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.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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 hand at all times in order to create Domino's pizza—not to mention a million or so cardboard boxes. Big Pizza means packaged pizza, and that means money spent on cardboard. "You've got some major players out there," said Manning.

I noticed a small black disk attached to one side of his tennis shoes. "It's called a step tracker," Manning said, and he explained that true to its name, the step tracker tracked every step he took. "This is to get people energized, motivated, moving."

Not every Domino's employee has a disk attached to the shoe. But for those who do, Domino's has connected step-tracker readers to the USB ports of selected computers. Whenever Manning or another step-tracked employee walks by one of these computers, the reader downloads the latest step-track data to a Domino's Pizza website, where it is easy to track who has taken the most or the least number of paces for Domino's that day, that hour, that week, or that year.

In the ten-thousand-year history of agriculture, had any peasant, grain merchant, or chef ever counted his or her steps? Not until today, when the footsteps of Domino's employees join Domino's ever expanding database of truck fuel, garlic powder, blocks of mozzarella, wheat prices, and every other conceivable component of a pizza that could be stuffed into a computer.

Manning told me that Domino's management had divided Domino's employees into step-tracking teams—who were at that very moment competing for a variety of step-tracking prizes, such as discounted health insurance. In order to win a prize, every team member would have to take a minimum of 323,000 steps. "It makes you walk," said Manning.

With renewed purpose, we strode past pallet after pallet of dressings, spices, and countless cases of a product named Pizza Sauce Ready to Use, a tomato topping produced by a company called Paradise Tomato Kitchens, based in Louisville, Kentucky. I began to consider how much of everything it would take to keep the entire world in pizza. How many steps? How many cans of tomato sauce? How many tomatoes in each can? And where did all those tomatoes come from? And how were they grown?

I was obsessing over the tomatoes, hardly aware that Manning had changed the subject. "And we got blown out of our hedges," he said. I had no idea what he was talking about, but the obnoxious little black disk on his shoe made everything Manning said seem absurd, so I did not ask him about hedges and why Domino's Pizza had gotten blown out of them.

I still thought that feeding the world was about the food. I still thought that pizza was about the dough, the garlic powder, and the blocks of mozzarella, and maybe something more about cardboard boxes and trucks.

A few weeks later I called the Paradise tomato sauce people in Louisville and learned that Pizza Sauce Ready to Use was a marvel of technology. "A great pizza sauce is custom designed to work optimally with the dough, the cheese, and the pizza oven," said Justin Uhl, the head of research and development at Paradise Tomato Kitchens. Uhl's careful choice of words—the language of industrially designed tomato sauce precisely fitted to Domino's industrial standards—was my first clue that the transnational pizza producer's tomato did not have much in common with the tomato of the roadside farm stand. But I was heartened to hear about vegetables rather than eighteen wheelers, cardboard boxes, and step tracking. At least this was an indication of the path of pizza back to the farm. There is an old journalistic adage: "Follow the money." My rule now became "Follow the tomatoes."

But following the tomatoes was not simple. I was surprised to discover that numerous books and treatises have been written on the subject. Websites and dissertations have been devoted to the planting, reaping, buying, and selling of tomatoes. Most recently, Barry Estabrook traced the struggles of underpaid tomato pickers in Florida and gave his book the apt title Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit (2011). For the commercial tomato business is like a country unto itself. It is colossal—and has been for a long time.

For the past hundred years or so, the ever improving proficiencies of fertilizing, irrigating, slicing, dicing, and pureeing have enabled the tomato to become the vegetable kingdom's greatest international commodity, with the bulk of the sauce and salsa spurting from the stainless-steel condensers of factories owned by some of the biggest names in global food, industrial titans such as Del Monte, Heinz, and Unilever.

But of the four thousand kinds of tomatoes on the planet, only a select few hybridized, high-yield, high-pulp varieties—the AB2, the Sun 6366, and the Asgrow 410—will make it into the global market for tomato sauce. These varieties are the so-called process tomatoes, and only they will be transformed into the earth's supply of ketchup, tomato paste, tomato soup, and pizza topping. And with all of the scientific research and product development devoted to engineering the tomato seeds of the future, with all of the far-flung transportation networks and hundreds of millions of transnational dollars committed to the tomato-industrial complex, it is easy to forget the humble origins of the fruit.

The earliest known specimens of Solanum lycopersicum flourished in the thin air of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru before they migrated to Mexico, where the Mayans became enchanted with the marble-sized fruit and devoutly copied its likeness onto their ancient cookware. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés was the first European to buy the product; he purchased xtomatl seeds in the great market of Chichén Itzá and brought them back with him across the Atlantic, where Old World botanists analyzed the New World rarities shaped like human hearts, and declared them aphrodisiacs.

Throughout the majority of the tomato's postcolonial career in North America, the general public considered the "wolf peach," lethal, perhaps because of its poisonous cousins in the nightshade family, belladonna and mandrake. But after a while, almost everyone realized that even though the deadly aphrodisiac was neither deadly nor aphrodisiacal, there was money in it. By the early twentieth century the H. J. Heinz Company was producing twelve million bottles of ketchup each year and exporting it to Australia, India, Japan, South Africa, and any other international market it could find. Today, as salsa overtakes ketchup in the race for global supremacy, the process tomato reigns as an undisputed supermarket superstar, a staple of Mediterranean and Latin American diets and the essential ingredient of pizza topping. The earth's annual production of the Peruvian fruit now exceeds a hundred million tons, and the demand continues to grow.

Certain parts of the world profit from and delight in the economic efficiencies of the commercialized, homogenized, globalized tomato. "The founding of Paradise Tomato Kitchens was rooted in innovation and technology," the company's CEO, Ron Peters, explained in an e-mail. "With the economic challenges our customer base faces, it is our mission to help be the driving engine in our shared success."

The customer base and the economic challenges that matter to Peters and Paradise Tomato Kitchens are the corporate concerns of Domino's Pizza, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, and Little Caesars—not the people who actually grow tomatoes or buy them at the supermarket. Then again, no one would expect Paradise to care too much about keeping the rest of the world's tomato purveyors and processors in business. The people at Paradise have plenty to keep themselves occupied as they enhance their sauce technologies and expand their market share. And lucky for Paradise, every year Domino's, Pizza Hut, and the rest of the international brotherhood of Big Pizza require ever increasing tonnages of custom-designed industrial tomato sauce.

One very big step down from those who purchase, process, and distribute global tomato sauce are those across the globe who sow, reap, and sell plain old tomatoes. And somewhere between the local market and the global market emerges a food paradox. This paradox is economic, and it borders on the ludicrous: the ever increasing international demand for designer tomatoes, custom grown for processors, has made it all but impossible for small- and medium-size tomato farms to sell what they grow.

If a chef decides she will only cook what she can get at the farmers' market, her pizza may taste different from month to month or week to week. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But industrial food depends on uniform ingredients, consistent components that have become the food industry's "widget," a word that entered the language in a 1924 Broadway comedy (Beggar on Horeseback by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly) and now means just about anything that comes from a factory—or in this case, a factory farm. Domino's, Pizza Hut, and Papa John's need last week's tomato paste to look, taste, and pour just like this week's tomato paste.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Bet the Farmby Frederick Kaufman Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.