Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed (12 page)

American
farmers receive billions of dollars in subsidies every year, which they lobby
fiercely to protect. In the first 3 months of 2012, as lawmakers began debating
farm subsidies as part of an extension of the U.S. farm bill, the American Farm
Bureau spent $6 million pressuring Congress. So why aren’t American farmers as
successful in pushing legislation that favors fresh produce and “real food” as
they are at winning subsidies?

The answer lies in recognizing that the prototypical American
farm does not produce healthy food. Companies like Whole Foods promote organic
food with images of idyllic farms, but farms with a variety of crops and
livestock are not representative of American agriculture. As food journalist
Michael
Pollan
has written in the New York Times
Magazine, America’s large commercial farms are monocultures, meaning they
specialize in a single crop, which is usually a grain. Together, corn and soy
account for almost 50% of all American crop revenues.

According to Rosamond Naylor and Walter Falcon of Stanford
University, America’s corn crop is used to produce half of the sweeteners
Americans consume every year in beer and soda. The majority of the crop goes
toward feeding cattle (46%) and ethanol production (25%). Corn also provides
the starchy base for processed foods and the oil for McDonald’s deep fryers.
The portion of crops from large commercial farms that does directly feed people
essentially makes our least healthy foods.

The dominance of grains in American agriculture is not unusual.
Just four grains — corn, wheat, rice, and soy — account for so much
of global agricultural output that economists modeling food prices only look at
the market for these grains. Naylor and Falcon note that countries’ agriculture
policy (including that of the United States) has been to increase the yields of
these grains. After all, higher yields intuitively mean more productive farms,
wealthier farmers, more food, and less hunger.

These policies are substantial enough that American agriculture
does not experience a free market. (Nor do farmers anywhere in the world.) The
origins of modern intervention in agriculture were sown during the Great
Depression, when a glut of crops and weak demand led to decreasing prices and
dire circumstances for American farmers. In response, the U.S. government
propped up prices by paying farmers to leave farmland barren and buying surplus
crops to destroy or ship overseas as food aid. Further legislation cemented the
government’s role in subsidizing prices, often by buying grains directly at
inflated prices. Today the government no longer pays farmers not to grow crops,
but it provides subsidies by paying insurance premiums.

Each piece of legislation responded to low crop prices and the
perception that the market insufficiently rewarded farmers. At the same time,
as related by Michael
Pollan
, the concentration of
American agriculture into large monocultures was no accident, but the result of
American policy choices. The government promoted the research and production of
chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and higher
yield
grains; the Department of Agriculture also encouraged farms to “get big or get
out.” The government did not dole out the decades of generous subsidies described
above indiscriminately; subsidies went specifically to subsidize the production
of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice at a large scale.

In some ways, these policies have been a great success. American
farms are profitable — a 2007 report on the farm bill found that 10% of
America’s farms, which produce 75% of its agricultural yield, make $200,000 in
income — and extremely productive —
Pollan
points out that the average
corn belt
farmer now feeds
around 140 people. In addition, the average American now enjoys half a pound of
meat per day — an amount once considered princely.

In contemporary America, however, where the majority of
Americans get too many calories rather than too few, these policies no longer
make any sense. In its push for large monocultures, and in order to buy the
peace of specialized vegetable farms, the USDA prohibited farms that received
grain subsidies from growing fruits and vegetables.
This put
the American government in the insane position of subsidizing the cost of fast
food while actively prohibiting some farms from growing fruits and vegetables.

Even farm animals, which are cheaper to
raise
when they can be fed with subsidized grain, have a mixed nutrition record. Most
nutritionists consider meat part of a healthy diet, but they also believe
Americans eat too much meat. In addition, grain subsidies, as well as the lack
of any policy prohibiting the regular use of antibiotics in animal feed, enable
farmers to raise animals at scale in confined areas. (The antibiotics keep
animals alive in the filthy conditions of small cages.) This author does not
want to pay more for steak, but it is this system that makes McDonald’s
hamburgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken cheaper than healthier foods.

America’s large, profitable farms spend millions on lobbying
each year and enjoy substantial access to lawmakers. The problem is that almost
none of these farms provide a counterweight to manufacturers of junk and
processed foods. Farms’ lobbying power protects
french
fries, Big Macs, and soda rather than leafy
greens. It’s the nature of the grain-dominated world food economy, but it’s
also a market that is supported by bad agriculture policy that pushes farms to
grow crops for unhealthy foods.

The Food
Pyramid’s Corrupt Foundation

With
this understanding of America’s food industry, we can understand a certain
mystery behind the food pyramid.

In 1992, the United States Department of Agriculture unveiled
the food pyramid, its guide to healthy eating. Thanks to government efforts to
publicize it — pushing it into doctors’ offices and home economics
classes — the majority of Americans recognize the food pyramid. As the
nutritional guidelines behind the food pyramid also inform policy like school
lunches and food stamps, the food pyramid is likely the most influential
nutrition document in the country’s history.

In its twenty-two year lifespan, however, the food pyramid has
seen a surprising amount of change. The base of the original pyramid contained
loaves of bread, plates of pasta, and bowls of cereal; the next layer had
fruits and vegetables; the next dairy, meat, and other protein-rich foods. The
advice seemed clear: a healthy diet includes plenty of grains that are rich in
carbohydrates, as well as fruits and vegetables.

The USDA replaced the pyramid with a revised food plate in 2011.
In the new plate, grains no longer dominate. Grains and vegetables each
represent 30% of the plate; fruit and protein each take up another 20%. The
changes do not represent a new understanding of nutrition; the story of the
food pyramid is just the most highly visible demonstration of the food and
agriculture sectors’ lobbying prowess.

Dr.
Luise
Light is a nutrition expert
and led the team at the Department of Agriculture that made the original
recommendations for the food pyramid. If you review her original
recommendations, they sounds very similar to dietary advice given by
nutritionists today: lots of vegetables, more lean sources of protein like fish
and nuts, and less dairy and processed foods.

Those guidelines, according to Dr. Light, did not survive their
trip to the office of the Head of the Department of Agriculture. In a 2004
account, she described herself as “shocked” by the changes that were made. Her
team placed fruits and vegetables at the base of the pyramid and whole-grain
breads and cereals further up. The new guidelines not only switched
carbohydrates to the base of the pyramid, it moved processed foods like
crackers and corn flakes, which Dr. Light and her team had placed at the top of
the pyramid with chocolate, to the base of the pyramid. Even with all the
edits, the food pyramid was not released for another 12 years.

With an understanding of the food lobby, it’s not hard to
understand why. The multinational companies that make processed foods and large
American farms that produce starchy products wanted to see carb-heavy foods promoted
at the base of the pyramid; the tiny leafy greens lobby was too tiny to make
its voice heard. As in 1992, every five years, when the Department of
Agriculture revisits its nutrition guidelines, the food industry gears up by
releasing floods of reports, nominating researchers that sit on industry boards
to be part of the USDA committee reviewing the policies, and appealing to
allies in Congress and the White House. This means that new policies are always
a battle between public-interest organizations pushing for healthier guidelines
and industry that is almost universally working to subvert them.

An
Unhealthy Lobby

The
American government wields enormous influence over our diet. Federal policy
shapes a farm system that could not be farther from a free market and
influences what millions of schoolchildren eat every day at lunch. As long as
food lobbyists overwhelmingly represent the makers of unhealthy food, health
advocates will always struggle to push policy in a healthier direction.

To some extent, this is inevitable. The profit margins for
making a well branded bar of sugar are better than for growing
brussel
sprouts, which creates more money for lobbying
against labeling laws, sugar taxes, and so on. But the current status quo, in
which American farms grow crops for unhealthy products like high fructose corn
syrup, is the result of misinformed agricultural policy. The latest farm bill,
passed in 2014, reduced some of the most egregious farm subsidies and provided
funding to support fruit and vegetable farming. Policy that ceased skewing
American agriculture in an unhealthy direction entirely would make the voice of
American farmers a healthier one.

"Good advice about nutrition conflicts with the interests
of many big industries,” Michael Jacobson, co-founder of the Center for Science
in the Public Interest, once said, “each of which has more lobbying power than
all the public-interest groups combined.” But the real problem is that within
industry, manufacturers of unhealthy food are so much more powerful than the
makers of health food that the food lobby has become synonymous with the foods
driving our obesity epidemic.

10.

WHY IS SCIENCE BEHIND

A PAYWALL?

S
cientists’
work follows a consistent pattern. They apply for grants, perform their
research, and publish the results in a journal. The process is so
routine
that it almost seems inevitable. But what if it’s
not the best way to do science?

Although the act of publishing seems to entail sharing research
with the world, most published papers sit behind
paywalls
.
The journals that publish them charge thousands of dollars per subscription,
putting access out of reach to all but the most minted universities. Subscription
costs have risen dramatically over the past generation. According to critics,
those increases are the result of the consolidation of journals by private
companies that unduly profit off their market share of scientific knowledge.

Investigating these alleged scrooges of the science world, we
discovered that their opponents believe that the battle against this parasitic
profiting is only one part of the scientific process that needs to be fixed.

Advocates of “open science” argue that the current model of
science, developed in the 1600s, needs to change and take full advantage of the
Internet to share research and collaborate in the discovery making process.
When the entire scientific community can connect instantly online, they argue,
there is simply no reason for research teams to work in silos and share their
findings according to the publishing schedules of journals.

Subscriptions limit access to scientific knowledge. And when
careers are made and tenures earned by publishing in prestigious journals, then
sharing datasets, collaborating with other scientists, and crowdsourcing
difficult problems are
disincentivized
. Following
17th century practices, open science advocates insist, limits the progress of
science in the 21st.

The
Creation of Academic Journals

“If I have
seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

(Isaac
Newton)

In
the 17th century, scientists often kept their discoveries secret. Isaac Newton
and Gottfried Leibniz argued over which of them first invented calculus because
Isaac Newton did not publish his invention for decades. Robert Hooke, Leonardo
da Vinci, and Galileo
Galilei
published encoded
messages proving their discoveries. Scientists gained little by sharing their
research other than claiming their spot in history. As a result, many chose to
keep their discoveries secret and build off their findings, only revealing how
to decode their message when the next man or woman made the same discovery.

Public funding of research and its distribution in scholarly
journals began at this time. Wealthy patrons pooled their money to create
scientific academies like England’s Royal Society and the French Academy of
Sciences, allowing scientists to pursue their research in a stable, funded
environment. By subsidizing research, they hoped to aid its creation and
dissemination for society’s benefit.

Academic journals developed in the 1660s as an efficient way for
the new academies to spread their findings. The first started when Henry
Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, published the society’s articles at
his own expense. At the time, the market for scientific articles was small and
publishing a major expense. Scientists gave away the articles for free because
the publisher provided a great value in spreading the findings at very little
profit. When the journals market became more formal, almost all publishers were
nonprofits, often associated with research institutions. Up until the mid 20th
century, profits were low and private publishers were rare.

Universities have since replaced academies as the dominant
scientific institution. Due to the rising costs of research (think linear
accelerators), governments replaced individual patrons as the biggest
subsidizers of science, with researchers applying for grants from the
government or foundations to fund research projects. And journals transitioned
from a means to publish findings to take on the role of a marker of prestige.
Scientists’ most important qualification today is their publication history.

Many contemporary researchers work in the private sector, where
the profit incentives of intellectual property incentivize scientific
discovery. But outside of research with immediate commercial applications, the
system developed in the 1600s has remained a relative constant. As physicist
turned science writer Michael Nielsen notes, this system facilitated “a
scientific culture which to this day rewards the sharing of discoveries with
jobs and prestige for the discoverer… It has changed surprisingly little in the
last 300 years.”

The
Monopolization of Science

In
April 2012, the Harvard Library published a letter stating that its
subscriptions to academic journals were “financially untenable.” Due to price
increases as high as 145% over the past 6 years, the library said that it would
soon be forced to cut back on subscriptions. The Harvard Library singled out
one group as primarily responsible for the problem: “This situation is
exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire,
bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.”

The most famous of these providers is Elsevier. It is a
behemoth. Every year it publishes 250,000 articles in 2,000 journals. Its 2012
revenues reached $2.7 billion, and Elsevier’s profits of over $1 billion
account for 45% of the Reed Elsevier Group — its parent company
which
is the 495th largest company in the world in terms of
market capitalization.

Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They
bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran
them, successfully betting that they could raise prices without losing
customers. Today just three publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account
for roughly 42% of all articles published in the over $19 billion academic
publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical research.
University libraries account for 80% of their customers.

Since every article is published in only one journal and
researchers ideally want access to every article in their field, libraries buy
subscriptions no matter the price. From 1984 to 2002, for example, the price of
science journals increased nearly 600%. One estimate puts Elsevier’s prices at
642% higher than industry-wide averages.

These providers also bundle journals together. Critics argue
that this forces libraries to buy less prestigious journals to gain access to
indispensable offerings. There is no set cost for a bundle; instead providers
like Elsevier structure plans in response to each institution’s past history of
subscriptions.

The tactics of Elsevier and its ilk have made them an evil
empire in the eyes of their critics — the science professors, library
administrators, PhD students, independent researchers, science companies, and
interested individuals who find their efforts to access information thwarted by
Elsevier’s
paywalls
. They cite two main objections.

The first is that prices are increasing at a time when the
Internet has made it cheaper and easier than ever before to share information.
The second is that universities are paying for research that they themselves
produced. Universities fund research with grants and pay the salaries of the
researchers behind every paper. Even peer review, which Elsevier cites as a
major value it adds by checking the validity of papers and publishing only
significant and valuable findings, is performed on a volunteer basis by
professors on university salaries.

Elsevier actively responds to each challenge to its legitimacy
and speaks of “work[
ing
] in partnership with the
research community to make real and sustainable contributions to science.”
Deutsche Bank, in an investor analyst report, summarizes Elsevier’s arguments:

“In justifying the margins earned, the publishers point to the
highly skilled nature of the staff they employ (to pre-vet submitted papers
prior to the peer review process), the support they provide to the peer review
panels, including modest stipends, the complex typesetting, printing and
distribution activities, including Web publishing and hosting. REL [Reed
Elsevier] employs around 7,000 people in its Science business as a whole. REL
also argues that the high margins reflect economies of scale and the very high
levels of efficiency with which they operate.”

One way to test the validity of Elsevier’s defense is to compare
the cost of for-profit and non-profit journals. Within ecology, for example,
the price per page of a for-profit journal is nearly three times that of a
non-profit. When comparing on the basis of the price per citation (an indicator
of a paper’s quality and influence), non-profit papers do more than five times
better. Another method is to examine Elsevier’s profit margins, which at 36%
are well above the average of 4%-5% for the periodical publishing business.
Given that Elsevier performs a centuries old practice, it’s hard to perceive
its high margins as reflective of anything other than charging extortionate rates
for a product (scientific articles) with no substitute. The aforementioned
Deutsche Bank report concludes similarly:

“We believe the [Elsevier]
adds
relatively little value to the publishing process. We are not attempting to
dismiss what 7,000 people at [Elsevier] do for a living. We are simply
observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as
the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.”

The high cost of journal subscriptions has been recognized as a
problem at least as far back as reporting done by The Economist in 1998. But
now even the world’s wealthiest university cannot afford to purchase access to
new scientific knowledge — even though universities fund and perform that
research.

No One to
Blame but Ourselves

For
critics of private publishers’ monopolization of the journal industry, there is
a simple solution: open access journals. Like traditional journals, they accept
submissions, manage a peer review process, and publish articles. But they
charge no subscription fees and make all their articles available free online.
To cover costs, open access journals instead charge researchers publication
fees around $2,000. (Reviewers who are not on payroll decide which papers to
accept in order to spare journals the temptation of accepting every paper and
raking in the dough.) Unlike traditional journals, which claim exclusive
copyright to the papers they publish, open access (OA) journals are free of
almost all copyright restrictions.

If universities source the funding for research, and its
researchers perform both the research and peer review, why don’t they all
switch to OA journals? There have been some notable successes in the form of
the Public Library of Science’s well-regarded open access journals. However,
current scientific culture makes it hard to switch.

A history of publication in prestigious journals is a
prerequisite to every step on the career ladder of a scientist. Every paper
submitted to a new, unproven OA journal is one that could have been published
in heavyweights like Science or Nature. And even if a tenured or idealistic
professor is willing to make that sacrifice, what about their PhD students and
co-authors for whom publication in a prestigious journal could mean everything?

Governments could push science toward an open access future by
mandating that publicly financed research be made publicly available. Every
year, the United States government provides over $60 billion in public grants
for scientific research. In 2008, Congress mandated (over furious opposition
from private publishers) that all research funded through the National
Institute of Health, which accounts for 50% of government funding of science,
be made publicly available within a year. Extending this requirement to all
other research financed by the government would go a long way for OA
publishing. This is true of similar efforts by the British and Canadian
governments, which are in the midst of such steps.

The Costs
of Closed Publishing:

The
Reinhart-
Rogoff
Paper

The
controversy over the 2010 paper “Growth In A Time of Debt,” published by
Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth
Rogoff
in the American Economic Review, illustrates some of the problems with the
journal system.

The paper used a dataset of countries’ GDP growth and debt
levels to suggest that countries with public debts over 90% of their GDP grow
significantly slower than countries with more modest levels of debt.

To the media that covered their findings and the politicians and
technocrats that cited it, the message was clear: debt is bad and austerity
(reducing government spending) is good. Although they discussed their findings
with more nuance, Reinhart and
Rogoff
obliged
Washington by discussing how their findings supported the case for deficit
reduction.