The new issue of “Rolling Stone” has a great piece on factory farming. (Thanks to Jim for the link.) Here’s how the story begins:
Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.
Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.
Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do — even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield’s business model…
I think the universe is conspiring to make me vegan again.
14 Comments
Whenever the Universe calls me into a triple-dog-dare, I eat Smithfield Ham until my kidneys make my intestines pop. You gotta show the Universe who’s boss or else you’ll be her bitch forever.
It would be a great prank to airlift a few metric tons of hog feces to this guy’s vacation home.
As long as we’re on this subject, I need to find someone raising organic-fed, no-hormone, no-probiotic hogs for country ham (the really salty stuff that I was raised on). Any leads?
Hogs are the animal I’ve never gotten a local lead on, sorry.
I would advise that you read Pollan’s book, mentioned previously, before you let yourself be grossed back into veganism. The “clean food” farmer he talks to in the middle third, I think, provides a good model for conscientious meat consumption.
Definitely read the book. While there is a good moral reason to not eat from the major meat producers, America is still going to eat meat. I think that more of a difference could be made by supporting good farmers, rather than just not supporting the bad.
You could start hunting feral pigs in the UP…
http://www.michiganfarmbureau.com/farmnews/transform.php?xml=20061130/cover.xml
and revive the Ypsilanti tradition of harpsichord making in the process.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,803099,00.html
Mark — A study this week in the “British Medical Journal” finds a correlation between vegetarianism and higher intelligence. If you become vegan again, people may suspect you of being smart, and you don’t want, do you?
The giant pits of shit — some of them 10 acres big — produced by hog farms are called “slurry lagoons,” by the way. The pretty name doesn’t seem to help the smell.
I agree that being a “Conscientious Omnivore” (as Peter simger suggests) is better than eating the factory farmed animals and would like meat eaters to make better choices about who they buy their animal products from, how the animals are treated and how far the product travels. However, there is no way that we can eat as much meat and other animal products as we do now and raise them humanely and sustainably. Meat (and other animal product) consumption MUST be greatly reduced if we are to stop the shittifying of the world by animal factory farming. (Feel free to use this new and exciting term, “Shittifying.”)
This is my main beef (hah!) with “people” like Sally Fallon who rail against vegegtarianism and promote a pastoral appraoch to eating animals that is virtually impossible on the scale in which we eat animals today. I’m going to include a long-ish reprint of an article by vegan author Erik Marcus responding to the “Omnivore’s Dilemma”
I hope that this isn’t too long of a post…
Dan
Could SPAM be what you’re looking for? I know it’s salty, and I think Hormel is a fairly reputable company.
I suggest you read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. That was the original muckraking novel. It may shock you off meat for at least a few weeks…
Above post was addressed to Mark. Mark, is there a way to edit posts?
-Paul
For an indepth look at the damage the hog industry has done and is doing in NC visit http://www.neuseriver.com. The dirty mess is there for all to see and read.
Rick Dove
New Bern, NC
We COULD take all that fecal matter and transform it into bio-gas. This would help reduce our dependence on arab oil. It would also reduce the pollution getting to our watershed. Also, PLEASE, I have heard several mentions about previous vegan lifestyles. If any could please tell me what they have found to be bad about the vegan lifestyle please let me know. I have always thought that if God did not want us to eat animals He wouldn’t have made them from meat, but alot of people recently are trying to convince me to go vegan.
If I’m not mistaken, people are made from meat too.
But people have always eaten people,
What else is there to eat?
If the Juju had meant us not to eat people,
He wouldn’t have made us from meat!
(from “The Reluctant Cannibal,” Flanders & Swann)