Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

FREDERICK KAUFMAN is a contributing editor at Harper's and teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. He has written about American food culture for Foreign Policy, Wired, the New Yorker, Gourmet, the New York Times Magazine, and others. He has spoken about food justice and food politics at the General Assembly of the UN and appeared on MSNBC, Fox Business News, Democracy Now!, and public radio's Radiolab, On the Media, and the BBC World Service.

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Praise for Bet the Farm

"Kaufman makes a convincing and terrifying case that the same merchant bankers who destroyed our housing market?and economy?five years ago are at it again. This time their target is the world's food supply."
?Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland

"Frederick Kaufman's great skill as a writer is to know when to be an ing??nue and when an outraged critic in his journey through the international food system. In going toe-to-toe with everything from a runaway pizza machine to Bill Gates, he goes to the heart of a complex world and shares why you should be angry. That makes this the best kind of journalism?one from which no one emerges unscathed, nor any reader finishes unmoved."
?Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved

"In Bet the Farm, Frederick Kaufman connects the dots between the food commodity markets and world hunger. Kaufman is a wonderfully entertaining writer, able to make the most arcane details of such matters as wheat futures crystal clear. Readers will be alternately amused and appalled by his accounts of relief agencies and the interventions of rich nations. This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about feeding the hungry in today's globalized food marketplace. It's on the reading list for my NYU classes."
?Marion Nestle, author of Why Calories Count and Food Politics

"'Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry said, but Frederick Kaufman shows, undeniably, that it is an economic act as well. Bet the Farm describes a global food system that has made food and money indecipherable, where what we eat is determined not by the seasons, but by the ebb and flow of market forces. It's a compelling portrait of a system on the edge of crisis, and a necessary call for change."
?Dan Barber, chef, author, and activist

"Since time immemorial, the most important human question has been 'What (if anything) is for dinner?' This book explains how that question is being answered (badly) for our planet right now?the forces that are driving us to human and ecological despair."
?Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

"This is more than a book about food. It's a book about how to revise our usual ways of thinking."
?Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

"This story should have been on the front page of the New York Times."
?Jami Floyd, Political Analyst, MSNBC

Aus dem Klappentext

In the last half decade, the world has seen two devastating spikes in the price of food, and a third may be on the way. In 2008 and 2010, farmers gathered record wheat harvests, yet more people starved than ever before?and most of them were farmers. How is that possible?

In Bet the Farm, Harper's magazine contributing editor Frederick Kaufman investigates the hidden connection between global food and global finance by asking the simple question: Why can't delicious, inexpensive, and healthy food be available to everyone on Earth?

You will find his discoveries shocking.

Like a detective intent on solving a mystery, Kaufman travels from the corporate headquarters of Domino's Pizza and Tyson Foods to Walmart's sustainability research center, to mega-farms and organic farms and numerous genetic modification laboratories. Kaufman goes to Rome to the meeting of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and finally ends up on Wall Street and the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where he discovers the answer to the riddle. His investigation reveals that money pouring into the global derivatives market in grain futures is having astonishing consequences that reach far beyond your dinner table, including the Arab Spring, bankrupt farmers, starving masses, and armies of scientists creating new GMO foods with U.S. marketing and shipping needs in mind instead of global nutrition.

Our food is getting less healthy, less delicious, and more expensive even as the world's biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever and that the rest of us should leave it to them to feed the world. Readers of Bet the Farm will glimpse the power behind global food and understand what truly supports the system that has brought mass misery to our planet.

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Bet the Farm

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

I had thought it was a simple question: Why can't inexpensive, healthy, and delicious food be available to everyone? And I thought I had a simple answer: pizza. According to the pizza industry, pizza is the world's most popular food, a thirty-six-billion-dollar-a-year business. If anything could feed everybody, it was pizza.

The Japanese go for slices topped with eel and squid, while Bangkok residents like their crusts folded around hot dogs. Pakistani pizza features curry, Costa Rican pizza features coconut, and Hong Kong locals have discovered a taste for abalone, crayfish, and crab roe pizza. Russians like their pizza topped with sardines and onions. Depending on where you stand on planet Earth, you may find yourself contemplating a slice of bacon cheeseburger pizza; dandelion pizza; mashed potato pizza; pulled-pork pizza; pickled ginger, minced mutton, and tofu pizza; or peanut butter and jelly pizza.

According to a recent Gallup Poll, children ages three to eleven prefer pizza over all other foods for lunch and dinner. So if you happen to be contemplating pizza, you may be standing in a school lunch line. And since a school lunch must include a serving of vegetables, it was only a matter of time before the following question arose: Is pizza a vegetable? The U.S. Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent a great deal of time and energy last year considering this question.

For the record, pizza is not a vegetable. But there was something lost amid the uproar over just how many tomatoes might or might not have given their lives to the pizza sauce atop a schoolkid's lunchtime slice. Lost amid the fight over high sodium, childhood obesity, and pizza industry lobbyists was the question of eleven billion dollars of federal school lunch money—a great portion of it embedded in frozen pizza.

We are talking about a lot of cash. The global pizza market is roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Lithuania. Pizza is big, but in order to satisfy the appetite of everyone on Earth, pizza would have to be even bigger. Fortunately, the bigger the pizza business, the more profitable the pizza business—which meant there might be money in feeding the world.

Recently, Domino's Pizza CEO J. Patrick Doyle returned from New Delhi, India, where he had opened his company's nine thousandth franchise and unveiled the next phase in his master strategy for global pizza domination. The company would establish a foothold of restaurants in Malaysia while doubling the number of U.K. locations by 2017. "We're in sixty-five countries right now," announced Doyle. "We're not seeing many places where it doesn't make sense for Domino's Pizza to go." Of course, where's there's lots of money, lots of people want in.

The international taste for slices fuels a global melee for market share among four players: Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, and Little Caesars. These companies compete for billion-dollar pizza delivery markets everywhere—markets known inside the industry as "couch commerce." And so the day after Doyle opened the nine thousandth Domino's, archrival Pizza Hut countered with an announcement of its own plans to open four hundred new delivery outlets throughout India by the end of the next fiscal year.

This meant war. But it also meant more pizza for more people. And perhaps it might mean less expensive pizza for more people. A pizza war might even mean healthier, more delicious meals for everyone on Earth—which was what I was looking for, the answer to the food question. So I visited the front line.

I inched my rental car through an industrial park outside Detroit and pulled up in front of a low-slung monster of a shed that housed one of Domino's seventeen U.S. pizza dough distribution facilities. These centers dot the United States and furnish all the goods for twice-a-week deliveries to five thousand Domino's retail pizza outlets across the nation. Half of the company's U.S. employees are truck drivers, and Domino's eighteen-wheelers cover eighteen to twenty million miles a year delivering ingredients. These trucks average a little under six miles per gallon. Way back in 1960, Domino's founders, brothers Tom and James Monaghan, purchased their first pizza joint not all that far from this forsaken stretch of Michigan frost and weed. Today the chain employs more than ten thousand people, and its 2010 fiscal revenue topped $236 million.

I was met by Domino's public relations manager, Chris Brandon, an enthusiastic twentysomething who led the way into an antiseptic dough-making room of clattering conveyor belts, industrial mixers, precision cutters, and metal detectors. Domino's manufactures its product in a place that looks nothing like a wheat field, a tomato farm, a dairy, or a kitchen. Every half second or so, a warm ball of Domino's pizza dough emerged at the end of the assembly line. Later, I did a few calculations and figured that if each of Domino's seventeen U.S. distribution centers were creating pizza dough at this rate for eight-hour shifts, five days a week, the company had to be selling around a million pizza pies each day in this country.

Ever good-natured, Brandon grabbed one of the just-manufactured dough balls and threw it to me like a baseball. Then he explained that each lump must be X-rayed before it can be released into the world, just in case a tooth-crushing twist of metal or a stomach-puncturing screw might have fallen off the assembly line and dropped into the mix.

I was impressed, and I became even more impressed when I approached a tremendous stainless-steel tureen that stood as high as my chest. A carefully calibrated stream of water flushed into the bowl, and after the water came an autodispensed dose of soy crush—commonly known as vegetable oil—that turned the liquid a dull yellow. Then five hundred pounds of industrial flour exploded out of yet another stainless-steel pipe. Through billowing clouds of white I glimpsed the computer that ran the proprietary Domino's software. "Step #17," read the screen. "Adding Flour."

Then it was time for a lifting machine to hoist the quarterton glob of dough fifteen feet into the air and for a tilting machine to tip the entire concoction out of the tureen and into an enormously large stainless-steel hopper. "It's going to miss the bowl," I said.

"It may look that way," Brandon reassured me, "but it never misses." The dough slithered out of the tureen and into the center of the hopper. He smiled.

But a few minutes later, the next five-hundred-pound batch hit the metal ledge of the hopper, slid off the side, and unceremoniously plopped onto the factory floor. Red lights flashed, alarm bells rang, the production line jolted to a halt, and Brandon stared as a great white blob slowly distended across the cement. For the first time in recorded history, a batch of Domino's pizza dough had missed the bowl.

Brandon ushered me away from the slowly spreading ooze and through a few sets of blue canvas automatic roll-up doors to a warehouse infused with the aroma of garlic, peppers, and onions. We were joined by Larry Manning, yet another customer relations expert, who explained that along with yeast, water, wheat, flour, and soy crush, pizza dough requires salt, sugar, and the "goody bag"—the top-secret potpourri that makes a Domino's dough rise above the rest. These are the elements that must be on...