The Brave New World of Government Marketing

In his 1932 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a future in whichhumans exist solely to support the economy and are conditioned from birth to buythings. Government bureaucrats manipulate the sheep-like citizens with drugs andslogans to make them consume as much as possible. In Huxley's vision, 26th-centuryconsumers learn that "ending is better than mending" and "the morestitches, the less riches"—that is, buying new things is better than fixing oldones. But for US consumers, this eerie futuristic fantasy—with government usingmarketing slogans and other undue influence to drive consumption—has arrived afew centuries early. This chapter explores government marketing as a feature ofmeatonomics and considers its consequences for consumers.

Checkoff Programs: Unseen and Unknown, But Felt Everywhere

In the Brave New World of the 21st century—where big box stores and mega marketsdominate the landscape—our government uses innocuous-sounding "checkoff"programs to encourage us to buy more animal foods and other goods. Themechanism's name persists from a time when the assessments were voluntary andproducers willing to opt in participated by simply checking a box. Nowadays, theprograms are tax-like and mandatory, even though the benign checkoff monikerremains.

The way they work is simple: Congress slaps a small assessment (less than 1percent of wholesale price) on certain commodities, and the collected funds areused to pay for research and marketing programs that boost the goods' sales. Sowhen animal food producers collect $1 per head of cattle, $0.40 per $100 ofpork, or $0.15 per 100 pounds of dairy, they pass those funds on to nationalmarketing organizations. The proceeds are allocated among state and regionalindustry organizations throughout the country. There aren't many Boston TeaParty–like protests when it comes to making the payments—probably because mostconsumers don't know about checkoffs and most producers think their trade groupsput the money to good use. These trade groups don't equivocate much about whatthey do or why they exist. The Kentucky Cattlemen's Association, for example,keeps it simple, saying its business purpose is "Promotion of the beefindustry."

Although few Americans have heard of checkoff programs, we've all heard or seenthe catchy, feel-good slogans they've generated:

Beef. It's What's for Dinner.

Milk. It Does a Body Good.

Pork. The Other White Meat.

Written, spoken, or sung—and flashed across every medium, including print,radio, TV, and the Internet—these statements have bombarded American consumersfor decades. The echo of one particularly snappy jingle that went with aubiquitous 1990s commercial—"The Incredible, Edible Egg"—still rattles in mybrain. And while that phrase and many others predate social networking, theypersist because their sticky messaging fits in perfectly with today's meme-saturated,web-dominated world. Like an ink stamp, these messages imprintthemselves with authority on our subconscious and become part of our beliefsystem. What's for dinner? Without even knowing why, many think, Beef.

Across the board, animal food checkoff programs are remarkably effective atmaking us buy more than we would otherwise. According to the USDA, for eachdollar of checkoff funds spent promoting animal foods, "the return on investmentcan range as high as $18." The beef checkoff program raises sales by $5 percheckoff dollar spent. The pork checkoff program drives $14 in sales per dollarspent. While it may not boast a memorable motto, the lamb checkoff provides anunusually huge boost, driving additional sales of $38, or seven extra pounds oflamb, for each dollar spent on promotion. But the biggest winner might be thedairy industry, which recently boasted that over a year and a half, checkoffefforts contributed to more than 7 billion additional pounds of milk sold.That's an extra forty-seven servings of dairy per person in the United States—aboveand beyond the hundreds of servings we would have consumed anyway duringthe period. Clearly, milk is up to more than just doing a body good.

All told, these programs provide funding of $557 million yearly for animal foodproducers to promote their goods. This massive, government-mandated marketingbudget gives the meatonomic system something few other microeconomic systemshave: an exceedingly deep marketing war chest, deployed to boost sales of allgoods from all producers in the program. A few other commodities, like cottonand soybeans, have checkoff programs of their own. Yet in every other industry,except for those lucky enough to have a checkoff program, individualcorporations must fork out their own funds to increase sales rather than rely ongovernment programs to prop up their numbers. With meatonomics, on the otherhand, the effect of checkoff programs is that we all buy more of nearly everyconceivable animal food than we would otherwise. Like a diner with an insatiableappetite, the animal food industry relishes the higher sales that result. Dairypromoters brag that since their checkoff program started in 1983, annual percapita consumption of milk "has climbed 12 percent to 620 pounds."

Some say checkoff programs have been unfairly linked to government and areactually just the tools of good old-fashioned capitalism. They argue thesecheckoff arrangements involve only private firms who pool advertising monieswithout government participation, and their mission and methods are no differentfrom those of any private advertiser. However, the US Supreme Court decisivelyrejected this position in a 2005 case involving the beef checkoff. In Johanns v.Livestock Marketing Association, beef industry participants who disagreed withthe message of the latest beef campaign claimed that being forced to fund itviolated their right of free speech. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding themessage was actually government speech (a form of speech the government can makeothers support). The court said:

The message set out in the beef promotions is from beginning to end the messageestablished by the Federal Government.... Congress and the Secretary [of theUSDA] have set out the overarching message and some of its elements, and theyhave left the development of the remaining...