We are bombarded daily by corporations telling us when and what to eat. They appeal to our basic human instincts with savory fats and sugary sweets. We buy our perfectly packaged food adorned with happy cows and golden arches from red-headed clowns and candy-coated cartoons. We’re so obsessed with how our food looks on the outside, we never think to look at what’s happening inside. Sadly, food corporations don’t want you looking inside. Your basic McDonald’s cheeseburger has meat from nearly 1,000 different cows. This cow meat was pulverized and stamped into the all-too-familiar circular medallion, flash-frozen and shipped hundreds of miles all so that any slobbering idiot can cook you and your family a hot dinner at a decent profit. Would you like to see where your dinner came from? No problem, come right in, just don’t bring any cameras; photographing or videotaping inside a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) is illegal.
They call it industrial agriculture: industry meets agriculture. The term seems harmless, but what does it really mean? It means big business has their grubby little hands on every last bit of food we eat. For food companies, turning a profit requires lawyers and lobbyists to hide the truth about how they’re really making their money. Copyrighting crop genes, fighting food labeling laws, buying politicians, and slaughtering billions of animals yearly is what industrial agriculture is all about (not to mention paying for those labels they put on your breakfast sausage showing happy little chickens and cows frolicking in a green field next to a red barn). Even the innocent looking gummy bears you buy at the store aren’t safe from industrial agriculture byproducts. Gelatin, a major ingredient in gummy bears, is actually derived from boiling the connective tissues, bones and skin of pigs and sometimes cows, yum! Unfortunately, it’s easy to fool people with beautiful, colorful packaging all the while shoving the ingredients to the bottom in small print. Is an ingredient like gelatin harmful to your health? Gelatin won’t kill you, but purchasing it, and products containing it, feeds a corrupt and environmentally hazardous industry.
Everyone loves bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits from McDonald’s, but where did the ingredients come from? McDonald’s is the largest purchaser of pork; naturally, this pork comes from concentrated animal feeding operations (Kenner, 2009). Consider the life of a piglet within a CAFO (we’ll call him Charlie). Charlie is born on a concrete floor where he stays until he’s weaned from his mother. Charlie’s mother is confined to a gestation cage that keeps her pinned to the floor so Charlie can nurse. Once weaned, Charlie gets his teeth and tail cut off so he and his fellow CAFO buddies don’t maim or cannibalize each other. Charlie has his testicles cut off and is force fed to gain weight quickly. He spends the next few weeks gnawing on the metal bars that keep him caged, nearly immobilized without even enough room to lie down. This is where Charlie reaches a fork in the road; does he end up with an infected abscess on his spine from a poorly executed mutilation, or does he get tasered and beaten into an overcrowded truck. If Charlie ends up with an infection, he is not given medical attention, he’s left to stew in his own bacteria and eventually is thrown onto the growing death pile deemed the 4-D by the industry (4-D is short for dead, dying, diseased, and disabled (Imhoff, 2009), that’s right, they throw living, disabled animals into a pile of dead and diseased animals). Should Charlie dodge any infections or diseases and end up on the truck to the slaughterhouse, he will most likely suffocate or freeze in transit.
Transported to slaughterhouses through all extremes of weather, pigs sometimes suffocate in summer or freeze to the sides and floors of trucks in winter. To cram as many animals as possible into the eighteen-wheelers, workers have been reported to resort to beatings or electrical shock. Up to 1 million pigs are estimated to die every year during transport in the United States (Imhoff, 2009).
Charlie’s daunting travels are far from over. Should he make it to the slaughterhouse alive, the workers may or may not stun him sufficiently enough to ease the suffering of death. The worker may not even do a decent job at killing Charlie as he is sent into the mechanized teeth of the pork processing plant alive and fully aware. If Charlie happens to be a little too sick to make it to the killing floor standing up, the factory farm will pump him full of steroids; laws prevent animals that are unable to stand from being slaughtered for the market. Once an innocent little piglet, Charlie has endured horrid living conditions, displayed abnormal behavior due to extreme confinement, suffered mutilation, and is ultimately torn to shreds by high tech machines.
Things can’t change overnight. As one of McDonald’s largest pork suppliers, Smithfield has attempted to appear revolutionary in its treatment of animals. However, a scathing report from Rolling Stone about waste overflow and scattered pig corpses tarnished that facade, prompting a rebuttal from Smithfield on their website, “as we read through the article, the half-truths and distortions eventually grew to outright misinformation” (Smithfield, n.d.). Even Temple Grandin, a pioneer in animal welfare handling, has defended Smithfield to an extent. “They've gotten a whole lot better over the years - there's no question about that… One of the things they've cut down on is electric prodding" (Walzer, 2011). Murphy-Brown LLC, Smithfield’s livestock subsidiary, has even pledged to lower its use of gestation cages at Grandin’s request. Is cutting down on animal cruelty really enough? Smithfield brings 17 million hogs to slaughter yearly (Smithfield, n.d.). That’s like taking the whole population of Mumbai, India (one of the most populous cities in the world) and sending them all to slaughter, but only using an electric prod on a couple million of them. Smithfield is currently posting record profits and the Humane Society has filed a suit saying they’re not changing fast enough. Keeping shareholders happy while improving livestock welfare requires a delicate balance and it is by no means a quick process. Logic would dictate that continuing to purchase Smithfield’s products would only help the company continue its cash flow for improving the conditions at their CAFOs, but who really wants to buy sick and tortured bacon? The true cost of industrial agriculture is proving to be more than monetary.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (n.d.) admits CAFOs pollute the environment and can potentially harm humans.
Combined, the beef, dairy, pork, and poultry industries generate six to ten times as much waste as humans. The major stressors associated with the generation and disposal of these wastes include nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous), sediments from runoff, veterinary pharmaceuticals (e.g., endocrine disrupting chemicals, arsenic, ivermectin, and antibiotics), pathogenic organisms, and atmospheric emissions of gases and particulates. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [USEPA], n.d)
All of the above pollutants easily make their way into all of our major water sources due to “poop lagoon” overload. Heavy rain and floods can spread these chemicals and pathogenic organisms to lakes and rivers, ultimately being washed into our oceans. Especially disconcerting is the amount of antibiotics entering our water sources. The majority of the antibiotics manufactured here in the U.S. aren’t even produced for human consumption; they’re given to cows, chickens and pigs being raised on factory farms. Why do industrial farm animals get all of our antibiotics, you ask? When animals are confined in concentrated feeding operations, disease spreads quickly due to close quarters and unhealthy living conditions, and rather than isolating and treating the illnesses as needed, the animals are given a constant low dose of antibiotics whether they are necessary or not. Overuse of low-dose antibiotics promotes the growth of resistant strains of bacteria and can have implications beyond the scope of the barnyard. Since these same antibiotics are used for human consumption, the risk of incurable infections in humans increases (National Center for Biotechnology Information, n.d.).
CAFOs came about in the 1950s when there was a need to increase the efficiency of meat production, in other words, to widen the profit margin. There’s a lot of science and planning involved with these large scale feeding operations and some CAFOs probably run like a well-oiled machine. Waste management by some CAFOs is extremely innovative and in a depressed economy, a job at a factory farm probably looks pretty enticing. The problem is a small-time farmer can’t compete with a CAFO that moves into their area. The farmers either go out of business or are swayed by a large company to become independent contractors. According to Food, Inc., these small time farmers are given large loans to start the operation, but can never get out from under the loan because the company is constantly changing their regulations, causing the farmer to take out more loans. There’s no doubt CAFOs can produce a product and turn a profit for the company, but is it worth it? Human exploitation is also prevalent throughout the meat production system. Even the processing plants exploit their workers. Food, Inc. exposed Smithfield again for using illegal workers in their processing plants. Smithfield deliberately hires illegal workers for a period of time, and then tips off the immigration authorities to have the workers deported only to send a bus back across the border to pick up more illegal immigrants. Apparently Smithfield keeps their costs down by paying illegals below minimum wage, not giving raises, and they certainly don’t have to provide their workers with benefits if they’re being deported every few weeks. It's no wonder Smithfield constantly posts huge profits.
“Big Food” is a huge industry and controls the majority of what we consume. What exactly can be done to help make a change? Without having to resort to drastic diet changes, a first step is to think local. Getting to know your local butcher or meat supplier will help you track down exactly where your meat comes from. Many small farmers have decided to fill a market niche for the local buyer. Instead of feeding their cows grain (contrary to popular belief, corn is not a natural food source for ruminants), the cows are allowed to graze in their innate environment. In fact, small farmer Joel Salatin has gone back to the true agrarian method of farming. Food, Inc. has an extensive interview with Salatin and his fully free-range organic livestock method. All of Joel’s livestock are free to move around all they want outside, which is a big difference from the windowless, festering, steel buildings CAFOs present. He lets cows graze, and then he brings in his free-range chickens to feed on the cows’ dried excrement. Once the chickens have cleared the cow dung, their excrement serves as fertilizer for crops or grass and the cycle continues. His way seems like a natural way of doing things. Unfortunately, Salatin has been accosted by the USDA many times for having unsanitary conditions for slaughtering his chickens out in the open air. Rest assured, Salatin’s product is a far cry from the arsenic-laden chicken meat you buy from the store (arsenic is added to chicken feed to help turn their skin pink, which is more appealing to customers at the local grocery). Joel’s product may be a little more pricey, but his hands-on approach to meat processing sounds much more appealing than the chewed up, ammonia-soaked cuts of beef you find at the store (ammonia, which isn’t always effective considering numerous beef recalls, is used to help destroy bacteria and other pathogens that arise from the mechanical production of cows). If CAFO beef, pork and chicken are too accessible to avoid, or if you would rather not pay more for local meat, changing your diet may be the way to go.
Cutting out animal products altogether can be difficult, but it can have a positive impact on your health and your state of mind. The quickest way to stop feeding your cash to CAFOs is to quit buying their products. Vegetarianism, along with veganism, has been around for centuries and still thrives today in certain cultures. The United States has seen growing numbers of vegetarians because of health concerns and the reluctance to support animal cruelty. The documentary Forks Over Knives spotlights The China Study, a study on millions of Chinese people and how their diets relate to their health. Depending on how many animal products a certain group eats, there is a direct correlation with higher cancer rates. Even tests on mice show that animal products effectively “turn on” carcinogens while consuming less meat and more vegetables and grains renders carcinogens much less effective. Ailing meat-eaters have lowered and even eliminated their need for prescription medication by switching to an all plant-based diet according to Forks Over Knives.
One of the biggest problems society faces is the convenience of modern food. Convenient foods are mass-marketed, manufactured for a profit, and are loaded with all sorts of unhealthy ingredients. If we would just stop and think about the food we eat, and especially read labels every once in a while, we may be better off. We eat at least three times a day and we do less research on what goes into our mouth than we do deciding which snazzy iWidget we should purchase next. You can’t digest or get any nutrients from an iWidget, and that ammonia-bathed, diseased cheeseburger you just ate probably is doing just as good at providing nourishment. The USDA has revised their food pyramid several times, but where do I put a double Quarter-Pounder with cheese and bacon in my daily food journal? What about that 94 ounce glass of high fructose corn-syrup? Diets are a touchy subject for most people, and the divide of omnivores and herbivores is as heated a topic as universal health care. A fundamental change in the standard American diet is needed if we are to ever see cheaper health care, more jobs in the agricultural sector, less polluted rivers, or children without diabetes. More money spent on free range grass-fed beef or shifting to a plant-based diet are two ways to steer away from the mass slaughtering and gene modification of billions of animals every year. It is understood that you must kill an animal to eat it; but do we need to confine it and abuse it beforehand?
References
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency CAFOs Pollution Prevention. (n.d.). Retrieved November 15, 2011,
Campbell, T. C., & Campbell, T. M. (2005). The China Study. Texas: Benbella Books.
Fulkerson, L. (Director). (2011). Forks Over Knives [Documentary]. United States: Virgil Films & Entertainment.
Imhoff, D. (2010). CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation): the tragedy of industrial animal factories. Sausalito: Earth Aware.
Kenner, R. (Director). (2009). Food, Inc. [Documentary]. United States: Magnolia Home Entertainment.
National Center for Biotechnology Information. (n.d) Airborne Bacteria in CAFOs: Transfer of Resistance from Animals to Humans. U.S. National Library of Information.
Smithfield Foods (n.d.) Rolling Stone's "Bosshog" article: Fact vs. Fiction. (n.d.). Smithfield Foods Company Information. Retrieved December 7, 2011
Salatin, J. (2007). Everything I want to do is illegal. Swoope, Va.: Polyface, Inc.
Walzer, P. (2011, April 10). Temple Grandin appears in Smithfield Foods Videos. Virginian-Pilot, The (Norfolk, VA).
