Over the past twenty-five years, Idaho has lost about half of its potato farmers. During the same period, the amount of land devoted to potatoes has increased. Family farms are giving way to corporate farms that stretch for thousands of acres. These immense corporate farms are divided into smaller holdings for administrative purposes, and farmers who’ve been driven off the land are often hired to manage them. The patterns of land ownership in the American West more and more resemble those of rural England. “We’ve come full circle,” says Paul Patterson. “You increasingly find two classes of people in rural Idaho: the people who run the farms and the people who own them.”
The headquarters of the Potato Growers of Idaho (PGI) is a strip-mall office suite, not far from a potato museum in Blackfoot. The PGI is a nonprofit organization that supplies market information to farmers and helps them negotiate contracts with processors. Bert Moulton, a longtime PGI staff member, is a big man with a crew cut who looks like a Goldwater Republican but sounds like an old-fashioned populist. Moulton thinks forming some sort of co-op, an association to coordinate marketing and production levels, may be the last hope for Idaho’s potato farmers. At the moment, most farmers live in areas where there are only one or two processors buying potatoes — and oddly enough, those processors never seem to be bidding for potatoes on the same day. “Legally, the processors aren’t supposed to be talking to one another,” Moulton says. “But you know that they do.” Not long ago, the major french fry companies in Idaho were owned by people with strong ties to the local community. J. R. Simplot was highly regarded by most Idaho farmers; he always seemed willing to help carry them through a lean year. Moulton says the fry companies now tend to be run by outsiders, by “MBA’s from Harvard who don’t know if a potato grows on a tree or underground.” The multinational food companies operate french fry plants in a number of different regions, constantly shifting production to take advantage of the lowest potato prices. The economic fortunes of individual farmers or local communities matter little in the grand scheme.
A few years ago, the PGI tried to create a formal alliance with potato farmers in Oregon and Washington, an effort that would have linked producers in the three states that grow most of the nation’s potatoes. The alliance was undermined by one of the big processors, which cut lucrative deals with a core group of potato farmers. Moulton believes that Idaho’s farmers deserve some of the blame for their own predicament. Long regarded as the aristocrats of rural Idaho, potato farmers remain stubbornly independent and unwilling to join forces. “Some of them are independent to the point of poverty,” he says. Today there are roughly 1,100 potato farmers left in Idaho — few enough to fit in a high school auditorium. About half of them belong to the PGI, but the organization needs at least three-quarters of them as members to gain real bargaining power. The “joint ventures” now being offered by processing companies provide farmers with the potato seed and financing for their crop, an arrangement that should dispel any lingering illusions about their independence. “If potato farmers don’t band together,” Bert Moulton warns, “they’ll wind up sharecroppers.”
The behavior of Idaho’s potato growers often betrays a type of faulty reasoning described in most college-level economics textbooks. “The fallacy of composition” is a logical error — a mistaken belief that what seems good for an individual will still be good when others do the same thing. For example, someone who stands at a crowded concert may get a better view of the stage. But if everyone at the concert stands up, nobody’s view is improved. Since the end of World War II, farmers in the United States have been persuaded to adopt one new technology after another, hoping to improve their yields, reduce their costs, and outsell their neighbors. By embracing this industrial model of agriculture — one that focuses narrowly on the level of inputs and outputs, that encourages specialization in just one crop, that relies heavily on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, advanced harvesting and irrigation equipment — American farmers have become the most productive farmers on earth. Every increase in productivity, however, has driven more American farmers off the land. And it has left those who remain beholden to the companies that supply the inputs and the processors that buy the outputs. William Heffernan, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri, says that America’s agricultural economy now resembles an hourglass. At the top there are about 2 million ranchers and farmers; at the bottom there are 275 million consumers; and at the narrow portion in the middle, there are a dozen or so multinational corporations earning a profit from every transaction.
food product design
THE TASTE OF McDonald’s french fries has long been praised by customers, competitors, and even food critics. James Beard loved McDonald’s fries. Their distinctive taste does not stem from the type of potatoes that McDonald’s buys, the technology that processes them, or the restaurant equipment that fries them. Other chains buy their french fries from the same large processing companies, use Russet Burbanks, and have similar fryers in their restaurant kitchens. The taste of a fast food fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades, McDonald’s cooked its french fries in a mixture of about 7 percent cottonseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow. The mix gave the fries their unique flavor — and more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald’s hamburger.
Amid a barrage of criticism over the amount of cholesterol in their fries, McDonald’s switched to pure vegetable oil in 1990. The switch presented the company with an enormous challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef without cooking them in tallow. A look at the ingredients now used in the preparation of McDonald’s french fries suggests how the problem was solved. Toward the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous, yet oddly mysterious phrase: “natural flavor”. That ingredient helps to explain not only why the fries taste so good, but also why most fast food — indeed, most of the food Americans eat today — tastes the way it does.
Open your refrigerator, your freezer, your kitchen cupboards, and look at the labels on your food. You’ll find “natural flavor” or “artificial flavor” in just about every list of ingredients. The similarities between these two broad categories of flavor are far more significant than their differences. Both are man-made additives that give most processed food most of its taste. The initial purchase of a food item may be driven by its packaging or appearance, but subsequent purchases are determined mainly by its taste. About 90 percent of the money that Americans spend on food is used to buy processed food. But the canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques used to process food destroy most of its flavor. Since the end of World War II, a vast industry has arisen in the United States to make processed food palatable. Without this flavor industry, today’s fast food industry could not exist. The names of the leading American fast food chains and the bestselling menu items have become famous worldwide, embedded in our popular culture. Few people, however, can name the companies that manufacture fast food’s taste.