Morgan Spurlock Watch

Why Does Morgan Spurlock Hate Recycling?

Last night's episode of Spurlock's TV show was called "Off the Grid." It featured a yuppie-ish, "wired," SUV-owning couple who spent 30 days on a commune, back-to-basics farm in Missouri. The lesson we were to take from the show, I guess, is that our consumer culture is overly wasteful. As Spurlock explains on his blog:

On tonight's show, we take a couple of all American consumers away from their daily lives of consumption and move them "off the grid" to an eco-village in Missouri called Dancing Rabbit.

You guys are gonna love Vito and Johari (the two people who go to the village), be on the lookout for the dolls ... its one of the funniest things in the whole show and one of those things that we could never plan.

ALSO - the word of the day is Humanure ... you'll understand after you watch tonight.

BEST PART OF THE SHOW - The farm that recycles all the manure from cows to create methane gas that he uses not only to power his entire farm, but enough energy to power 70 homes around him! How many feedlots and farms are there in the US? This should be done everywhere (not only is it giving off electricity en masse, it also kills the shit smell that permeates most massive farms.)

This kind of praise for earthy commune farms is pretty typical. We're told how nothing gets discarded, and everything's fully consumed, recycled, and conserved -- in this case, apparently, even solid human waste.

Communes and Luddite farms are fine, so long as we approach them with the understanding that they are, at heart, parasitic. They may shun technology, markets, and commerce but technology, markets, and commerce make it possible for them to exist. They aren't applicable in the macro. That is, if we all lived this way, we'd all starve.

But that's a little beside the point of this post. This post is actually about recycling. Spurlock seems to be rather fond of it. At least in some contexts. But his fondness for the communal farm is hard to explain in light of the way he exploits and mischaracterizes the rendering industry in his book. I suppose the intent in his book is take cheap shots at the cattle industry. The intent of the TV show is to take shots at consumer culture. But the two positions aren't consistent. Here's why:

Spurlock writes:

In an amazing display of collective insanity, the meat producers of this country are feeding all sorts of animals to the animals they feed to us. Dead pigs and dead horses are ground up into cattle feed, and so are dead chickens. A lot of chicken manure gets mixed up into the feed in the process, so the cows are not only eating chicken, but chicken shit, which can spread salmonella, tapeworms, and chemicals like arsenic. Not only are cows fed dead chickens, but chickens are fed dead cows (Cue "The Circle of Life" from The Lion King).

You want to hear something really disgusting? The cattle industry buys millions of dead cats and dogs from animal shelters every year, then feeds them to the cattle who end up in your burger.

Yeeecccchhhh!!.

Oh, and the do the same with roadkill.

Is your mouth watering now?

This is not only disgusting, it's utter madness. It's the new, insane version of the old "circle of life." It passes new types of diseases around and around the food chain. And at every pass, we make some of those strains of disease stronger and stronger, because we keep bombing them with antibiotics that kill of some of them but only make the survivors and their offspring more resistant. And then they pass through the whole cycle again.

The FDA has regulated some of this and issued recommendations on certain points, but the basic facts are as I just told you. (p. 106)

No, they aren't.

The process of using animal waste for other purposes is called "rendering." For the uninitiated it is, to be sure, an ugly process. But then, who would have thought spreading animal waste over the ground where vegetables grow would be a good idea? We've come to accept it because we're familiar with it, and because it works. It's the main way organic vegetables are grown, and Spurlock's awfully fond of organic food in his book.

But let's get back to rendering. When Spurlock writes that some animals are "ground up" into cattle feed, he's oversimplifying the rendering process to the point of dishonesty. Here's what actually happens:

The "raw materials" -- by-products from slaughterhouses, mostly -- are pulverized down to a fine grain, which is then cooked at temperatures between 240 and 290 degrees, Fahrenheit. That's plenty hot to kill off all of the bacteria, protozoa, viruses, and parasites. The stuff is cooked at those temperatures until it breaks down into basic nutrient building blocks -- protein, water, and fat. At this point, the protein and fat are separated, and the excess water is evaporated. The protein and fat are stored separately. The protein is dried. The fat is further separated. Some is processed further, some is sold to other industries.

About 80% of the dried protein from rendering plants is eventually used to fortify animal feed. The fat is used for a variety of things. Much of it is used to make soap, or as an additive to lotions, creams, and makeup. Some if it is turned into grease -- for lubricating automobiles and other heavy machinery. Some is used to make artificial rubber. There's some research now that may find ways to use it for natural biofuel. A very small percentage of the highest-grade tallow is used for flavoring in food we eat.

Rendering is recycling. In fact, it's a much more efficient, productive, useful way of recycling than, for example, putting your bottles, cans, and paper in separate bins at the end of the driveway each week. Not only does rendering turn waste into usable consumer products and put fat and protein to new uses, it safely eradicates between 40 and 50 percent of post-slaughter animal waste. It breaks that waste down, kills off pathogens, and puts it to new uses. Were it not for rendering, we'd have twice as many cow, pig, and chicken remains we'd need to find something to do with -- likely disposal in a landfill.

Contrary to Spurlock's claims, only a very few rendering firms still process dog and cat carcasses or roadkill. None of these firms sell that waste domestically, and none sell it for livestock feed. Of course, in terms of safety, there's no reason they shouldn't. But most have stopped precisely because people like Spurlock have fueled public queasiness about the process. Instead, carcasses from vet offices and animal shelters are now generally sent to landfills. So much for recycling.

Spurlock seems to be in awe of commune farms that find a use for everything, even products most of us consider disgusting, like human feces. But when industry does the same thing on a larger scale, Spurlock is not only outraged, he distorts the actual process of rendering to exaggerate the "ick" factor. For Spurlock, when anti-consumerists recycle biomass, it's something to be celebrated. When industry does it, it's something to be vilified.

The Big C

Cancer, that is.

Spurlock quotes someone from the "Vanerbilt University Online Wellness Center," who writes:

"According to studies conducted by the American Cancer Society . . .more than 20 percent of all cancer deaths in women and 14 percent in men ar linked directly to being overweight. Another 33 percent of cancer deaths are linked to poor diet and physical inactivity . . . that's a lot of people dying needlessly." (p. 15)

That study from the American Cancer Society made huge news. Most media outlets did just as Spurlock has done -- found someone who had read the executive summary, and quoted him. Few reporters read the actual study (or if they did, they ignored its findings). It's odd how rarely Spurlock cites an actual study. Instead, he usually cites a newspaper's account of the study, or something he found online, such as the Vanderbilt Online Wellness Center.

If he had looked at the actual data , he'd have found some pretty striking contradictions. For example, the study found that among people the government classifies as of "healthy weight," there were 4.5 cancer deaths per 1,000 people. But get this: Among people the government classifies as "overweight," there were only 4.4! If you're worried about cancer, it's actually healthier to be overweight than of "healthy" weight. Paul Campos and others have also pointed out that the study's data shows that women who are extremely obese actually have a lower risk of cancer than men who are underweight. As the Center for Consumer Freedom has put it, if risk from fat is our barometer, Roseanne Barr is at lower risk of cancer than David Spade. The study also concedes that being overweight actually helps prevent brain cancer, leukemia, lung cancer, and melanoma.

Here's what the study did: Among the extremely obese, deaths from cancer increase prett significantly. Incidence is higher, but deaths are also higher -- probably because cancer is more difficult to detect and treat in the very obese. In any case, in drawing its conclusion (the conclusion carried by most of the media), the study merely lumped the very high rates among the very obese in with the rates of the obese and overweight. It then compared the aggregate rates of those with the aggregate rates of those of "healthy" weight and the underweight. The former was higher. Therefore, we were told, being overweight puts us at greater risk of cancer. But the vast majority of Americans aren't obese, or very obese. They're merely overweight by government standards. And they aren't at greater risk for cancer, they're actually slightly at less risk.

This is how the public healty hysteria industry works.

There were data collection problems, too. The study was based on surveys. Researchers asked people how much they weighed at the time, and asked them to remember how much they weighed a year ago. The study was based on their answers, not on actual medical records. When the New England Journal of Medicine published the study, it actually published an accompanying editorial expressing reservations about the study's conclusions. Most media outlets went with the study's summary, ignoring its data tables and the accompanying editorial.

Moving on, Spurlock writes:

Specifically, diet and obesity have been linked to increased risk for breast, colon, endometrial, esophageal, and kidney cancer., (p. 15)

Linked by whom? Deaths from every one of those types of cancer is down over the last fifteen years, the very period over which we've been allegedly getting obese. In fact, of the ten types of cancer nutrition activists tell us are most strongly linked to obesity, deaths from nine of them are down (breast, kidney, gall bladder, stomach, ovarian, cervical, prostate, colon, and pancreatic). Only esophogeal cancer has gone up. See a few handy charts and graphs I made here.

In fact, deaths and incidence of cancer in general have dropped every year for the last fifteen years. And this, while we've all been getting fatter. Pretty strong correlative evidence that obesity isn't going to drive up our cancer rates.

My favorite part of Spurlock's passage on cancer comes here:

Diets high in animal fat seem to promote cancer and inhibit recovery from things like breast and colon cancer.

Where do people eat high-fiber, plant-based diets? The nonindustrial world, that's where. Where do people eat too much meat and fat? Guess.

Again, Spurlock longs for a culture more like those areas of the world untouched by capitalism. Have a look at this table. There are three columns. One is the name of the country. One is per capita GDP, a good indicator of a given country's "industrialization." And one is life expectancy, a good indicator of a country's overall well-being. I'm sure you can guess where the correlation lies. Big GDP equals long life expectancy. Small GDP equals early death.

Fast food and all, the people of the industrial world live about 25 to 30 years longer than the people of the non-industrialized world. There's no comparison. Progress and industry have bettered and lengthened our lives.

Poor People Don't Eat Artichokes

Spurlock writes:

The USDA reports that the cost of vegetables and fruit rose 120 percent between 1985 and 2000, while the price of junk like sodas and sweets went up less than 50 percent on average (p. 12)

This may be true, I'm not sure. Spurlock's source is a 2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencier article, and the reporter gives no specific source for the claim, other than the tag "according to the USDA."

Spurlock uses this same S-I article a number of times, but never bothers to doublecheck its assertions. He could have at least cheked with the USDA to verify.

If he had, he'd know that the USDA did commission a highly-publicized study on how much it would cost for the average person to get his full daily requirement of fruits and vegetables.

The answer? Sixty-four cents. Or, about twelve percent of the average American's food budget. There are "127 different ways to eat a serving of fruits and vegetables for less than the price of a 3-ounce candy bar," the study says. The notion that processed food is cheaper than fresh food was dismissed by the study, too: "Researchers found that nearly two-thirds of the fruits and vegetables studied were cheapest in their fresh form."

In fact, according to the USDA, per capita fresh fruit and vegetable consumption has gone up by 20% since the 1970s!

I know what you're thinking. "Doesn't the government count the potato as a vegetable? Isn't most of that increase probably due to french fries and potato chips?"

Actually, no. Check out this table from the USDA (from this report). Potato consumption is included in the "frozen" statisitics, not the fresh (as you might imagine, it is up, by about 21 pounds per year).

This makes sense. Revolutionary improvements in agriculture, shipping, and preserving fresh foods, together with a rapidly growing economy (there's all that awful "consumption" again), have created a market for diverse, fresh produce, and a means of satisfying it.

Typically, nutrition activists' response to this is to point out how hard it is for low-income people to access fresh fruits and vegetables. Indeed, that's Spurlock's next paragraph. He points out that low-income areas are often dotted with fast food joints and convenience stores, but few if any outlets for fresh produce.

Here, he's right. And I sympathize. But I have a solution: We have business models that can deliver good food at low cost to low-income people. They do it by stocking huge inventories at very small mark-ups, and by cutting costs just about everywhere they can. They're called big box stores, and they've been doing it all over the country, except in urban areas. The best in the business is Wal-Mart.

The problem is, every time Wal-Mart attempts to open a Superstore (the Superstores carry a full line of groceries, including fresh produce) in an urban area, it's people like Spurlock and his nutrition activist allies who raise holy hell to prevent it from happening. We've seen it happen in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and here in Washington, D.C.

People like Spurlock want low-income people to have access to fresh, preferably organic, cheap, diverse produce, but only if the means for delivering said produce isn't evil Big Box Retail. Sorry, but that's asking too much.

One nutrition activist I debated a few months ago had an interesting solution -- communism! Or at least a localized application of communism. Her comments on artichokes are particularly amusing.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Evan Williams says there's too much guilt by association in this post. He's probably right. But a subsequent commenter passes along this link, in which Spurlock expresses the very opinion of Wal-Mart I suspected he might. Williams is still probably right. But the post is ultimately right, too.

Communist Chic

Spurlock writes:

Right now, I'm planning a trip to Cuba. I want to experience the coutnry and its people before that Pandora's box is opened there. Because you know after the day Fidel dies, the shipments of American consumer crap will come flooding in. (p. 65)

What an incredibly crass sentiment. Judging by their actions, I gather most Cubans are rather eager to be "flooded" by "American consumer crap." Last I checked, there weren't many Miamians risking their lives on ramshackle rafts to escape our "consumer crap" for Castro's anti-capitalist paradise. Let's hope Spurlock does a bit of research while he's there. More than he did for his book. After he learns a bit about what really happens to the citizens of command-and-control regimes, perhaps he'll have a change of heart about all that capitalism he's forced to endure back home. If not, perhaps he'll offer to switch places with an actual Cuban. I'll bet there are at least 10 million willing take him up on it.

Spurlock's Contempt for Commerce

Spurlock writes:

In 2002, the retail industry in this country spent $13.5 billion telling us what to buy, and we must have been listening, because in 2003 we spent nearly $8 trillion on all kinds of crap. That's right, trillion. How insane is that? We are the biggest consuming culture on the planet. We buy almost twice as much crap as our nearest competitor, Japan. We spend more on ourselves than the entire gross national product of any nation in the world.

It's hard to know where to start on a passage like this. It comes from a position so averse to capitalism, progress, and commerce, I'm tempted to just shrug and blow it off. Of course, I won't.

Look, every one of those transactions that made up that $8 trillion Spurlock describes as "crap" was voluntary. Each party agreed to part with something in exchange for something else he valued more. The overwhelming majority of the time, each party got what he wanted, and walked away happier than he was before the transaction took place.

Why is this a bad thing? Why should we be ashamed of the fact that we've progressed to the point where there are millions of products available that in some way make our lives better? So, Spurlock says, some may actually make our lives worse. Fine. So avoid them. Don't buy stuff. Don't buy "crap." The rest of us will crap up our homes, our cars, our offices, and our wardrobes, and we'll be happier for it.

It's all fine and dandy to don the pretense of anti-materialism. But the simple fact of the matter is, our want of stuff, our pursuit of stuff, and the genius of our forebears to generally leave the market alone has made us the healthiest, most prosperous, most comfortable, least violent society in the history of mankind. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's something to relish. It's something to wish upon the rest of the world.

Not Spurlock. He writes:

What does all that consumption do for us? Does it make us happy? You tell me. If we were all so happy, would we be on so many drugs?

We're on "so many" drugs because "so many" drugs are available to us. Thanks to capitalism.

Live expectancy in the U.S. is at an all-time high. The three biggest killers -- heart disease, cancer, and stroke -- are all dropping dramatically. This is particularly heartening with cancer, which is dropping despite our ability to diagnose it earlier. To state without context that "lots of Americans are on drugs" means nothing. We're the healthiest we've ever been. Yes, even with fast food.

Spurlock goes on:

Antidepressant use in the U.S. nearly tripled in the past decade.

Again, this means very little. Antidepressant use has risen in part because of breakthrough drugs like Prozac and its "me too" followers have been so effective, and in part because the success of those drugs have gradually eroded the stigma against depression and mental illness, meaning more people are getting treatment, as opposed to suffering in silence or shame. These, again, are good developments.

Spurlock:

We've got drugs to counteract the disastrous effects of all our overconsumption--diet drugs, heart drugs, liver drugs, drug to make our hair grow back, and our willies stiff. In 2003, we Americans spent $227 billion on medications. That's a whole lot of drugs!

It's disingenuous to say many of those conditions are caused even in part by "overconsumption," much less exclusively. Many are genetic. Many are genetic predispositions triggered by environmental factors. Frankly, the idea that the people on these kinds of drugs somehow deserve the condition they're in because they're gluttounous or greedy is pretty damned offensive. Sure, some drugs may enable us to indulge bad habits without repercussions. So what? Even conceding that that's not a desirable development (and I don't), the vast majority of medical treatments are aimed at ailments no one "asked for."

And only the most rabid of anti-capitalists could find fault with the fact that we now have drugs available to treat the ailments that have plagued us for centuries. Only a smug socialist could consider, "are life-saving drugs a good or bad development?" a question up for debate (all, of course, while selling a movie, two books, and a TV show).

Spurlock goes on like this for another five paragraphs. He blames advertising for our "excessive" consumption, our (alleged) depression, and our general ennui. He concludes with this sweeping statement:

Yet none of the stuff we consume -- no matter how much bigger our SUV is than our neighbor's, no matter how many Whoppers we wolf down, no matter how many DVDs we own or how much Zoloft we take -- makes us feel full, or satisfied, or happy.

Bullshit. Tell me, would you be happier with or without your iPod? Do your sunglasses with UV protection make being outside better or worse for on eyes? Do you get more or less enjoyment from the added features producers sometimes add to DVDs? Are you better off with the quality and durability of a DVD picture, or with the grainier, less-lasting properties of VHS? Would you prefer to spend August in D.C. with or without air conditioning? In any case, even if you opt for the less efficient, less modern, less rational answer to any of these questions, that's fine. No one forces you to enjoy any of these conveniences. You may still live like a Luddite in America.

The funny thing is, people like Spurlock can only make silly arguments like these because capitalism has saved them from more dire concerns -- starving to death, for example. Or dying of malaria. Or struggling to make sure his kid lives past the age of ten. Or making sure he has enough meat cured to last until April. There are a few billion people around the world who still don't have the luxury to bitch about the overabundance of life-saving drugs, too many flavors of ketchup, or bemoan the fact that Viagra -- God forbid! -- lets old people continue to enjoy sex well into their eighties.

They don't bitch and moan about too many choices in the toothpaste aisle because they're busy trying not to starve to death.

Wanna' know why we don't have to worry about starving to death anymore? Because of capitalism. Free markets. Consumerism. Consumption.

Our responsibility is not to feel shame for our consumption. Our responsibility is to bring the beauty of markets and the miracle of "overconsumption" to the people who need it.