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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT ARE ‘FOOD BARONS’— AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?  
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Charlie Hope D’Anieri
April 11, 2024
The Bittman Project
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_ The rise of the baron illustrates the failures of our approach to
food policy better than a dry description of policies ever could. For
example, the story of the Grain Barons tells the history of the Farm
Bill and how it has corrupted the food system _

A new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s
Food Industry, provides a portrait of our food system through stories
of its oligarchs. , Photo courtesy Austin Frerick

 

I’ve known Austin Frerick since 2019, when he was a researcher at
the Open Markets Institute. After he became a fellow at Yale’s
Thurmond Arnold Project, another anti-monopoly thinktank, we
collaborated to report a feature for Vox on “The Hog Barons.”
He’s gone on to expand this idea to a full book, titled Barons:
Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, that
provides a portrait of our food system through stories of its
oligarchs. Austin enlisted me for some editorial consultation while
the book was under contract, and today I asked him a few questions
about the book and how it helps us understand American food system.

CHD: The first “draft” of this book started when you and I
collaborated on a piece called “The Hog Barons” for Vox/New York
Magazine, with the help of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. I
remember the “baron” phrasing was your idea (in fact, the whole
concept was your idea!). First, what gave you the inspiration for this
piece? And secondly: did you have your eye on a longer project at that
time?

AF: I got the hog baron idea back in the spring of 2018. Over Busch
Lights in a dive bar in Des Moines, an Iowa political operative told
me about a couple who had recently donated $300,000 to Kim Reynolds,
the state’s Republican governor, in support of her campaign for
reelection in a hotly contested race. According to the operative, the
donors were hog farmers who owned a private jet emblazoned with the
phrase “When Pigs Fly.”

I just found this image to be such a powerful example of what happened
to my home state over my life. The power of robber barons in the food
system has overrun the state’s government to the detriment of its
environment and its communities. My curiosity led me to reach out to
you to work together to tell this story, which ultimately led to our
article in Vox.

At the time, I had been mulling a book that would tap into the growing
antitrust movement through a food lens, but I could never figure out
the right story to talk about these issues. As we wrote our article
about the Hog Barons, I realized that Jeff and Deb are part of a
bigger trend that has transformed the food system in places across the
country and beyond. I wrote this book as an attempt to grapple with
how that happened, using the barons as a narrative framework.

CHD: Besides making for great characters, why is it clarifying or
important to examine our food system by looking at its barons?

The rise of the baron illustrates the failures of our approach to food
policy better than a dry description of policies ever could.

AF: Each chapter is built around both a baron and a key concept. I
first figured out the key ideas I wanted to touch on in the book and
then worked backwards to figure out which baron best encapsulates each
idea. I found this framework to be a compelling narrative vehicle to
tell these bigger structural stories. In each case, the rise of the
baron illustrates the failures of our approach to food policy better
than a dry description of policies ever could. For example, I used the
story of the Grain Barons to tell the history of the Farm Bill and how
it has corrupted the food system.

The more concentrated a market is, the easier it is to gouge shoppers.

CHD: Food issues are always important, for obvious reasons. But in a
period when food prices are incredibly high and still increasing in
the US faster than consumer products as a whole, why is the
“barons” approach to thinking about the food system urgent and
relevant to headlines out there right now?

AF: The more concentrated a market is, the easier it is to gouge
shoppers. I’d argue that there is no industry more concentrated than
America’s food markets. There’s no better illustration of this
than the illusion of choice we see when we go to the grocery store.
Take peanut butter, for example. You can look at a shelf of peanut
butter and think you’re seeing a competitive market, with a range of
options like Jif, Smucker’s, Adams, Laura Scudder’s, and Santa
Cruz Organic, but all of these brands are owned by the J.M. Smucker
Company, which now sells nearly half of all peanut butter. They use
these different brands to target different demographics and price
points.

Once you realize that there’s no real competitive market, increasing
prices seem less like a product of broader forces and more like the
product of intentional decision-making. These titans of industry are
manipulating markets at our collective expense.

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CHD: Some of these barons don’t so much fill an existing market
demand as they create their own, like the McCloskey’s invention of
the hugely successful Fairlife milk product, or the Driscoll’s
family making berries available for four seasons in the U.S. What does
it mean for a baron to come to power on the strength of their own
product?

AF: Part of the point of this book is that these new products didn’t
arise in a vacuum; the idea that these barons invented new products
out of thin air is a farce. Driscoll’s, for example, established its
dominance by drafting off of breeding and genetic research that was
being done for the public by a lab at UC Berkeley. The McCloskeys
benefitted – and continue to benefit – from manipulating the dairy
Checkoff and other policy failures. In fact, Fairlife recently
received $21 million in tax credits and up to $20 million in
additional capital grants from New York State as an incentive to build
a facility that would create only 250 new jobs.

CHD: The barons you profile in this book spend a lot of time worrying
over their reputations. How do you see the role of public
relations—whether strict secrecy and/or brand management—in
maintaining the status quo in our food system?

AF: To my knowledge, there is now only one reporter in the state of
Iowa whose sole focus is on agriculture. I really think that reflects
the dire current state of American media, especially in rural
communities. The lack of funding for truly independent media often
means that the news that does exist is funded by industry. As a
result, there’s just tons of corporate abuses and other shenanigans
going on that we simply don’t know about. We were able to write
about the regulatory capture of Iowa by the Hog Barons because of the
incredible reporting about agriculture that thee Des Moines Register
used to do. Heck, there was a whole daily section on agriculture in
the paper back then! But that’s gone. And what has filled the void
are a ton of corporate industry-backed publications that just copy and
paste press releases that people like the Hog Barons put out.

CHD: You grew up and went to college in Iowa, stayed in the Midwest
for grad school, then started a career on the East Coast. In DC and
New York, what attitudes about food and agriculture did you encounter,
and did these conversations play a role in encouraging you to write
about these issues for a wide audience?

Austin Frerick. Photo: Kris Graves

AF: Funny you ask, because I just had an interview with a famous food
podcast host and the undercurrent of the discussion centered on who is
to blame for the sorry state of the American food system. He put most
of the blame on poor people for their diets, which I really, really
rejected.

Many people see the brokenness of our food system but they blame it on
the individual and think that consumer choice can drive change.

His attitude, to me, is reflective of a broader perspective on the
coasts. Many people see the brokenness of our food system but they
blame it on the individual and think that consumer choice can drive
change. I find it funny that even criticisms of our food system are a
product of a neoliberal worldview that focuses entirely on the actions
of the individual. The idea that we can change the food system with
our fork is clearly a failed theory of change by this point. I firmly
believe that you change systems by changing structures, and that
usually comes from confronting power head on.

I say all of this because I really think that in certain elite pockets
of America there is a disdain for other parts of the country and a
truly comical degree of naiveness about how the rest of the country
lives. That’s largely why, for example, Walmart’s complete
economic dominance has flown under the radar in recent years. These
folks have no clue what’s going on because they travel to other
elite cities domestically and abroad. They don’t hang out in the
Dubuques of America.

CHD: What are you excited for readers to experience in your book, and
what do you hope they walk away with after reading it?

I want readers to walk away thinking that it doesn’t have to be this
way.

AF: Well, first I’m excited for readers to tell me which barons they
find to be the most interesting. Second, I want readers to walk away
thinking that it doesn’t have to be this way. I believe that healthy
markets are not a natural phenomenon; competitive markets are like a
garden–they have to be cultivated and maintained. I’m optimistic
because we’ve been here before- in the past, we’ve dealt
effectively with robber barons. We chose to let these food barons come
to power, which is depressing, but it’s also empowering because it
means that we can also choose to do things differently.

* food policy
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* food storage
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* food waste
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* Farm Bill
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