Title: LEVELING THE FIELD – ISSUE BRIEF #4
Hogging the Market:
How Powerful Meat Packers are Changing our Food System and What We can do About it.
Date Published: May 2008
PDF: 
Abstract: In their book Food, Society, and Environment, Charles Harper and Bryan Le Beau ask readers to envision the food production system as an hourglass. On one end are millions of farmers, ranchers, and farm workers raising crops and livestock; in the middle are a small number of companies that carry out the slaughtering, packing, processing, and distribution of food; and on the other end, purchasing food from that small group of processors and distributors, are millions of consumers.
That small neck in the middle of the hourglass—the packers and processors—may not be a part of the food chain that we often think about. But meat packers and processors have an immense amount of power over the shape of our food system, and the power that they exercise can have harmful effects on both ends of the hourglass—closing markets to independent livestock producers and affecting the price and safety of meat for consumers—as well as on the safety and health of the workers these packers employ.
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