Iowa’s food landscape can become like Italy’s — if the “barons” who captured the American farmstand can be defeated, a new book argues.
Barons, published on Tuesday by Austin Frerick, a native Iowan and Yale food policy fellow, argues that a runaway process of monopoly has gutted rural America while bleeding the taste from American food.
In the book, Frerick tells the story of the consolidation of American agriculture since the 1970s through the rise of seven “baronial” families that rose to dominate entire sectors of a once-diversified American food system.
The subjects of these agricultural sagas range from the Waltons’ conquest of the grocery market, in which Walmart now has the same market share as the second- through eighth-largest grocery chains combined; to the Cargill-MacMillan family’s consolidation of a quarter of the grain market; to the McCloskey family’s commanding position in dairy.
Frerick told The Hill this consolidation of the market has led to a collapse in American consumer choice. To take one example of many, the Reimann family of Germany — which employs 180,000 workers globally — now owns virtually every American coffee chain aside from Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts: Peet’s Coffee, Caribou Coffee, Einstein Brothers Bagels, Pret A Manger, Panera Bread, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Intelligentsia Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee, Trade Coffee and Keurig.
The Hill has reached out to the above companies for comment.
In addition to its impacts in strip malls around the country, this market change has led to a staggering change in American landscapes, Frerick argues in Barons.
Rather than today’s Walmarts and factory farms, a driver crisscrossing the country in the mid-1980s would have passed through a landscape of small farms.
In what is now the corn, soy and hog country of Iowa, for example, they would have passed cows grazing on the landscape, and in late summer could have smelled the state’s once-extensive apple orchards.
Now that landscape is marked by the sight and penetrating smell of vast hog barns, where tens of thousands of pigs are kept in close confinement — amid hectares of corn and soy intended for biofuels.
Frerick told The Hill that consolidation has left Americans with food that is more expensive and less nourishing than in any other developed country.
That’s a change that he argued has led to “an underappreciated collapse in taste,” as American food has become ever more curated for features that make it transportable across long distances — rather than taste or nutrition.
“This is dark … and I think most people know it,” Frerick said, “Anytime you talk to Americans who go abroad, they’ll tell you: food is better and cheaper abroad. Italians have cheaper, better food than we do.”
To Frerick, Italy is a model for what Iowa could have been — and might still become. The Midwestern state boasts some of the country’s richest farmland: thick, nourishing black earth plowed and fertilized by the slow, implacable ice sheets that once covered the northern U.S.
In 1982, that land nourished a great deal of corn — but it also held more than 12,000 acres of vegetables, a number that had plunged to 7,500 by 2022, according to the Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Over the past 30 years, the number of farms in Iowa fell by 25 percent, and surviving farms increased in size by 30 percent — part of a broader “hollowing out” of rural America that The Hill has previously reported on.
Between just 2017 and 2022, the number of U.S. farms dropped by 142,000. The one category of farm that didn’t decline was those that encompassed more than 5,000 acres.
Three quarters of American farm income now comes from operations that make than $1 million in annual sales, according to the USDA.
“It all fell apart in my lifetime in Iowa,” Frerick…
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