In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.

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A handful of large companies [PDF] dominate the U.S. meat industry. The biggest of all (besides Cargill whose interests extend well beyond meat) is Tyson Foods, one of the two largest beef packers, the second-largest pork packer, and the second-largest chicken producer.

Tyson has exerted tremendous influence over the recent U.S. food culture and economy. It innovated the “vertical-integration” strategy that now dominates meat production, wherein mega-packers breed, slaughter, and process farm animals — mostly leaving the risky job of raising them to farmers working on contract. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser reports that in the ’80s, Tyson bred a monstrous, large-breasted chicken dubbed “Mr. McDonald” specifically for an experimental chicken dish for a certain fast-food chain. Ever heard of Chicken McNuggets? After years of roaring success, the U.S. meat industry has fallen on hard times. The industry’s lifeblood — cheap corn and soy for feed — has dried up since the biofuel boom started in 2006. The flailing economy means people are eating out less and cutting back on meat, and investment bankers are much less enthusiastic about financing takeovers.

More long-term, there’s a growing public awareness of the the grim ecological, public-health, human rights, and animal-welfare implications of industrial-meat production, as evidenced recently by the decisive passage of California’s Prop. 2.

But Don Tyson, son of the company’s founder and its controlling shareholder, has a plan. He laid it out in a recent exclusive interview with the Associated Press. Tyson’s vision can be summed up like this: Generate the next profit windfall by industrializing and consolidating meat production in Brazil, India, China, and the entire global south — just as Tyson and its peers did in the U.S. starting in the ’70s.

AP reporter Christopher Leonard gives a concise history of Tyson Foods’ vast influence here in the U.S.:

Full Story: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/10/13149/672?source=food