Pizza is the world's most popular food, and that enormous appetite is fueling what has recently become a transnational melee for market share and profits among four players: Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, and Little Caesars. On the face of it, this intense competition for the dough we spend on dough sounds like a good thing. We eventually bite into better-tasting pizza that's made faster and sold cheaper. "Pizza is as economical to buy now as it was back in the '80s, if not more so," says Jennifer Litz, editor of PizzaMarketplace.com, an online trade publication for the industry.
But what if that large pie delivered to your doorstep costs more than you think? A number of economists, sociologists, and food scholars claim that the $36 billion-a-year success of Big Pizza has ominous undertones and implications that reach far beyond weighty matters like deciding between extra cheese and anchovies. They argue that the unrelenting push for ever-cheaper pizza ingredients is hurting the planet and driving small and medium-size farms out of business. Some of these farmers feel they have no choice but to move to the megacities sprouting across the globe. Once relocated to urban slums, many find themselves among the estimated 1.1 billion people earning less than $1 a day, an amount that makes it hard to survive, let alone afford Domino's recent special offer of $5.99 a pie for two medium pizzas. Of the farmers that decide to stay put, some opt for a quicker death, at their own hand.
"We are faced with two possible futures," says sociologist Harriet Friedmann, Ph.D., a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto. "One is a diversity of crops, of cultures, and of cuisines that can inhabit ecosystems sustainably and produce healthy food for urban centers. The other is long-distance food from nowhere, monocultural systems that aren't sustainable, and simplified diets, especially for the poor. Global pizza typifies the second option."
Another outspoken opponent of the circumstances underlying the worldwide pizza trade has been Philip McMichael, Ph.D., a professor of development sociology at Cornell University. He believes that the combined processes of bioindustrialization, the ever-increasing reliance of agro-industry on fossil fuels, and the relentless search for the most rapidly expanding overseas markets has led to a phenomenon he calls "the food regime." The machinations that lie behind this new world order perform very well when it comes to churning out profits for transnational corporations, but that success comes at considerable social and economic expense, says McMichael. "It's undermining people who make their living off the land everywhere."
While I can understand acute hysteria and mass terror when it comes to melting icecaps, oil slicks the size of Arkansas, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with his finger on the trigger of a nuke, I haven't quite gotten my arms around the pizza apocalypse. So I decided to start my investigation at the beginning of the pizza chain, at the place from which a Domino's pie springs forth. I inch my rental car through a dismal-looking industrial park outside Detroit and pull up in front of a low-slung, nondescript building that houses one of Domino's 17 U.S. dough factories.
Way back in 1960, Domino's founders, brothers Tom and James Monaghan, purchased their first pizza joint not all that far from this forsaken stretch of Michigan frost and weed. Today the chain employs more than 10,000 people, and its 2010 fiscal revenue topped $236 million.
I'm met at the dough factory by public relations manager Chris Brandon, an enthusiastic 20-something who leads the way into an antiseptic dough-making room of clattering conveyor belts, industrial mixers, precision dough cutters, and metal detectors. It turns out that each lump of Domino's pizza dough must be x-rayed before it can be released into a litigious world, just in case a tooth-crushing twist of metal or stomach-puncturing screw might have fallen off the assembly line and dropped into the mix.
I approach a stainless-steel tureen that comes up to my chest, and watch as a carefully calibrated stream of water flushes into the bowl. After the water comes an autodispensed dose of soy crush--more commonly known as vegetable oil--that turns the liquid a dull yellow. Then 500 pounds of industrial flour explodes out of yet another stainless-steel pipe to join the fun. Through billowing clouds of white I catch a glimpse of the computer that runs the proprietary Domino's software. "Step #17," reads the screen. "Adding Flour."
Clearly this is high-tech bioindustrialization at its finest.
Soon it's time for a lifting machine to hoist the quarter-ton glob of dough 15 feet into the air, and then for a tilting machine to tip the entire concoction out of the tureen and into an extremely large stainless-steel hopper. "It's going to miss the bowl," I say.
"It may look that way," Brandon reassures me, "but it never misses." The dough slithers out of the tureen and into the center of the hopper; he smiles.
But a few minutes later, the next 500-pound batch hits the metal ledge of the hopper, teeters off the side, and unceremoniously plops onto the factory floor. Red lights flash, alarm bells ring, and the production line jolts to a halt.
For the first time in recorded history, a batch of Domino's pizza dough has missed the bowl.
Brandon ushers me away from the slow-spreading ooze and through automatic doors to a warehouse perfused with the aroma of meat, garlic, and onions. We stride past pallet after pallet of dressings and spices and uncountable cases of "Pizza Sauce Ready to Use" produced by a company called Paradise Tomato Kitchens. No doubt, Domino's swallows up quite a few of the world's tomatoes.
This demand has led to megafarms like the one in Yolo County, one of the largest process tomato producers of California. A vast, perfectly geometric 10,000 acres of mud is spiked with tomato seedlings that will eventually yield 120,000 tons of "process tomatoes"--the kind that become commercial pizza sauce. An operation like this is not replicable in the fields of the developing world. The furrows have been dug by GPS-guided tractors, the seedlings irrigated by an underground drip often spiked with a nitrogen fertilizer called UN-32. And the process tomatoes themselves are high-tech, high-yield hybrids known as AB2, Sun 6366, and Asgrow 410.
For the past hundred years or so, the ever-escalating technology of growing, harvesting, slicing, dicing, and pureeing has enabled process tomato to metastasize into the vegetable world's greatest international commodity, with the bulk of the red stuff spurting from the stainless-steel condensers of factories owned by some of the biggest names in global food, names such as Del Monte, Heinz, and Unilever.
Of course, there are those who defend the efficiencies of the homogenized paste: "The founding of Paradise Tomato Kitchens was rooted in innovation and technology," the company's CEO, Ron Peters, tells me in an e-mail. "With the economic challenges our customer base faces, it is our mission to help be the driving engine in our shared success."
It may come as no surprise that the customer base and the economic challenges that concern Peters and Paradise Tomato Kitchens belong to Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, and Little Caesars--not to the world's tomato growers. Indeed, as Big Pizza's preference for globalized sauce has matured, many of the other farmers who used to make a living growing and selling tomatoes have been pushed out of business.
In Ghana, for example, locally harvested tomatoes were once a staple. But tomato concentrate has destroyed the market there--not to mention the lives of the nearly 2 million people involved in tomato cultivation in one region of the country. Despite Ghana's farming tradition, it has become the world's second-largest importer of process tomatoes, after Germany. As a result, according to the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana, more than 700 tomato farmers have gone belly-up.
"We do not get good prices for the little harvest," said Comfort Mantey, a tomato farmer in the Ghanaian community of Matsekope, when she was interviewed for a report on poverty in the region. "The traders tell us their customers now mix fresh tomatoes with imported tomato paste."
Another tomato farmer, Martin Pwayidi, defaulted on the $2,000 loan he had secured from a bank and sunk into his 4 acres in 2008; no one would buy locally grown tomatoes from him. "I lost everything," said Pwayidi to one African news outlet. "There was absolutely no reason to live."
Sadly, this is the same conclusion arrived at by many of Pwayidi's neighbors: Annual waves of suicides have washed across Ghana's northern growing regions as some desperate farmers ingested the insecticide they no longer needed for their tomatoes.
The most expensive ingredient of any pizza pie is neither the dough nor the sauce, but the cheese. About half the U.S. milk supply is used to manufacture cheese, and last year's 10 billion pounds broke all previous production records. Mozzarella recently topped Cheddar as the most popular cheese variety. And where does all that mozzarella go? Onto your pizza, of course.
Every shred of Domino's mozzarella cheese comes from a Denver-based company called Leprino Foods, the world's largest producer of the gooey pie topping, with sales estimated at $2.6 billion in 2009. At one point, the company held more patents related to mozzarella than anyone else in the industry. Leprino also happens to be one of the largest privately held companies in the United States, and its employees are notorious for not speaking to the press. "We'd prefer to stay under the radar," a Leprino vice president told the Denver Business Journal several years back.
My own repeated attempts to contact James Leprino, the mozzarella billionaire the Denver Post once dubbed "Denver's Biggest Cheese," took me up a ladder of increasingly paranoid cheese executives until I found someone who was quite willing to talk to me for an hour--completely off the record.
According to the most recent data, Leprino must buy an astonishing 5 to 7 percent of the total available U.S. milk in order to supply mozzarella to Domino's and Pizza Hut and everybody else in global pizza. Put another way, one out of every 20 American milk cows must be dedicated to the production of Leprino's mozzarella. Paradoxically, it is Leprino's demand for milk that has driven dairy farmers to the wall.
It may come as a surprise that such a thing as a global cheese market exists, and that 40-pound blocks of Cheddar are traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). But ever since Ronald Reagan put an end to inflation-adjusted milk pricing, mozzarella prices have been linked to trading on the CME. And that means the day-to-day dollar-and-cent fluctuations of industrial cheese have been put in the hands of the biggest buyers of milk--corporations like Leprino, Kraft, and Dean Foods.
"Farmers need to be valued economically," says the University of Toronto's Friedmann, but insider cheese trading has allowed the largest processors to force the price of milk into a downward spiral, as lower prices mean greater profits for the processors. In 2008, for example, a cooperative called the Dairy Farmers of America paid a civil penalty of $12 million for trying to manipulate cheese prices. And as cheese industrialists buy more and more milk to make the mozzarella to supply the world's pizza purveyors, the ever-sinking price of milk has had a nasty effect on those without whom there would be no milk, no mozzarella, and no pizza.
"Farmers have never received less money for their milk," says John Bunting, a dairyman from the western foothills of the Catskills, in New York State, who also writes a blog that focuses on the plight of dairy farmers. For instance, the area where Bunting lives used to be rich in milk production; as the price of milk has touched bottom, though, it has been plagued by debt and bankruptcy. "There is no one in the country making a living milking cows," he says. "Not this year, and not last year, either. I get calls every day from just plain desperate farmers. Nobody knows what to do."
Of course, as the country's small dairy farmers head into bankruptcy, the largest producers of cheese have prospered. "Kraft and Leprino are on tight margins," says Bunting. "But they have so many units running past the cash register that Jimmy Leprino can get rich."
Last year was the worst in at least 30 years for small-scale dairymen, who lost money on every cow on every day of every month, says Bunting. Despite the losses, one upstate New York farmer, Dean Pierson, refused to let go of the 51 milking cows on the land his father had bought. Instead, Pierson took a small-caliber rifle and went through the barn he had built and shot each of his cows through the head. Then he sat down on a chair and put a bullet through his chest.
"The milk-pricing system is truly an attack on the family farm," says Bunting, "and truly an attack on the family that operates the farm." And as more and more dairy farmers become impoverished, the self-destructive illogic of global pizza becomes ever more obvious: The day I speak to Bunting, he tells me that five huge dairy operations in the Texas panhandle have filed for bankruptcy.
Leprino's website boasts, "Our customers benefit from the innovation and economies of scale we provide." That is, until the drive to provide high-volume pie topping at the lowest possible cost shuts off Leprino's milk pipeline for good.
"The system is breaking down," says Bunting. "And no one seems to be paying attention."
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