Busboys and Poets welcomes Christopher Leonard to discuss and sign his
book The Meat Racket
The American supermarket seems to represent the best in America:
abundance, freedom, choice. But that turns out to be an illusion. The
rotisserie chicken, the pepperoni, the cordon bleu, the frozen pot
pie, and the bacon virtually all come from four companies.
In The Meat Racket, investigative reporter Christopher
Leonard delivers the first-ever account of how a handful of companies
have seized the nation?s meat supply. He shows how they built a system
that puts farmers on the edge of bankruptcy, charges high prices to
consumers, and returns the industry to the shape it had in the 1900s
before the meat monopolists were broken up. At the dawn of the
twenty-first century, the greatest capitalist country in the world has
an oligarchy controlling much of the food we eat and a high-tech
sharecropping system to make that possible.Â
