Factually! with Adam Conover - The "Food Barons" Jacking Up Your Grocery Bill with Austin Frerick

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Whether you're at the grocery store or a restaurant, food is becoming obscenely expensive. It's easy to point to inflation as the sole culprit, but that's only a narrow view of a much bigger picture. For years, the food industry has been falling to monopolists who have been edging out independent farmers. Food quality has gone down, prices have gone up, and it has been a shocking disaster for the environment. This week, Adam speaks with Austin Frerick, an expert on agriculture and antitrust policy, a fellow at Yale, and author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. Find Austin's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me again. You know, if you're like me, you like to eat. In fact, you have to eat or you'll die. And you might have noticed that food has been getting a lot more expensive. Although inflation for food has slowed relative to 2022, you have to remember that the effects of inflation are cumulative and recent numbers showed increased prices

for everything from frozen juice to ground beef. Eating out is more expensive than last year and even vending machine prices are up. It sucks. Again, we all have to eat and for most of us, living off the grid and growing our own meat and potatoes is not an option. So ideally, we'd have a world where different food companies compete

to get us the lowest price, right? Well, unfortunately, just as with industries like newspapers, internet advertising, airlines, and athletic shoes, that competition doesn't exist anymore at all. Instead, our food system is run by monopolies, and those monopolies have the power to screw us, whether we're their customers, their workers,

or citizens living in places where they exert unfair and undemocratic influence over our lives. I mean, I can't believe I have to say this, but food is simply one of the necessities of life, which means it's a bad thing that only a few people in this country have control over that necessity. You simply cannot explain how we get our beef, pork, grain, how grocery stores work, why prices are higher than ever,

without understanding the influence of these massive and manipulative companies. And luckily, on the show today, we have a guest who knows everything about it. And not only that, is from one of the very regions that produces our essential foodstuffs. He not only knows about this, he has lived it himself. And I cannot wait for you to hear this interview.

But before we get to it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all of the fascinating, challenging, and intelligent conversations we bring you every single week, you can support us on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every one of these episodes ad free.

You can join our community as well. We would love to have you there. And if you want to come see me do standup comedy, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. Soon I'm headed to Phoenix, Arizona, Toronto, Canada. I'm going to have a lot of other dates up there soon. Head to adamconover.net to check them out. And now my guest today is Austin Frerich.

He's an expert on agriculture and antitrust policy. He's a fellow at Yale, and he is born and currently lives in Iowa right here in the United States. His fantastic new book is called Barron's Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry. Please welcome Austin Frerich.

Austin, thank you so much for being on the show, man. Thanks for having me on, Adam. Okay, so tell me, what is so fucked up about America's food system? How radical it's become. You have one man in Iowa, the most powerful political person in the state, and he does five million hogs a year. I mean, not alone. That one little example. He does five million hogs a year.

What do you mean by he does them? That could mean a lot of things, some of which I don't want to picture. Yes. So he owns, so he has about 7,000 workers, employees at this point. A lot of them are contractors, so you gotta be careful with the word workers, but he owns 5 million hogs. He has other people grow them, but he maintains the ownership as they grow them out.

But his operation produces 5 million hogs a year. And how much of the American pork supply is that? So he's the fourth largest pork producer in America. Basically in my lifetime, you've seen the hog family farmer die where you have the 10 largest entities do about 70% of the hog market control it, including the largest owner of hogs is actually a Chinese multinational Smithfield. Is there a reason you're saying, by the way, hogs and not pigs?

I'm just very curious. Oh no, I use them interchangeably. Oh, okay. I was like, is this, should I, is pigs wrong? Should I not be saying pigs? Do I look like a, like a city folk if I'm saying pigs? Okay. Well, and so why is that a problem

to have that be so monopolized in so few hands? That one person is doing so many hogs. So let's just take hogs. So I open, my book opens with a hog baron, this hog guy. I know, isn't that, first of all, it's not so- I'm sorry. The hog baron is just, what a great image. It sounds like an anime character or something like that.

I imagine a guy with like a top hat and there's like a little snout on the front. He's got some goggles and he's like, hello, I'm the hog baron, oink oink. Like that's, what a great guy. You gotta put a little bit more Florida on him. So my hog baron has like a Florida twist to him. First of all, I find this campy.

That's kind of why I like this framework is it, you don't feel powerlessness because it's so morally ridiculous. And this whole thing started because of him. I literally was in a bar in Des Moines in 2018, where someone, a political person was complaining. I didn't know at the time, but like Iowa doesn't have campaign contribution limits. So he had given the governor $300,000 for her campaign. Wow. And the thing that caught my eye was,

it was not even that, it was, he has a home in the rich suburb of Des Moines. He has a home down in Naples, Florida, which says something, but he has a private jet that he flies back and forth between the two. Wow. And I was like, that's power. That is like, that imagery says everything.

But how did Iowa fall apart in my lifetime? How do I tell this bigger structural story with this little like trashy Florida man? So there used to be such a thing as a family hog farmer. Now we have a hog baron, but there used to be a hog peasant or a hog small landowner, right? A hog family farmer.

Yeah, and now those people now are low wage workers for this baron. And instead of like, you know, having a real estate ship of the animal, your job now is about 10% of the pigs die inside these metal sheds. So you're paid to go in there, haul the dead bodies,

throw them into a dumpster. Wow. I mean, that is, that is where we are now. But that's also like for those people, an erosion in the middle class, right? Because if you previously, I assume, were a hog farmer, you had some ownership of some land,

of the animals, of your production pipeline. You were a hog farmer. You had some ownership of some land, of the animals, of your production pipeline. You were a producer selling to somebody. And I imagine that that you were able to make more money that way than when you're just a surf working for the hog baron. Yeah. And you're spending your money locally. You're paying taxes.

You're sending your kids to school. And that's an all gone. You see the massive consolidation of power. And honestly, the guy's probably taking his money down the floor to knowing how this game works. And what happens is it's basically modern It's the cult. It's basically modern day sharecropping. It really comes from chicken. They call it chicken ization. And it's happened across the food system and happened to pork. He saw that coming where

I kid you not a century ago when they wrote the regulations to tackle the meat monopolies in response to Upton Sinclair's, the jungle, when they wrote the regulations, they didn't write chicken into it because there weren't commercial chicken slaughterhouses. You just butchered a chicken in your backyard. So down south corporations took that model to black farmers that a sharecropping model applied to the chicken. And then what you see is USDA didn't step in saying, chicken, you can't behave that way.

And you see the chickenization of everything else. Wait, so let's get a little bit of a bird's eye view of the history of American food production. Cause you started talking about, you dropped so many little historical bombs there, sharecropping, the regulations in the Upton Sinclair era. So take us to the moment before Upton Sinclair, what did things look like?

Why did the regulations come in? And then what did we live in? What world of food did we live in after those regulations up until the present day? Yeah, so I think actually meatpacking is a single best way to like talk about all this stuff because it shows what the system could be and how it all falls apart.

But let me also first start with the notion that, I wanna be very careful while we're emphasizing the past in the food system, because in the day it's rooted in genocide and slavery. Yeah. But we did make progress, we really did. And you saw the meatpacking where we as a society were mad and angry what we saw the jungle, the meat quality we were getting, and we made policy choices to break out these meat

companies to empower the workers and they got power. That became a solid middle-class job. People on both sides of my family did that for a living. And then what we've seen since the election of President Reagan is systematic assault on that industry. Massive consolidation where even in my book, I have a slaughtering baron, this secret super corrupt Brazilian family, where I would actually argue they're the closest thing to have to a criminal organization in modern day corporate America. Wow. Which is saying a lot, but they actually pled guilty to bribing their way to monopoly level status.

And I'm not talking campaign bribes, I'm talking bribery. But they're now the largest meat packer in America. They're the largest meat packer the world's ever seen. And that's why we see rampant use of child labor. We see all these bad things we tackled. This regulatory system collapsed and we shouldn't be shocked that Robert Barringer fell in that void. So you said members of your family did this kind of work

in maybe not the good old days, but decades ago and made a living that way. So like, what did their lives look like compared to what it looks like now? Yeah, I mean, my grandfather, my grandfather was kind of like my idol. He worked at a hog plant in town, the old Wilson's. You know, they bought a home out in the country.

He had a little acreage I grew up, that's kind of actually why I love farming and gardening, is I just grew up working his plot with him. He owns his house and nowadays, I mean, just even where I live, um, a lot of immigrants and they live in section eight housing. Um, they're usually Sudanese and they work at either in Tame or Waterloo, Iowa. They live two or three families to a two bedroom. You know what I mean?

My grandfather could buy a house, live the American dream. And now these people are barely getting by and where they live is actually most highly impoverished school district, sorry, school, elementary in the city. It's just, it says so much of where we've become and it's incredibly dangerous. And you add the whole layer on top of it, of a lot of these workers either undocumented

or on the marginal thing of, there's just so much abuse going on that we just don't even know about. So how did this transition take place? How do we go from the world that your grandfather lived into, the world that your grandfather lived into the world that these folks now inhabit? I mean, I just think we're living in a second Gilded Age,

just another laissez faire thing. And it's such a simple thing, but I realized sitting in a business school class a few years ago, the goal of any corporate executive is monopoly. Yeah. Period. And so like you saw what they did is regulatory capture.

You know, the election of Reagan was such a game changer of just I know you had Lena Conn on I mean, that's like to me this best ray of hope right now is we're We were moving away from that model, but it allowed massive consolidation to occur where my coffee baron in my book It's a secret German family that now I know sells more coffee than Starbucks But didn't even sell a bean of coffee in America until 2012. They bought Panera, caribou coffee, Einstein's, but burgers, bagels, curry cups, Stumptown, intelligence, crispy cream, you name it. And you know,

they bought all of the worst bagel chains as a lifelong New Yorker. They bought all the bagel chains I would never fucking eat at in my life. They have spongy bagels. They, they toast every single one of them. And along with all these other chains as well. So, sorry, go on, please. No, I was just laughing because that's like a hot point in my marriage.

My husband agrees with you if I love Panera Bread, Semina Crunch Bagel. My husband's from New York City. It's fine if you, you know, if you got to eat in a mall, it's completely fine. I get it. But yeah, please, please go on. Like how did, yeah, how did this occur?

Robert Bork. I mean, there's always going to be hatchet men for industry. I mean, there's always going to be academics doing the bidding of the rich. And he basically flipped America's anti-trust laws upside down. And we had all these guard rails, like what the coffee baron did could not have been done

just a few decades ago. You couldn't come in and roll up a competitive industry. But when these garbage rails came way where they came up with this kind of junk science where consumer welfare standards, what they call it, where you can show that prices go lower for consumers, you can buy a company, you can fire any economist to produce those numbers. And so you see massive consolidation in meat packing and coffee and grain and all these different industries.

I actually think food is the most concentrated industry in America because it's that illusion of choice. You know what I mean? Like if you look at the peanut butter area, there's actually one company has about a 60% market share in peanut butter, but they have all these different brands. Wow, 60% market share in peanut butter. Like, so Laura Scudder is not a real person.

That's what you're telling me. She's just part of some bigger conglomerate. She's actually owned by that company. I think it's Smucker's. Smucker's invented Lourdes Scudder. I thought her name too conveniently rind with peanut butter. I was looking at Lourdes Scudder peanut butter. There's no way that this lady was like,

you know what, my name sounds like peanut butter. Let me start an independent peanut butter company. There's a fake lady. This is why my mom hates grocery shopping with me because I love telling her these little factoids when we shop. Yeah, I'm the same way. I think we would have a good time

at the grocery store together. We'd spend about three hours there and never buy anything. We'd just be pointing at stuff going, oh, you know what's fucked up about this? About this maple syrup or whatever. I mean, even my favorite is, probably my favorite chapter to write was the grocery chapter because I love them.

But I had a grocery guy tell me, you got to think of a grocery store as modern-day mafioso capitalism. Because even the shelf space, there is so much shenanigans going on what you see at the eye level. Like the whole slotting fees, all these games going on. It's incredible.

Yeah, yeah. So what happens? I know about the consumer welfare standard. Robert Bork puts out a very influential paper called I believe the Antitrust Paradox, right? Making the argument that all the antitrust enforcement that we had for decades and decades in America that broke up monopolies and made sure monopolies

couldn't form actually was bad and that we shouldn't be applying it. And instead we should only break up a monopoly when the price is gonna go up for consumers. If the price goes down, it's okay. Yes. And then that has the advantage of being very easy for judges to adjudicate, right?

You just get an economist before a judge and the economist says, oh, here's some numbers that say the prices go down. Well, the judge isn't an economist. They're listening to, they're like, oh, you're an economist. All right, so if you say the prices go down, I guess they'll go down. That's good enough for me.

I'm just some fucking judge and bangs the gavel and they allow the mergers to go through. And that's happened in so many different industries. It's happened in my industry, the entertainment industry, so many others, but 60% of peanut butter or all these coffee chains, that's a huge amount of consolidation. That would be illegal if not for the seat change

and anti-tarsus enforcement? It's actually probably higher than 60% because a lot of times they do the store label and you only know as usually when there's a huge amount of consolidation. That would be illegal if not for the seat change and anti-tax enforcement. It's actually probably higher than 60 percent because a lot of times they do the store label and you only know as usually when there's a peanut recall. Ah, uh-huh. Uh-huh. OK. You're totally I mean, when you explain that whole Robert Bork framework is to me, that's the hallmark of this era is big words to hide. I mean, you're using complex language to keep people out to really hide. Right. Shunyanatians like. Right.

Consumer welfare standard, those words mean nothing, but they sound really smart and it plays into people's intellectual insecurity. Because they don't want you to know what they're doing. That's all that is. Yeah. The consumer welfare standard is like, oh, that sounds like a big, important legal doctrine that very important smart people came up with. And you shouldn't argue with it. And it gives the decision the air of legitimacy.

When in fact, what it's much simply, they're just saying, hey, let's let the mergers go through. and you shouldn't argue with it. And it gives the decision the air of legitimacy. When in fact, what it's much simply, they're just saying, hey, let's let the mergers go through. It's junk science, like masking moral judgments. In the day, how many hogs one man should own? That's a moral question we should wrestle with. As a democracy, Excel can't tell you that answer, but we pretend to do it.

Well, so give me more examples about why this is such a big problem in food. Again, I know this is a larger economic problem, but what makes it so bad in the food system? The workers, the workers are the ones being squeezed here the most. That, I mean, that is, the one that shocks people the most in my book

is my berry baron, Driscoll's. You're berry baron. Oh, Driscoll's. Driscoll's is in, Driscoll's is in my supermarket. I buy Driscoll's all the time. They sell one in three berries in America. They, but they don't grow a single berry, Adam. They sell one in three berries, but they grow zero berries.

Is that what you said? Yes. How is that possible? Chicken. They chickenized the berry industry. It's, they, and it's like a combination of Silicon Valley meets chicken. So they took the Silicon Valley model of owning the IP.

So they own the IP of the berry and then they contract out production. And part of that chapter is I wanted to tell people a lot of the produce you consume now has moved offshore because of these trade agreements where you can exploit labor, exploit the environment. So, you know what I mean? How can you compete on price against a 12-year-old

picking berries in like Baja, Mexico? Okay, I have to dwell on the question of IP. You said there's IP in the berries, intellectual property. Now I'm used to that in Hollywood, right? Like Batman is IP, you know? And so if I wanna write a Batman movie, well, guess what?

I gotta get permission. And also I'm not that important as the screenwriter or the director. Batman's the star, right? Even the actor isn't that important. So IP is a real problem where I work. What is the IP for the berry? Is the IP the name Driscoll's?

Is it the, or is it the berry itself? What the fuck are you talking about? Both, because they want a branded product. I mean, Driscoll's was kind of the first branded produce thing. Like you can't think of like, name a branded Apple company. You really can't.

But on top of it- I can name Apple varieties. You're right. I can't. And I know some of those are proprietary, but I can't name a company. I can name Chiquita Banana. That's that's one that I can think of that's maybe older. But the key thing is, is it's really about durability. What's really fascinating about Driscoll's it's it's really you almost kind of have to blame Walmart.

Like Walmart is the king of kings in the creation of one Robber Barron makes other Robber Barons where Driscoll's saw the rise of Walmart coming and realized Walmart wants one company to do four berries year round for 4,000 stores. And so that Barry's not engineered for taste. So they patent, they make special types of berries that either sometimes they're going to Morocco, sometimes in Baja, sometimes in Chile, but it's all about durability. How can you make that berry last as long as possible

as it goes from, you know, Chile up to Vermont? Right. And those Driscoll's berries, like, they taste, not great. I mean, you know, I've, I, yeah, I was lucky enough, my parents' garden, when I was a kid and we would have strawberries fresh from the garden, they taste so strawberry, either incredible, you know, Driscoll's berries are like, you're like, I'm getting a, I'm getting a hint of strawberry,

a wafting under my nose when I bite into this watery pink white berry. It's better than nothing. It's okay on cornflakes, but it's not like a berry berry. But that's the story of the food system, is nothing tastes good anymore. I mean, that is like, writing this chapter, I did little tastings, so I love milk, shocking.

Like, sorry, sorry. Yeah. No, no, no. No, you look like a milk drinker. You look like a milk guy. I'm sorry. I'm a white boy from Iowa. Yeah, of course I'm gonna love my milk.

But like inputs matter. Like inputs matter and like cow and pasture is gonna make a very different tasting milk than like an industrial cow inside a metal shed or in Bakersfield, you know, eating corn all day. And that's a story across the food system. On top of it, industry will love to say this makes cheap food. That's not factually true.

That's like maybe my favorite little factoid writing this book is, oh, these are concentrated markets, concentrated markets gouge. That's what they do. And we see rampant gouging across the food system. So we're paying more for garbage. Like that is what blows my mind. Yeah, those Jisco's berries are not like cheap. They're still, you know,

berries are expensive to buy in the grocery store still. You don't get many, you know, you pay, I don't know, like eight bucks a little tiny thing of blueberries. Last year, you know, a smoothie and a half. You know, it's not a. It's just like, I mean, but the thing is this system is done by design. Like my maybe the hardest chapter, right.

But one of my second favorites is my farm by Grain Baron chapter about the farm bill. The farm bill heavily subsidizes grains. So it makes highly processed food cheap. But if you grow produce, you don't get anything. And it also pushes people to grow grains and not produce. So it pushed produce off the shore of America to other countries. And when supply chains get long, transparency collapses like it's so stupid.

But like part of the reason why I wrote that was I read an article 15 years ago where 70 percent of apple juice in America comes from China. Really? 70 percent of apple juice in America comes from China. But I mean, American apple farming is still big. There's like America makes a lot of apples. I get them in the grocery store. Many of them are good. So why would the apple juice be produced in China

when we're growing apples here? Because then the biggest part of apples is labor. It's cheaper to hire someone over there, ship liquid across the world. I mean, we still produce a lot of apples, but not as much as you think. I mean, it's kind of, I know if you go to Trader Joe's,

look at the back of every juice. You'll notice a lot of them will say, Turkey, pick your country. It's a of, I know if you go to Trader Joe's, look at the back of every juice. You'll notice a lot of them will say, Turkey, you know, pick your country. It's a labor component. It's as we rave standards of living for farm workers here, it undermines, you know, it kind of pushes people off. And even in Iowa, most of the orchards are gone that I grew up with, but they're not subdivisions.

They're just more corn and soybeans, because that's where more of the subsidies are going to. You know, and I've known for a while that, we covered on my Netflix show, The G-Word, the fact that we subsidize certain foods and not others, and that we subsidize these grains. And the story that we present is that it's somewhat of a historical accident that we subsidize those particular grains,

as opposed to any other crops. And we don't subsidize healthy fruits and vegetables. This is a very, it's a very simple story. We told it on television, so it had to be sort of simple and quick, it's one I've read elsewhere. I did not realize that that story though, meant that we were, I thought we were just producing less vegetables, not that it was getting pushed offshore.

That's wild, like if I'm buying broccoli or whatever, it's like more likely now to come from a different country entirely. Yes. It took me a while to kind of, I love, do you know what they're like census for people? Well, USDA does its own agriculture census and every seven years they do it.

And you start pulling into the data and you just notice, oh, there's some weird trend lines going on here. And even something simple as during the new deal, uh, what are the things did the workers progress administration is they commissioned state guides. They called them almost think of Wikipedia mixed with like travel. I was reading the Iowa one and I was reading about all these different regional product food productions. You're like, wait, there used to be tons of peaches in Iowa.

There used to be tons of onions, like some food supply chains used to be much more regional. And part of it is to be fair, part of it is refrigeration. Refrigeration was a game changer. It extended supply chains. But what this system does is it really pushes people to specialize, but it makes them incredibly fragile. So like that's what happens is like you used to just see like Del Mar peninsula

used to do a lot of the produce for the East coast. The Delta used to do some produce for the South. Now ever all your strawberries in America used to come from California. Well, now it's starting to shift away to Baja. You know what I mean? Like, California is increasingly nuts because that's just pure capital intensive.

Right, like, sorry, when you say California is nuts, you're not referring to the craziness of life in California, which I can vouch to. Let me be clear. Things are pretty wild here in the state in which I live. No, you're talking about in California, which is a huge agricultural state. They are now mostly growing nuts. And part of that is because nuts are easily like financialized.

Like you can ship them really easily. They're worth a lot of money. Like almonds are very, they're calorie dense. They are also money dense per a unit of almonds, right? Yep. Totally. And then it's easy to harvest. You don't really need people. They just have machines that can do a lot of the work. So you don't need to pay someone to go up there and pull it down the fruit. But that means that, you know, a state like mine

that used to have, you know, farming used to be a big part of its economy that people actually worked in. And that, you know, there's the famous farm worker unionization efforts of the last century, you know, like it's part of the history of the state, the fucking, you know, dust bowl migration, all this shit. This is like part of what California is. Now it's just, you know, the same amount of land,

but it's being used with these giant machines to farm almonds just for a couple people to profit at the top rather than something that's benefiting everybody in the economy. Yeah, in California, speaking of nutso, it's just, it's a different food system. And it took me as a Midwestern or a while to get my head around. Like, hmm, there's a lot of problems with like the Homestead Act and stuff.

But it established like de-concentrated power, especially in land holdings. California, on the other hand, has always been colonial. Like you drive the Central Valleys, you don't see farmhouses in the fields. And like, right. You start. I mean, you write a book like this, there's so much stuff that ends up in the cut room floor. I got obsessed with the water stuff in California. Like the whole imperil valley makes no sense to me.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's crazy. The way water has been redirected across the state, specifically to the, in the most populous state in the country. And by the way, I live in the most populous county in the country. And by the way, I live in the most populous county in the country as well, which is enormously thirsty of water, constantly in a drought state.

But part of that is because so much of the water is directed to these farms that are owned again by one or two people as their sort of personal wealth creation. Do you cover the, you cover the Resnicks in the book? So I knew you were gonna say that. I have a whole B list of Barons that didn't make the cut. There's already been a lot of good, you're calling the Resnick's B list Barons,

the almond and pomegranate Barons of California. You're calling them B list. Hey, screw you, man. These are, these are great. These are some of the greatest robber Barons in the American economy. Stuart Resnick and his wife, whose name I forget. They steal water from all across the state. They're like making huge amounts of almond milk, Caliphia almond milk is them, Palm Wonderful is them. They've created company towns across of like,

where they, you know, force people to live, like on their property, right? They're horrible people. And I can't believe they didn't make your list. I'm insulted as someone who lives in California. Do not have the resnic on your list. Have you seen my ass? Have you seen their new product?

What is their new product? Seedless lemons. Seedless lemons? Because Americans are too lazy. They don't like the seed in their lemon. So like there's something evil. Like, how does this is the weirdest thing to say? Some of these barons, you have to kind of admire like the seed in their lemon. So like, there's something evil. Like, how does this is the weirdest thing to say some of these barons, you have to kind of admire like the bullshit of it all. Like, that's kind of brilliant.

Yeah. And it's, I mean, that's the funny thing about writing this book. Sorry, you shouldn't say funny, but people tell me, oh, you got when I was in Minnesota, they're like, you got, let me tell you about this potato baron. When I was in Indianapolis, they told me about this carrot baron. You're just like, it's so ridiculous that we have this. I mean, the Resnick's are, it sounds weird when I wrote, when I structured this book, I wanted to mix up the narrative. So I have trashy money. Then I go aristocratic money than trashy.

You know what I mean? Like, you don't want to do the same story over and over the Resnick's kind of have this, um, they're like Cargill to me. They have this like Greenwich, like they understand image construction in a way that my hog baron doesn't give a fuck about. Yeah. Yeah, they're very, they make themselves look good, right? They, there's a lot of people,

they do a lot of donations and things like that. They, they make themselves look like upstanding pillars of the community, even in the products themselves. I mean, these people are one of the pioneers of almond milk and you know, almond milk is wildly popular and it is not great environmentally, right? Because the almonds take so much water to make. It's like, you know, a bunch of almonds, but then I just, it's just almond plus water. And it took water to grow the almonds.

But they have like the, you know, the Caliphia almond bottle. It looks so wholesome and happy. Oh, there's no, there's no cows bottle. It looks so wholesome and happy. Oh, there's no, there's no cows involved. So it's good for me. Like it's got a, it's got a halo to it. Oh, my favorite. I mean, their best product is obviously Fiji water.

Oh, they're Fiji water as well. I forgot about that. Let's ship water from halfway across the world and brand it as bougie and like sell people it for like, you know, that's, that's where we are right now. Hey, did you know that learning actually makes a sound? It's true. Listen, that's the sound of you mastering a new language with Babel. Learning a new language can be one of the toughest yet most rewarding

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off your delete me plan when you go to join delete me.com slash Adam and use promo code Adam at checkout. That's joined delete me.com slash Adam promo code Adam. Yeah. And speaking of shipping, you know, these liquids halfway across the world, I mean, it's ridiculous to be shipping so much food across the country or across the world in cargo containers, right? In like, why? I think about this every time I drink a Pellegrino, and I like a Pellegrino, it makes me feel classy,

to have a sparkling water at dinner, but I'm like, a LaCroix just comes from Wisconsin. Why do I need it shipped from Italy, right? There's a lot more fossil fuels to have just like water brought from one place to another. There's water here motherfuckers. Like, why do I need it to come on a boat? And I get it. The same thing has to be true of Apple juice and all these other products as well.

Right? Yeah. Because it's all about exploiting labor. I mean, it's this whole neoliberal trade stuff. I mean, that is the trade component to the food system has been really underappreciated. I mean, even if you go back to Baja and the berries, these are like. It's hard to use these words like almost like plantations, because people don't live a lot.

It's very sparsely populated. It gets as much rain as Death Valley, three inches a year. Wow. They bring in indigenous workers from Oaxaca. It's so dangerous to go report this to be a journalist down there. They they're they're plantations. You know, I mean, they build desalination plants on the ocean. They pull up the water, they drain the aquifers. The people there don't eat the berries.

They're for rich, you know, they're for upper-class Americans at Costco. Wow. So they're literally, they're almost like terraforming, like they're doing it on the surface of Mars or something. I mean, Baja California is a wonderful place, but it's not suited to this kind of agriculture and they're just like, oh, here's some cheap land with some cheap people. Let's just like get some water from somewhere else or drain it out of the aquifer and we can grow our cash crop.

Yeah. It's that finance financialization, short term private equity kind of thing where I mean, you have massive amount of pig production in Oklahoma panhandle where like the dust bowl took place and pigs are thirsty or even you go to fucking sorry, you go to Bakersfield and it's like massive amount of dairy going on there. And you're like, this doesn't make sense. I see an oil rig next to a dairy cow standing in sand in the desert. Yeah, I mean, every time, you know, drive that freeway route from L.A. to San Francisco, it's like the most it's the weirdest part

of the whole drive. You go through that sea of cows. And it was like something is not right here. And also the air smells bad. Yeah. I mean, like, but people don't realize that is, dairy existed in Vermont, Wisconsin, upstate New York for a reason. It made environmental logical sense. When you put it in the desert, like,

New Mexico does three times more dairy than Vermont now. And it's all over the Eastern side by Texas near Clover. And it's just, these are industrial feed lots. And I mean, dairy's really scary because these guys are kind of like feudal lords too, cause they employ, it takes a lot of men, undocumented men to run these empires. They're usually also the landlords. So they're both employer and the landlords are usually the

largest employer in the county. I talk about my dairy bearing, created that milk Fairlife. I don't know if you've ever seen, it's like that branded milk in the grocery store. Coke just bought it for him. It's twice the cost, half the volume of normal milk. Cause it's, it has high protein content. So young men love it. Uh huh.

It's that's where we are. And when you say that, let's talk more about the financialization, like that this is driven by the market, driven by private equity, but how much is that the case? Is it, yeah, describe how that process might work. I mean, part of it is, so like intellectually, I came at this of you, to me, I really believe you have to understand how someone amassed power

to deconstruct it. And like, there's this, the simple stupid story is, oh, this was efficiency, this was technology. But when you actually step back and you dig into it, you're like, no, this is an old fashioned story of a combination of regulatory capture and access to cheap capital. My hog baron, he saw the industrial model taking hold.

He was building some of those metal sheds. He got some Wall Street money and he was able to essentially get big when you saw market changing and then he established his market dominance and then with that dominance, he's able to essentially set the regulatory structure. Like he's given that money to the governor of Iowa, that much money, because his whole empire is Iowa, Iowa needs to control Iowa. Cause the second you regulate hog manure, like human manure, his models no longer economically viable.

Like I can't say this, this fact blows my mind where like I was 25 million hogs now and a hog defecates three times more than us. That's the manure of 75 million people. That's California, Texas, Illinois combined. And that regulatory structure is gutted. Like there's how many people live in Iowa? Three, three million, three million. Three million.

So you got three million people doing three million pounds of people shit. And then you've got 25 million hogs doing the equivalent of 75 million pounds of people shit. Yes. So you're saying Iowa is something like, what, like, like, like, like seven eighths shit. Yes.

Excuse me. Excuse me. Iowans, but like the math, the math there is boggling my mind. It's the waterways and I weren't open to her. Wow. No, I was going to say like 70% of the waterways are too taxed to go into. You see these, there's manure lagoons underneath them and they occasionally leak and you're like, no city would occasionally leak human manure everywhere. And you know what I mean?

It's such a fact of life. Yeah. And so you say that the hog manure, despite there being many times more, we're talking 20 times more of it than there is a human manure. Human shit is regulated. It can only be put certain places.

It has to be treated certain ways. Not the case with hog shit. Yes. I mean, my favorite little example of this is I go to, I fly a lot. It's like the East coast for like different stuff. And I wait, there's no straight flight out of Iowa shocking. And when I do that flight between Cedar Rapids and Chicago, you're flying over, like, especially in the winter, you fly over snow fields, uh, fields covered in snow and you'll just see hog shit.

Cause what they do is they, every few months you have to drain it and you're not really supposed to drain it and put it on snow in the winter. Cause then when the snow melts, it goes straight into the water. They do it. It's an, everyone knows they do it and you're not really supposed to drain it and put it on snow in the winter because then when the snow melts it goes straight into the water. They do it. Everyone knows they do it and they don't get fined for it. It's an open secret. But the worst one is actually in North Carolina because this is where the hog model comes

out of was a state senator deregulated this industry in the 80s first. And he did it in the poor black areas. And because of the water table in North Carolina, in Iowa they injected until the soil they put on top of it. In North Carolina, they injected until the soil they put on top of it in North Carolina, they sprayed into the air, the manure. So there's all these stories. They spray it into the air. Like they're watering the land. Wow. And so all these. And so there's stories of. Yeah.

Stories of these poor black churches having to repaint their steeples every few years because they turn brown. Jesus Christ. Just turn brown from the hog shit. Yeah. You can't, I mean, it's, Jesus Christ. Just turn brown from the hog shit. Yeah. You can't, I mean, it's, people don't realize how much destructive the quality of life is. And the way these things, these states are so captured,

you can't stop the construction of these confinements when they go up. So your home is your everything in America. It's your wealth. If one of those metal sheds full of piggies get built, you're fucked. Like you can't do anything about it. And it just destroys your wealth,

destroys your quality of life. It traps you inside. And one thing that really strikes me is how invisible this has become to mainstream America. Because you've got the destruction of the family farmer. That means that, well, you've got like one guy owning an entire part of the food system. And then everyone working for him, as you say, is an undocumented immigrant, someone with,

you know, who's maybe here short term, or maybe they don't speak English. They're, you know, they're not, they're not able to vote. They're not, or they're living on some sort of weird company town off in, you know, the Central Valley of California or Baja, California. Well, that's a different, different country, but you get my point.

And the people eating the food have no visibility because there's been this like disconnect California or Baja, California. Well, that's a different, different country, but you get my point. And the people eating the food have no visibility because there's been this like disconnect between the people making it and the people eating it. Is that, does that sound right to you? Totally. I mean, like to me, the bigger tooth, just to add onto that is like one, you have local news collapse in these,

in places like Iowa. I mean, the one retro got gutted by private equity, Sinclair rounds most of the TV stations. So these stories aren't being told, they're not being reported out. So then the robber baron essentially creates his own narrative. Like I kind of think of Iowa, rural America now is like an extraction colony

where the colonizers set the narrative. Right. So these stories aren't told. And on top of that, you have a lot of news outlets in New York City want to talk about what's the new high end restaurant. Like there's not these structural undercurrent stories. It's like what's the new vegan restaurant in Brooklyn?

You know? Yeah, that's food journalism. Yeah. Yes. But it's easy. It's cheap. And on top of it, my hog baron has his own spokeswoman. So like there's this whole propaganda apparatus that just licks him up and down all day. And I mean, my favorite, sorry, my favorite little my husband. I have these gay little sassy lines in the book I kind of love. And in my hog barren chapter, Mike, Mike Roe did a dirty jobs

episode on my hog, my dairy barren. Uh huh. I love that. By the way, you keep saying my hog barren, my dairy barren. You're really attached to these people. You love them. I feel like you're I just imagine you in your home, like just where there are pictures on the wall, like little shrines to them everywhere. Like you love them. I feel like you're, I just imagine you in your home, like just where there are pictures on the wall, like little shrines to them everywhere. Like you love these people.

Oh, I'm like, I had a, actually a writer buddy of mine called me out on that a few months ago too, cause it's, I had him, I mean, I spent five years on this and I read thousands of articles just to kind of get my head around it. Yeah. You get a vibe, you get a flavor of them. You just kind of get to know what type of person they are.

And like, I know, I know that type of guy. My dairy barons, I call them Bubba's, just that arrogant white guy that thinks they build everything. I mean, so many of these guys cosplay as farmers, but they're really capital asset managers. And like, he goes on dirty jobs, sells his narrative of being a farmer.

And then I dig into it and you're like, oh, you actually claim residency at the Ritz Carlton in Puerto Rico, probably to evade capital income taxes. And then like, and then my line on that, my line is Mike Rowe sold his narrative like he used to sell products on QVC. Cause it's just like, he's just a piece of shit.

Mike Rowe, the guy from Dirty Jobs famously, if people don't know, you know, part of shit. Mike Rowe, the guy from Dirty Jobs, famously, if people don't know, part of the right-wing information machine, like he's been funded for years by all the biggest right-wing billionaires and has always pushed a really pro-corporate message on that show and on his other products, which is, you know, that's his right to do

as a communicator. I push a narrative that I find more true than that, but that is his ideological and historical role in the world. Yeah. I mean, I think I didn't know that, though. I just I was in, I kid you not, in Oklahoma watching Top Gun two years ago. I was like there for something. I was at a theater and he cut an ad before the movie saying how great fracking was for Oklahoma.

But it was like the most delusional ad I've ever seen. And you're like, cause he's one of those people, my parents always have them on. Like it's like storage words, or just kind of on in the background. Yeah, it's a good show. It's got this hidden ideological message that, that people don't usually appreciate. That and like to me, the truth was so obvious. That's what actually bothered me the most about the Dairy Baron is they got a lot of press for how environmental sustainable they were.

And you just go to their operation. It's about an hour south of Gary, Indiana. And it's just so obviously wrong. Like, I've never seen a Midwest cornfield with canals around it. You're like, wait, what's going on here? And you Wikipedia, literally Wikipedia, and this was an old wetlands. It was everglades at the North. Teddy Raville used to go hunting here.

This shouldn't be in row cropping production. And to do intensive dairy work, dairy cows, we talk about hogs maneuvering a lot. Dairy cows do an insane amount more where that dairy operation he's a part of has about 35,000 cows. Those cows do as much manure in a day as the city of Austin, Texas.

Wow. He's doing that in a wetland. I mean, well, so let's talk again about the, though the people who are doing the work for these guys. Because look, I mean, Trump is out there right now saying he's going to deport every undocumented immigrant in America, that that's his policy.

He wants to deport all of them. And Biden has moved far to the right on immigration. There's almost a growing consensus about like deportation. At the same time, our food system is built entirely on the backs of these undocumented workers who are doing work that no middle-class American would ever agree to do at the wages that are being paid. The work was basically invented

for undocumented people to be underpaid doing, right? And so like, how does that interact with our politics? I mean, just tell me about that piece of it. It seems insane to talk about deporting these people when like, where would you get your fucking Driskles? That is the irony of it all. I mean, my dairy baron gave a massive truck to Trump right after the Access Hollywood tape came out.

But it's like, dude, your old empire is undocumented workers. I mean, even writing this book, I discovered a worker died in his manure pit. Wow. It was a Honduras man, had three children. It was never reported. It took me like two, three years to get the death records

on him because the power he wields in the county. That's the irony of it all. I mean, that's the thing I wrestled with writing in the coffee chapter was, and I think this has been lost history is. The role monopolists play in financing fascists, and I danced around that in the book where. Tim Wu had this good book called Curse of Bigmas, where he kind of mentioned it.

Yeah, that book's incredible. Yeah, that's where I got a bunch of the argument that I told you about Robert Bork from, yeah. Yeah, and so he had this little nugget in there that I dug more into. After World War II, a big part of America's reconstruction in Japan and Europe was trust-busting. Like, Congress commissioned a report

and they're like, how did this happen? And one of the key findings were monopolist finance fascists. Hitler's largest donor was a company called IG Farben. IG Farben was a chemical company. Hitler comes into a room and goes, oh, I'll help you sell more chemicals, whatever. I don't mean all the crazy rhetoric.

They cut him a check. They sell him chemicals, including chemicals used in gas chambers. That company's broken up into seven. One of the modern day companies that was broken up into is Bear Monsanto. I just think the history is so important, especially now.

And I think because I'm from Iowa, I kind of saw where it all fell apart. Like Iowa should be the Italy and North America. It should be the Napa, it should be where you go for food tourism. Yet as the second highest cancer rate in America, it's one of the most obese states, the politics of rage had filled the void of what used to be a solid middle-class place of what used to be a purple state. And we don't have to go down this path, but this is the path we're on.

And like, that is a goal I really wanted to have with this book is here's on this conversation where we are, but what we could do too. That's amazing how these barons have inflamed our politics while keeping all the attention away from them. Like the public, a lot of the public is so angry about illegal immigration and undocumented immigrants, but like why are undocumented immigrants taking those jobs?

Because these barons have created a job that only an undocumented immigrant would take. That is so poor and has done so by fucking with the food system of the food that we eat. And so this is a problem that's entirely created by them. And yet the public is angry at the victims, at the people who are dying in the manure pits so that we can eat worse food, all so that these guys on top can make more money. It's insane. The bearing that it's the scariest is because of how unknown they are is actually Cargill.

So Cargill is owned by the largest private company in America. They're bigger than the Koch brothers, but no one knows who they are. I mean, I didn't even have them in my business, like when I laid out the book and I grew up around Cargill. I was born next to a Cargill plant, played soccer next to a Cargill plant. My church was next to a Cargill plant. And they're all about owning the middle

because they're not consumer-facing. You don't know who they are, but they have so much money and power. And what they do is they engage, I call it, they use middleman. So they never do things overly. They pay these DC groups to do their bidding so they can play, you know, be ignorant. You don't mean or plead guilty, you know, plead, what's the word I'm looking for, innocent? Which is incredibly dark. I mean, that is the fear of concentrated economic

power is you just assume it corrupts the political system. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk more about how this affects the food that we actually eat in so many ways. Like the financialization, the monopolization has actually altered the food itself, right? I mean, if I can give you a personal example of this. Last year was in upstate New York. I was on a college campus. The college campus had some apple trees.

It was like a historic apple orchard on it. And so they had some apples out like in the cafeteria and they were like, oh, you can have some, here's a Macintosh apple. And I took the Macintosh apple and I bit it. And I was like, this tastes nothing like a Macintosh apple I've ever had in my life. It was like crisp and juicy and had like a,

had a complexity of flavor. It makes me sound like a food nerd. I'm not trying to be snobby about it. There was literally something going on with this apple I had not tasted before, whereas every other Macintosh, one of the most popular apple varieties in America I'd had before, had tasted almost exactly the same. And you know, I'm sure this apple was fresher

because it was local and da da da da, but also I was like, something about the genetics seemed different. Something, like everything about this apple was different to me. And it made me just reflect on there are all these ways that the mechanized, financialized food system changes what we actually eat without us realizing it

until we finally have the counter example. I mean, but that's, I'm obsessed with Owning in the Middle with this book is how radical the system has become. And like part of owning the middle and like what we're talking about, these reforms are like, oh my God, animals should be on the land. What a radical concept. Oh, food should be grown near you.

Food should taste good. People should get a decent living wage. We've gone so far off track and I will say as dark as this can be, what gives me hope is everyone's seeing it's not working. Like the biggest, the thing that's kind of shocked me the most is how much the business traveler has taken to my book. It's like a cliche for upper class Americans to go, oh, I went to Italy, I ate better food, I lost weight, you know, it's cheaper. Yeah.

I mean, everyone's just kind of seeing it. It's not working. And that is like, I mean, I had, I went on Glenn Beck's TV network recently. I mean, there's like this weird, there's this whole weird thing going to on the, on the right right now over food. I mean, it's a little raw, milky RFK. Yeah, no, but they've gotten, it's sort of like the, a crunchy, you know, California hippies who got kind of right wing have influenced the rest of the right wingers to

get a little bit more crunchy. And now they are really obsessed with the food system in a you know, California hippies who got kind of right wing have influenced the rest of the right wingers to get a little bit more crunchy. And now they are really obsessed with the food system in a surprising way. I realized this when I did a segment about for Adam Ruins, everything. And it was a pretty light segment. It was just like, hey, you can eat bugs if you want it.

You know, like bugs are not that bad for you. A lot of cultures eat bugs. There's bugs in the food you already eat. It's a good source of protein. Just like a fun light segment. And a bunch of right-wing blogs freaked out and were like, Adam Conover says you should eat bugs. And I realized that they have some sort of like meme

about how in the future we'll all be forced to eat. Like we're on the snowpiercer train or something, and we're gonna be forced to eat, you know, Soylent Green or whatever. and we're gonna be forced to eat, you know, Soylent Green or whatever. Like they're like, they have like a, an apocalyptic future in mind. And I accidentally like triggered them

and their fear of being forced to eat bugs. And I wasn't aware of that until that moment. I've seen ever since that was maybe five years ago, I've seen more and more of this throughout the right wing. They're like obsession with the food system and purity and back to the land and that kind of thing. Oh, I mean, just two things add on to that. One, I laughed because cargo is getting to the bug industry.

They're trying to as a protein source to feed industrial animals. So they want to as like soy, they're kind of replace soybeans and corn is just all feed up. We'll feed the pigs inside these metal sheds bugs, which is like a whole new separate thing. But that's actually why I like book talks to your point, because you, it's pattern recognition. You're like, why am I getting a lot of questions about raw milk? Why am I getting a lot? Because people come up to you, they have this conversation one-on-one.

You're testing your rhetoric. I mean, that's actually where I get the best probably gossip for the book or like tips is just people like, Oh, you should really look over here. Like I did a book event in the hometown of my hog barren. And it was the one time I was actually scared of shitless. I put the tracking on my phone. You were scared shitless because there was so much shit surrounding you. You were ankle deep in shit.

That's why you were scared shitless. Or I could be floating in the next day, you know, like some little Chinatown thing goes down. Please go on. But I was just that that night I was the the scariest I've been in the book tour, because like I didn't expect doing this book tour was every place an old lady would always ask me,

are you worried about your safety? And honestly, I'm not. And that I can say that is honestly the beauty of America is I can write a book like this and not be worried about my safety. That's that that town is like I'm going into the heart of the beast. I'm going to a town of 5,000 people and I was to do a book talk. I was shocked. We had 50 people show up and to get 50 people at a book talk in 2024 is a big deal. It was just people pissed off and they were about more than half the room came up to me afterwards. Oh, I knew, I knew Jeff and Deb, they promised me this. They did that.

They did, you know, you could just see the anger and the sadness in people's face. And like, that's also something I've internalized writing this book is there's a degree of Stockholm syndrome in real America that I don't think urban America appreciates. A lot of people fought power and they lost and like, you can't afford to leave. It's too depressing to really grapple with this material. There's still some fighters.

I opened with a book of a pissed off old woman fighting it. Usually the fighters still are pissed off old ladies in rural areas, but it's hard, but it's a weird, these people are barely getting by and you can just feel the pain. I don't know. I don't know how to describe that, but it's just something I've noticed.

Yeah. Well, I think we have all felt that that there's something is deeply wrong with our food system. something I've noticed. Yeah. Well, I think we have all felt that, that there's something is deeply wrong with our food system. And, you know, we had, you know, when we cover on the show, what has happened to us health-wise because of food, the blame, and to me, always falls on the food system, on the capitalist food system that has, you know,

given us all of these foods that are very delicious to us, but are extremely unhealthy. But more importantly, of these foods that are very delicious to us, but are extremely unhealthy, but more importantly, even the foods that aren't healthy have gotten less healthy, right? All the meats have gotten less, they're produced less healthily for the people who produce them, but also for us. Do you have any particular examples of that?

And do you think that the process that you're talking about here, this baronization, this chickenization of the food system is to blame for our poor health outcomes. Oh, 100%. I mean, it takes money now to be healthy in America. Yeah. One of the hardest sections, or I was actually the obesity section in my grain barons chapter, where it all goes back to corn and chicken. I joke.

Yeah. Like, before corn store really took hold in America, we didn't have, I mean, sugar was hard to do. Sugar cane has a very limited production region like Louisiana and Florida. And sugar beets actually has this weird new deal supply management system where it's like there's quotas basically on how much you can produce. And but then the creation of corn syrup in the 70s and 80s and the highly amount of subsidies going into it just exploded the use of sugar. Julia Guthman is an academic at the University of Santa Cruz

has done a lot of scholarship on this and really drove that point home. But I mean, I see, I mean, that's why I love going to grocery stores because you can just see the price points. You see, you walk down the pop aisle and you're like a two liters a buck 50, but if I want carrot juice, it's $6. You're pushing people into it. And I've done one interview for this book that got junked and it's because there's this elitism among certain people where they blame the lower income person for

their obesity. And I was like, you don't get it. You don't get what it's like to work two jobs, have kids. And this food is easy. It's easy to cook a frozen pizza. I mean, I, I grew up on that stuff. I mean, it's, it's hard. It takes money to eat healthy and it takes time when people are barely getting by. Also keep in mind, this stuff is, if you had a rough day, who isn't happy after like a box of Cheez-Its, you know? Right.

And well, there's a place for that, right? And you know, there's a lot of concern that this sort of argument leads to a continual shaming of people eating, you know, processed foods, et cetera. There's a place for processed foods in the world, but there is also something clearly very wrong with our food system that is like hurting people and that is doing something bad to their health.

And you think this is the culprit? Oh, 100%. I mean, the Farm Bill is a reflection of our moral values and our Farm bill is now designed for Wall Street. It's designed for Pepsico to make chips and pop as cheap as possible at the expense of everything else. So as chips got cheaper, you know, fresh stuff got more expensive. And it's, I mean, also these supply chain lines, you know, it's even in like a lot of vegetables used to be grown in Iowa and that's gone. And also when things

like my husband and I were just talking about carrots today. How awful baby carrots taste. So like private equity is one of the largest grower carrots in America. Yeah. I mean, it's really funny. I've had conversations with people before, because you know, I'm the kind of guy, I just look stuff up when I'm interacting with it. And I like looked up baby carrots once and you probably know better than me, but the

story that I read was that one enterprising carrot company figured out, well, if we take the ugly carrots and we whittle them down into little carrot nubs, then that's reproducible. The carrot doesn't need to be pretty. We can do that with any carrot. And then we can take the shavings

and we can turn it into sugar and use it as an additive in things. And when I try to tell people this, I'm like, baby carrots are like whittled carrots. Like people will say to me in my life, they'll go, no, they're baby carrots. They're like little, they're like, the carrot is a baby. They picked it while it was still a little child.

I'm eating a carrot toddler. No, motherfucker, it's a whittled carrot. Somebody put that on a lathe, you know, and it turned it real fast to like shrink the carrot down. You're eating a mass produced like carrot chunk. I'm embarrassed to say, Adam, I thought that until very recently. They don't even look like baby carrots. They look like a piece of carpentry. They look like something you'd use to join two two by fours. I just didn't think we'd be that wasteful. I mean, that's why I just couldn't believe we would shave down a carrot. And then

here's the thing. It makes a bad product. And so like you turn away from it. You're like, like melons is the other one I notice about. You got to put so much hummus on a baby carrot for it to taste like anything. It's like the saddest experience to eat a baby carrot. Yes. And so like it pushes you're like, oh, produce isn't that good anymore. These Driscoll berries don't taste that good. So then you start eating more.

Well, who isn't, you know, Oreos and stuff. And then on top of it, you go into these grocery stores and like, you're not seeing innovation. You're not seeing new products because like these stores, they don't want to deal with some local person doing what you only do two stores at Walmart. They want to deal in the Bisco that can do 4,000 stores. So that's why when you go into a store now, you just see a new kind of Oreo. You don't see new products. You don't see quality stuff. And it's on top of it. It's, it skews the system so much where. I mean, so much of that neoliberal framework of like change the system with

your fork to bifurcates the system even more, you have like whatever that fancy LA one's called Aragon for like the rich. Arawan. Yeah. Arawan. And then, then you have like, Walmart is massive. Walmart sells one in three groceries. Their market share grocery is the same as the second,

third, fourth, sixth, seventh, and eighth combined. That is an insane amount of market power. And as you say, one baron creates more barons because Walmart wants all the food. They want to buy it in huge tranches. They want to get all their food from one supplier. And so that privileges the one supplier who's able to grow the exact same thing

in huge quantities to sell to every Walmart store simultaneously. And that causes them to buy each other up or for one. Like if Walmart's selling one out of three groceries, then pretty soon you're gonna have one person selling one out of three berries. And then probably even more than that. You said melons though.

What's the problem with melons? I wanted to hear it. I mean, after spending all this time, I mean, feel sorry for my husband. I just vomit this information. I had him all day. And so we got married two years ago. And I'll, I'll replace him. I'll marry you.

I love hearing this stuff. If he doesn't want to hear it anymore. Okay. Uh, propose I'm down. Our one year anniversary, we went to like, um, like France and Italy. And I'm just, I got to say a system that worked. And I hate cantaloupe. I just I see it in a fruit bowl. I think it tastes awful.

But then they had it over there and you're like, wait, this is actually really good. They would sell it on the side of the road. You pull over, you buy a good cantaloupe and you're like, it's just it's kind of like when you cut corners so much at some point, you're cutting bone. Like there's there's no efficiencies again. You're you're cutting quality. And it's just so rampant, especially private equity people don't, they don't understand how to run a business.

I mean, the reason, the best grocery stores in America are actually still privately owned, like HGB in Texas, Hy-Vee in Iowa, Wegmans on the East Coast. You know what I mean? There's not this Wall Street financialization because like some boy who went to Harvard MBA, who's never worked a grocery store job in his life,

doesn't understand the nuances of this, of these marketplaces. And it's also, it's a profession. There's a craftsmanship to merchandising. My dad used to be a beer merchandiser. So like, I noticed that when I go into like, you go into like a Wegmans or whatever, fancy, like, sorry, those type of grocery stores, they merchandise, they care, they're, it's homecoming weekend. There's gonna be a bunch of homecoming stuff. You go into Walmart and they just throw the palette on the shelf and you have to dig for it. Yep.

Well, what can be done about this, right? You had said that maybe there's a positive sign in Lena Kahn's leadership at the FTC. We'll see how long she's there based on what's happening, what's gonna happen in November. I kind of don't think Trump will keep her on if he wins, but we have seen a sea change in antitrust enforcement, at least on the Democratic side.

And there are occasionally some Republicans who will join in on an antitrust fight here or there. They do occasionally have an ally. And you're saying that the right side of the aisle is becoming more and more obsessed with food. So is there a growing appetite for change in our food system? Yeah, I mean, I think what Lena is really fascinating is I actually think she's one of President Biden's best

at political appointments. Because what says so much was earlier this year, Matt Gaetz went to the Wall Street Journal and praised her. Wow. That is, there's such a, I'm a big fan of outflanking. Like Republicans will talk this big game of me backing. Be right there with them. Josh Hawley does a lot of this. Outflank Republicans here because it's such a, hold their feet to the fire. I mean, it's also kind of, I'm a big believer too that weird

things happen in America when unique coalitions come together. But what gives me the most hope and what we can do are like three things that come to my mind. One is the death of ethanol. The Biden administration has been incredibly aggressive at transitioning the American auto fleet to EVs and hybrids and people don't realize, but the largest use of corn now in America is ethanol. And it's really, which is used for what? Burning, burning corn in your cars. Like it's truly.

Wow. It is the museum of failure included ethanol and it's, and it's a exhibit. I, anyone that thinks ethanol is good for the climate thinks the world is flat in 2024. Also, I think in food, you see one of President Biden's worst political appointments, Secretary Vilsack. Secretary Vilsack of USDA

is a former industrial dairy lobbyist. His solution to climate change right now is to put ethanol in airplanes. Wow. And by the way, this is a crazy thing to do because like fossil fuels are bad enough because you're taking energy out of the ground, putting into the way, this is a crazy thing to do because like fossil fuels are bad enough because you're taking energy out of the ground, putting it into the atmosphere, right?

Stored energy out of the ground, into the atmosphere. That's bad, that warms the earth de facto, right? But if you're taking energy from the sun and putting it into the atmosphere, right? Like the sun is hitting the corn, making the corn grow, and then you're burning that, you're releasing, that's a whole new source of energy to put into the atmosphere to heat the planet up. It's even worse than that because you have to use fossil fuels to help grow the corn. And like, right. Of course you do a fertilizer and etc.

And the underappreciated thing is Koch brothers actually massive in fertilizer. They have a massive holding the nitrogen fertilizer. So like there's this whole weird marriage between big ag and big fossil fuel oil that hasn't been fully. I don't think people realize, but it's just delusional. But you know what? It's like watching Miley Coty chase that bird off the cliff right now. ethanol is going to die. I don't care. I don't care what the industry says. It's going to, it's going to meet its maker. And my big moment to me, it's what are we going to do at that moment? Um,

I want to put animals back on land. That is like truly one of my biggest things cause it's like, it takes the temperature down. It makes who doesn't want more farmers? Like here's like most grain production is going to be robotics. That's not a bad thing. You go to a farm show now, these tractors are themselves

but there's only so many dairy cow one man or one person could look after. But for these rural areas, it's more jobs. Yeah. So you want to go to a small scale version of dairy farming again, like having, like breaking it up and rather than one farmer, one quote farmer owning huge numbers of cows,

you've got small scale farms again. You think that's a massive improvement. Yeah, I just want to go back to that family farmer model. And it's also, it's also what it does too. It's, I mean, there's a, dairy's weird, where actually this industrial dairy model is actually even worse for the climate because when a cow is on pasture When she defecates she she knows she's fertilizing her feet when you put it indoors first Why you have to use fossil fuels to grow our feet?

But when you pull her manure when it breaks down it creates additional methane that is not produced when she defecates on land So it creates additional fossil fuel gas so So like that Bakersfield dairy production model is actually incredibly more destructive for the environment than some dairy cow in Wisconsin. So like Bilsack comes out of that world. So that's why he has this like bullshit kind of mentality there. But do you think there is an emerging politics

that is a more populist food politics, right? Where we can sort of go across partisan lines. And I mean, because if you're looking for, you know, rural America is largely red, right? And, you know, Republican politicians tend to have pro-corporate policies. So do Democrats, but you know, these are trends we're talking about.

It does seem like this is an issue that could break some of our political logjam. If you have, you know, politicians's these are trends we're talking about. It does seem like this is an issue that could break some of our political logjam. If you have, you know, politicians from rural areas say, no, actually, I want to fight for the, you know, the chicken farmer, the hog farmer, the small scale pork farmer like these and, you know, actually help their folks. Oh, totally. I mean, keep in mind, I also want to broaden the conversation because it's not just about the farmer. It's about those who pick it, process it, transport it, cook it, serve it. People like my mom and dad.

That's one in 10 of Americans. And like we're obsessed with such a small part of the pie. Once you talk about one in 10, you focus center that on labor. That's what really matters. And it's the dirty secret of big ag is it hollowed out its voter base. You know, you used to have thousands of Iowa hog farms. And now you just have, you know, a few of our harbor barons and no one's called bluff on, like Denver has no clothes now

and no one's called it. And that's also like my big thing now is I think we should junk the farm bill. The farm bill picks favorites. It heavily subsidizes grains. It's destructive for the climate. It's rewards this incentive, this destructive model. On top of it, you have the whole heritage coke,

sorry, heritage Cato Institute, they hate that model too. They hate the farm bill. And I think that's a, there's, to me, there's no reason why Democrats should support the modern day farm bill. Like the best example of how rotten the farm bill's gotten is actually crop insurance. Cause when people hear crop insurance,

they think it's for like a hurricane or rain or whatever. It's not, it's insurance for low prices where 60% of the premium is paid for by the taxpayer. And there's no cap at them. So like people don't realize Bill Gates is one of the largest owner of farmland in America, if you want to talk about like a load baron. So he can get as much crop insurance as he wants to grow as much corn as he wants. And so, you know what I mean? It's so, I just, I've been telling reformers, don't play like the system

is so broken. Why back that? Like, let's yeah, let's move away from the system at the same time. Use school meals as like the positive structural change vehicle. Who doesn't want all dairy served in Wisconsin come from, you know, pasture, family dairy farms instead of like industrial beef and the Brazilian rainforest. Like it's good politics. It's good tasting.

You keep your money local and you're building up a new system as you phase out an old one, because I mean, school foods, a joke. We all know that. Yeah. But the problem is the farm bill is one of those bills that, you know, no matter how divided Congress is, it flies through every time because it has so many, uh, parts of the society are dependent on it. Right? Like it's got something for everybody. is it flies through every time because it has so many parts of the society are dependent on it, right?

Like it's got something for everybody. It's got something for the voters in, or the constituents or the money constituents in every area, you know, gives subsidies to the cities to purchase food, give subsidies to the, you know, to the barons in the red areas to grow the food. Is there really a chance that it could be junked, as you say? I mean, it's actually kind of falling apart.

I mean, they couldn't pass. They tried to do basically a copy paste bill and they had to punt it. So the rumor on the street is. OK. No, no, but then I'm not up on what's happened. That's amazing. No, it's part. But it's this weird thing where even Republicans find crop insurance to gluttonous. Like they want more crop insurance. You're right though.

I mean, there's this weird coalition of like, it's food stamps and the farm entitlement programs. I'll be frank, I think you can break those apart. Food stamps are gonna be okay because Walmart depends on food stamps. Walmart is the richest family in America. Some days it's the richest family in the world. So much of their employee and customer base depends on food stamps. It's a waste subsidy. So much of corporate

America needs that. I'm feeling comfortable. No one's going to touch that. I mean, first of all, you just need all Democrats and 10 Republicans to save that. You take away the crop insurance. You do farm bills standalone. Half Republicans will flake on that. And if Democrats don't support it, my hog baron, you know what I mean? Like they don't have a constituency. Yeah. Their massive amount of welfare they get. It's just also that coalition was formed in 1960s America. The suburbs were not a part of that coalition.

Right. Like rural America's. There's suburbs. I left the suburbs out of the story. And I mean, this election will come down to a few suburbs in the Midwest states. Yeah. What can the public do about this? And I mean, this election will come down to a few suburbs in the Midwest states. Yeah. What can the public do about this

if they're as incensed about this as I am to take us out? The big thing is I always tell people, buy what you can, buy your values, whatever. But the other thing too is help connect your farmers doing it right with your schools, with your colleges. Those procurement contracts really stabilize them. Like a lot of farmers will tell you privately, they don't like doing the farmers market,

they get rained out, whatever, it's not consistent. You get lot of farmers will tell you privately, they don't like doing the farmers market. They get rained out, whatever, it's not consistent. You get that contract with the UC school system, your local school, it's just such a good stabilizer. And you want to build up the people doing it right. Cause writing this book over five years is, yes, I focus on a few bad people, but most people are good.

They're trying to do the right thing. They're just struggling. And so how do you rep, how do you copy and paste them and help them, you know, not decay, but like actually grow? And because it's also, there's no positive vision here. That's what I realized writing this book. Neither party is articulating a positive vision, especially for rural America.

And I actually think people crave a positiveness. Like they want the opposite of what they have right now. And the positiveness is inspiring. You're like, okay, it gives people that power to rush the gates to get to that better system. Like that's what gives me help, I should say. Yeah, and it sort of seems like all we need is a politician or a leader to really run on that stuff,

and to say, to find the way that this affects everybody and to speak to people who haven't been spoken to. It literally is a pinata saying, hit me, hit me. I mean, look, the meat packing especially, breaking up the meat companies, like these are comically corrupt companies. By the way, they're not even American. They're like these weird state-backed monopolies.

Smithfield's quasi, there's this weird Chinese relationship there. A lot of the beef companies are Brazilian. So it's like, there's good politics there. It's just someone needs to, you're waiting for the right person with local courage to take up a swing of that pinata. Well, God willing, somebody will.

And I can't thank you enough for coming on here to make the case that somebody should. You've certainly convinced me. The name of the book is Barron's. You can pick up a copy if you love this conversation at factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people get and where can they follow your work, Austin? I'm on all the socials. My handles are Austin Frerich, F-R-E-R-I-C-K.

Thank you so much for being here, Austin. It's been incredible. Yeah, thanks again for having me on. Well, thank you once again to Austin Frerich, F-R-E-R-I-C-K. Thank you so much for being here Austin. It's been incredible. Yeah, thanks again for having me on. Well, thank you once again to Austin Frerich for coming on the show. Once again, if you want to pick up a copy of his incredible book, you can head to factuallypod.com slash books.

And when you buy there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you would like to support the show directly, you can do so on Patreon. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits of the show and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues.

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You can find all of my tour dates, just a reminder at adamconover.net. I'll see you out there on the road. And until next time, we'll see you on Factually. I don't know anything. That was a hate gum podcast.