrupting butchers, price-fixing, and squeezing ranchers. And Armour says, Look. I’m getting beef to the urban masses, and that requires different rules. It requires a different way of doing business.”

A different way of doing business: the Farm Problem, the Farm Bill, and farm subsidies

Americans have been talking about the Farm Problem for nearly one hundred years; by some measures, it’s actually been longer than 100 years (just ask Thomas Jefferson!). As a phrase, the “farm problem” was first used in the 1930s after continued market failures to absorb what farmers were producing, leading to overproduction and rural unemployment crises. The Great Depression finally spurred the federal government to act, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Farm Bill as part of his New Deal legislation in 1933. It aimed to reduce surplus and raise crop prices, making it easier for farmers to receive fair value for their agricultural products—and help them survive, as a group.

The Farm Bill still exists today; it is renewed every five years with new opportunities to address agricultural policy issues, fix spending, and more. It is currently in the process of being negotiated through Congress. And as in 1933, one of the major imperatives of the Farm Bill is price control.

Whether it’s something you think about much or not, the Farm Bill shapes much of the US’s eating habits, because these farm subsidies control what is accessible and affordable for every American. The Farm Bill’s current shape keeps meat prices low by subsidizing massive swathes of the animal agriculture industry. For example, an astonishing 73% of the US dairy industry’s income comes from government programs and subsidies. Farm subsidies are what makes burgers cheaper than salad.

Who’s really benefiting from farm subsidies?

The intent behind the Farm Bill is in some aspects a noble one: to ensure that farmers, the people who work to provide us with food, can survive the dips and dangers of an inherently variable industry. Farm subsidies are still vital lifeboats for many small and mid-sized full-time family farms, which have incomes at or below the national average. This group accounts for over three-quarters of full-time farmers, and many of them depend upon government farm-support payments of some sort to stay above the poverty line. But the amount of money this group receives in the grand scheme of the Bill is vanishingly little; the smallest 80% of recipients of the Farm Bill collectively received only 9% of subsidies.

In fact, the overwhelming amount of the Farm Bill’s money and support goes to huge, destructive factory farms—farms that are not humble locals struggling to survive, but behemoth corporate entities wreaking destruction on humans, animals, and the environment alike. Most farm subsidies go to the largest and wealthiest farms: between 1995 and 2021, the top 10% of farm subsidy recipients that received the largest payments received over 78% of commodity program subsidies. The top 1% received 27% of payments. This inequity is, ironically, baked into the way farm subsidies work: payments are made based on acreage or production, so of course the corporations which are prioritizing profits and land grabs above all else get the largest payments. It’s a grim, self-fulfilling prophecy.

The history of the Farm Bill, too, is based on racist land dispossession and racial inequality. When Roosevelt’s administration passed the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, it only allowed landowners to sign government contracts, while the vast majority of Black farmers were tenants or sharecroppers. White landowners were supposed to share the payments with their renters and sharecroppers, but rarely did—or deliberately only signed crop subsidy contracts when they didn’t have tenant or sharecropper agreements. The result is that white ownership of farmland held steady relative to 1910—and Black ownership dropped by 90%.

Who’s really paying for farm subsidies?

In a wide-ranging and confronting conversation about the state of the meat industry, journalist Ezra Klein and C.E.O. and president of Mercy for Animals Leah Garcés considered the point that of course, there is a much more expensive price attached to meat. We just don’t see it.

The meat industry, with the help of farm subsidies, takes an unbelievable toll on the planet. Let’s start right there, with the planet itself. Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production: factory farms wreak damage on our environment at almost every step of their processes. Consider the problem of land; in order to raise lots of cows cheaply (and cruelly—but we’ll talk about that in a moment), factory farms make a decision, like, say, infiltrating 75% of deforestation worldwide. It’s relatively cheap to cut down rainforest, and then raise cows there to sell for huge profits. But deforestation is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and so there is a huge price that future generations must pay in terms of climate crisis for our cheap hamburgers.

But you don’t have to look to the future to see the toll of factory farming. Consider another ‘byproduct’ of factory farming: pollution. In the US alone, over 15,000 people die every year from air-quality related deaths as a result of food production processes. Animal waste paired with common factory farm chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and aerosols have a huge impact on factory farm workers and surrounding communities. Landmark studies and legal cases in North Carolina have shown that people who live near large pig farms have elevated death and disease risks. “Because it’s in low-income folks’ areas, with less political agency, less social capital, they are less able to fight this,” says Garcés. “And the industry is able to get away with it.” We should add those deaths, those diseases, that quality of life impacted and brutalized by factory farms to the price of every pork chop.

And of course, at the very heart of factory farming are the victims who pay the greatest price, in their lives and their pain: the animals themselves. More than 80 billion land animals are raised and slaughtered every year so that we can eat them. (That’s not including aquatic animals, like crustaceans and fish, who are harder to track, as they’re often measured in tons rather than numbers.) Globally, 90% of all animals are kept in industrial animal farms; in the US, it’s 99%.

It’s unsurprising and tragic at once that factory farms are so obviously, continually, brutally cruel to the animals they raise and kill. The enormity of this death and violence happens at such a vast scale of violence that it’s almost impossible to wrap our heads around it. Factory farms breed animals so that they suffer from their very first breath: from chickens with enormous artificially grown breasts, cramped into inhumane cages where they lie suffering in their own feces, to the pigs kept in savagely small gestation crates, forced to feed their young through bars, to the cows forced into pregnancies and long and cruel transportation to their slaughterhouse deaths. Factory farms perpetuate a thousand atrocities, legally and illegally, on the animals they kill for meat every day. To detail them all is the work of a lifetime. And yet that detail is present, albeit invisible, in every piece of meat we eat, marveling at its inexpensive price tag. What a deal.

So who is paying for farm subsidies? The environment. The climate. Low-income communities. People suffering from premature death and disease. Every animal who has the bitter luck to be caught in its trap. And someone else, too: You.

Your tax dollars go straight to corporations via the Farm Bill; your elected officials work for you in negotiating it. The money that goes toward farm subsidies has to come from somewhere, and one of its major sources is American tax income. One of the great and frustrating issues of tax is your inability to control where your money goes, so whether you like it or not, you yourself are funding factory farms, no matter how much more you would prefer to fund things like schools, hospitals, or even animal welfare programs.

But with that cruel truth comes agency. Your dollars have value. Your purchases carry power. You can take action to stop the cruelties that factory farms perpetrate, whether by putting pressure on your elected representatives to change farm subsidies, or by refusing to spend your money on meat (there are plenty of affordable plant-based meals out there), or by joining the movement to fight the corporations hurting our people, our animals, and our planet.