As Big Ag’s grade-A meat promoter, Charlie Arnot cooks up opposition to industry reform

Charlie Arnot's dining options are limited today.

He keeps an office in a nondescript business complex with few other tenants near Kansas City International Airport, so he can get in and out of town quickly.

The restaurants around here are the same as everywhere else in the country — an Arby's, a Taco Bell, a KFC, a Dairy Queen. People who want a nicer garnish and a waiter can go to the Ruby Tuesday or the Waffle House.

Arnot picks the Ruby Tuesday.

It's a bracingly cold Thursday afternoon. As he walks from the car to the restaurant, he worries about the weather. He has tickets for opening day at Kauffman Stadium and doesn't want to see the game postponed.

Inside the restaurant, Arnot sits at a table but doesn't bother to open the menu. It lists 24 types of burgers. USDA beef, range-fed bison, chicken, ground turkey — any of them with cheese, bacon, a slice of fresh avocado, or a steak sauce made with Samuel Adams Boston Lager — and as much of the pink grilled out of the flesh as a customer requests. There are seven types of steaks, four combinations of barbecued ribs and meat and sauce.

Americans love meat. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average U.S. citizen consumed 90.6 pounds of beef, 62.3 pounds of pork, 99.2 pounds of chicken and 18 pounds of turkey in 2008. It's a lucrative business in Kansas and Missouri — both place in the country's top 10 states for meat production. According to the USDA, the two states produced a combined 10,850,000 head of cattle and calves in 2007.

And meat loves Charlie Arnot.

The founder of CMA Consulting, he does public-relations and "issues management" work for clients such as the National Pork Producers Council. He's also the CEO of the Center for Food Integrity, a nonprofit whose mission is to "build consumer trust and confidence in the contemporary U.S. food system"; its backers include the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation.

At 47, gray hair is seeping into his temples. He wears a madras shirt and khakis.

Having spent close to 15 years in agribusiness and now writing a regular column for the industry newspaper Feedstuffs, Arnot has an intimate knowledge of how cattle, hogs and chickens live and die. He knows about the penning, the inoculations, the drugs put in their feed, and the methods of their slaughter.

He orders the salad bar.

Before he went into business for himself, Arnot spent 10 years as vice president of communications and public affairs for Premium Standard Farms, a pork producer with hog farms across Texas and Missouri. The company is the second-largest hog producer in the country, developing millions of pigs every year. The company owns every level of production — the semen, the science behind the process of insemination, the pens in which the animals are raised, the slaughterhouses, the Styrofoam trays that carry the meat to market.

At the time, rural communities were turning against companies such as Premium Standard. Though they had once welcomed massive corporate hog farms as economic engines, rural residents saw their property values drop when the operations moved in. Hundreds of thousands of hogs penned in one area created problems with waste disposal. In 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency and a coalition of 60 of the company's neighbors in northwestern Missouri filed suit against Premium Standard for repeated violations of federal environmental-protection laws, including waste-disposal methods that had tainted the region's water, and for health problems caused by the stench of the sewage.

Arnot's official message on behalf of Premium Standard: that the technical classification of a spill didn't apply to what was happening, that the company was an excellent neighbor, and that it was actually on the cutting edge of changing the agriculture business to something more environmentally sound and ethical.

In 2007, Smithfield Foods bought Premium Standard; the litigation is ongoing.

By the time he was laid-off in 2004, Arnot had made so many industry contacts and had learned enough about media practices that he went into business for himself, forming CMA Consultants.

He stayed in Kansas City, not because it was one of the country's old cowtowns but because his two children were in middle school and he didn't want to uproot them.

And soon enough, Arnot had work to do.

When the book Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food was scheduled to be released in 2006, the meat industry had reason to be worried. One of its authors, Eric Schlosser, had already grossed out thousands of Big Mac lovers with Fast Food Nation, his detailed exposé of the drive-through business. A movie version of that best-seller was in the works; people who had read it knew that there was a good chance their burgers came with a bit of feces along with the lettuce, tomato and special sauce. Chew on This was to be a kid's version, to educate and disgust a whole new generation of consumers before they were old enough to get hooked on Happy Meals.

Co-opting Schlosser's well-recognized title, Arnot's consulting agency launched a Web site called Best Food Nation in May 2006. The site's members included the American Meat Institute, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the Cattlemen's Beef Board, the National Chicken Council, the National Council of Chain Restaurants, the National Pork Producers Council, the Snack Food Association and the United States Potato Board.