Right now people are a little fearful of eggs, and who can blame them? The recent salmonella outbreak that resulted in the recall of half-a-billion eggs and sickened more than a thousand people across the country has left people wondering just how safe our food supply is. As a nutritionist, people ask me about this a lot—and what’s most important to understand is that all eggs are not created equal. The industrial food industry has taken our foods and made many of them unsafe. Not only this, but the nutritional value of our foods is intricately tied into this same industry. Which leads to another question I often hear: What are the healthiest foods? This should be an easy question to answer, but with the industrial food complex wrecking havoc on our food supply, things have become far more complicated.

Eggs prove to be the perfect example, something that can be an extremely healthy food. I wish I could stop there, but the great variation in the quality of eggs makes this impossible. If we are talking about local, small-scale, farm-raised eggs from chickens that live on pasture and spend plenty of time outside, then yes, eggs are quite possibly the perfect food. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans don’t have access to eggs produced this way. On the other hand, if we are talking about the average egg that you pick up in a supermarket, then no, eggs are not very healthy at all. Not only are they unhealthy, but they can actually be unsafe to eat as this most recent recall illustrates.

So what makes industrially-produced eggs so different? Let’s start with the safety issues. Eggs that come from hens confined to battery hen houses are not produced in sanitary conditions. Tens of thousands of cramped chickens spend their short lives either lined up in tiny cages or crowded into open henhouses, standing in their own feces, unable to move around or gain access to fresh air or sunlight. They are stressed and often sick.

Since the late 1980s, salmonella has been a major problem in these giant warehouses. One giant producer in particular, Austin DeCoster of Wright County Egg, has been responsible for multiple outbreaks of salmonella over the years, according to yesterday’s New York Times article. State regulators were so concerned, that for a period of time, New York and Maryland even banned the sale of DeCoster eggs. Salmonella can be quite serious to those with a weakened immune system, babies, young children, the elderly, and pregnant women. According to the Times article, in one of the earlier DeCoster egg outbreaks, nine people died. Salmonella has also been linked to a host of chronic ailments, including reactive arthritis, Reiter’s syndrome, Miller-Fisher syndrome, and ulcers.

When it comes to nutrition, it is not widely known or understood that the industrial egg is significantly less healthful than the egg from a pasture-raised chicken. The industry has managed to take real foods, like eggs, and make them not only unsafe, but also less nutritious. Mother Earth News completed a study in 2007 that compared the nutritional profiles of industrial eggs versus eggs from pasture-raised chickens and found substantial nutritional differences. According to the study, eggs from pasture-raised chickens contained two-thirds more vitamin A, three to six times more vitamin D, two times more omega-3 fatty acids, three times more vitamin E, and seven times more beta-carotene than their industrial counterparts.

Why? Industrial eggs are fed processed grains (usually genetically modified corn that is heavily sprayed with pesticides). This is not the chicken’s natural diet. Chickens are omnivores and will eat grass, seeds, insects, grubs and whatever else they find while roaming on pasture. This varied diet results in a more nutrient-dense egg, which is higher in omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin A and beta-carotene. In addition, chickens that live outdoors convert sunlight into vitamin D and other nutrients that store in their eggs.

Something else I often hear is: But don’t eggs raise cholesterol? The answer is no. People are often shocked by this since the government, dieticians, and doctors have spent years telling people to eat fewer eggs or to eat egg whites alone. But this is a fallacy, as studies have consistently shown that dietary cholesterol is not what influences blood cholesterol levels. In fact, findings from a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who ate four eggs per week had significantly lower mean serum cholesterol levels than those who ate one egg per week. Plus, the daily nutrient intake of people who ate eggs was much higher than the non-egg eaters. And you won’t get these benefits from the egg white alone. The egg exists as a whole for a reason, the nutrients in the yolk and the white work in concert to make the egg the perfect food. I would recommend eating at least one high quality egg a day and for children and pregnant women, two or more.

The challenge is making pasture-raised chickens and their eggs available to everyone. Sometimes access and availability are the issue and sometimes it’s cost. Pastured eggs are much more expensive than industrial eggs and this is something that must change. But consider that you are getting more nutritional bang for your buck when you eat pastured eggs. Plus, coming down with a bout of salmonella as a result of a factory farm’s irresponsibility and carelessness is something no one deserves.

Visit your local farmer’s market to find pastured eggs and ask the farmer about his or her practices. To find pastured producers near you go to Eat Wild or Local Harvest.

This is the first piece in a regular column by holistic nutrition expert, Kristin Wartman. She will examine food, nutrition, and the way the industrial food industry affects our food system and our health.

Photo: Tina Negus on Flickr

What do most of us know about Moby (not the whale, but the music artist)? I, for one, know that he makes good dance music, he likes tea, and he’s an outspoken vegan.  So how did he end up editing a book with a contribution by Paul Willis, Mr. sustainable hog farmer? And did they drink not-too-sweet organic peach tea to seal the deal? It seems like food politics may have made some super strange bedfellows here.

We are at an interesting moment, I think, one in which the vegans are trying a new tact. Sensing a possible ally, they have decided to team up with the sustainable food movement in order to improve animal welfare and decrease the number of animals suffering at the hands of Big Ag. It’s a pretty darn good match.  After reading Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety, composed of 15 pieces on the negative environmental, health, community, financial and global impacts of industrial animal production, it’s hard not to feel that you must opt out of the system entirely.  For some—like me—that means choosing to eat less meat and to be careful about where that meat comes from and how it is raised.  For others it’s going to mean giving up meat altogether.

Moby and Miyun Park, who has long worked on farm animal welfare issues, collected these 15 pieces and organized them by type of impact (e.g. health; worker rights; climate change) to create a kind of primer.  They gathered a quirky assortment of contributors—determined perhaps by six degrees of Moby?—including food movement warriors like Frances Moore Lappé, Danielle Nierenberg and Meredith Niles to talk about global and environmental impacts; love-him-or-hate-him Whole Foods CEO John Mackey to talk about the true, hidden costs of cheap meat; Canadian ultra-Marathoner Brendan Brazier to talk about being a powerfully capable athlete living only on plant protein, and the bodily health that comes from skipping all those antibiotics and growth hormones.

The takeaway at the end of the read is disgust at a system of food production that could be failing humans, the physical environment and animals so comprehensively. The vegan handbag/shoe designer and the pork producer can agree upon this, as can any reader with a conscience and a heart.

Meat industry luminaries including Don Tyson, Jimmy Dean, and the late Frank Perdue were inducted that evening, along with litigious feedlot owner Paul Engler, who you might remember for suing Oprah Winfrey over mad cow disease and getting spanked in court. By all accounts, it was a truly magical evening, what with Kurtis’ gripping keynote address offering up a 30 minute history of the American meat industry.

Despite the glitz, an undercurrent of worry pervaded the event. See, the meat industry was in the midst of its most horrific year on record, being seemingly besieged by all sides. Robert “Bo” Manly, CFO of pork titan Smithfield Foods put it best: “Anything that breathed lost money.”

Most of the meat industry’s pain was from a faltering economy that was creating countless “recession era vegetarians.” An August USDA report showed that beef, pork, and chicken production had all dropped substantially. That month, meat giant Tyson Foods warned its investors that quarterly sales had dropped 3 percent from a year before.

The end of burgers and fries as the quintessential American meal may be at hand. In America, the furthest you can possibly get from a McDonald’s is just 107 miles. But it appears the industry has overbuilt, and franchises are closing up left and right. In a sign of the times, one failed KFC was converted to a marijuana dispensary.

Nowhere was animal agribusiness’ pain more keenly felt than in the milk industry. American dairies were failing at such a rate that one observer predicted that a third would go out of business in 2009. To deal with the glut of milk, government and industry combined to organize a mass slaughter of more than 100,000 cows. Dairies spent 2009 looking for every excuse to cut herd sizes, and keep only the most productive cows. Overall, it appeared likely that more than 1.5 million cows would be slaughtered in 2009. The dairy industry’s pain was borne disproportionately by organic farmers, as cash-strapped consumers switched back to cheaper factory farmed milk.

Happily for US dairies, the USDA once again came riding to the rescue, this time with a $290 million taxpayer-funded bailout. Imagine if that money had instead been spent to subsidize the production of healthful fruits and vegetables, instead of producing more unwanted milk and nasty government cheese. Adding to the industry’s woes, agribusiness giant Cargill announced an invention that could dramatically reduce demand for milk: a plant-based substance that can be used to produce gooey, stretchy, totally realistic cheese.

The chicken industry likewise tightened its belt in 2009, eliminating its national chicken recipe contest. The grand prize—which once stood at $100,000—had been slashed to $50,000 before the contest was cancelled outright.

The pork industry had a horrifying year. Smithfield Foods’ CEO, Larry Pope, said, “I sort of feel like the world has been against us for 12 months.” In November, America’s 22nd largest pork producer abruptly quit the business. The company had an inventory of more than 30,000 breeder sows. USA Today reported in November that, starting in late 2007, pig producers were losing about $23 on each animal they raised.

Business was comparably bad at feedlots, with nearly all hemorrhaging cash. Twenty percent of feedlots were up for sale in 2009, but, given the beef industry’s bleak prospects, there were no buyers. When National Beef attempted to raise $276 million through an IPO this year, they were forced to withdraw the offering for lack of interest. The future looked even worse for ranchers in the UK, where it turned out the minister put in charge of rescuing the beef industry is a vegetarian.

Excerpted from Vegan.com, Read the rest here

When faced with gruesome images of mistreatment of farm animals, rather than simply condemning the cruelty, some in agribusiness just can’t leave it at that. They feel the need also to attack the compassionate investigators who put themselves at great risk to go undercover and blow the whistle on such abuse.

For example, a new Mercy for Animals investigation involved videotaping workers at one of the nation’s largest pork companies throwing piglets by their ears and legs across the room, cramming pigs into cages barely larger than their own bodies for months on end, and even leaving pigs with untreated prolapses, sores and other health problems.

And what’s the response of the president of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians, Dr. Butch Baker? Quite simply: These types of investigations “really are an attack on the rural lifestyle of America.”

Wow.

Since when does “rural lifestyle”  equate with rampant animal cruelty, and since when did the head of a veterinary trade group (who you’d think would focus on protecting animals) become qualified to comment on such sociological phenomena? It would be interesting to see just how many folks in rural America think a video decrying obvious animal cruelty is really an attack on their lifestyle. Perhaps those in big agribusiness perceive it that way, since cruelty is far more endemic in the meat, egg, and dairy industries than many may think, but alleging that anti-cruelty whistleblowers are somehow victimizing rural Americans would be laughable if it weren’t so appalling.

Another example is the recent Humane Society of the United States investigation into a Vermont dairy calf slaughter plant. The investigator worked as a floor cleaner for a total of 21 days, videotaping days-old calves—some with their umbilical cords still hanging from their bodies—who were kicked, electrically prodded, and in at least one case, even skinned alive.

What’s the response of the exposed plant’s leadership? Rather than accepting blame when caught red-handed, they claimed the investigator actually “provoked” at least some of the abuse by instructing a worker how to act.

Seriously.

Forget about the fact that after reviewing the unedited segment of the video that would show the allegedly “provoked” scene, the Burlington Free Press reported that no such provocation is on the tape. Forget about the fact that the USDA had cited the plant for inhumane handling three times in 2009—and the plant was shut down two of those times—all prior to HSUS’ investigation.  Just consider how plausible it would be for a brand new floor cleaner, the lowest person on the totem pole, to somehow have the authority to “instruct” anyone to do anything. And it’s especially absurd when you consider that the co-owner of the plant himself is seen in the video abusing animals with gusto—relentlessly shocking, cursing at, and making fun of calves who were too weak even to stand.

These throwback reactions and denials certainly reflect poorly on agribusiness. But there are more welcome signs—a recognition that the real problem isn’t with the taping of cruelty on factory farms, but with the reality of animal cruelty itself.

Agribusiness industry trade publication Feedstuffs recently editorialized about these investigations conducted by animal organizations. To its credit, the paper’s editorial board didn’t recommend continuation of the current strategy of blaming animal advocates for the abuse they merely document. They in fact wrote: “It’s important to understand that companies and producers can’t just say ‘bad apple’ and move on because—to consumers who have seen these videos again and again—there are no bad apples anymore. The bad apple, to consumers now, is the industry.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Jonathan Safran Foer speaks with the reasoning of a vegetarian, the skepticism of an investigative journalist and the concern of a parent in Eating Animals. This persuasive narrative forces us to ask why we have ignored the issues associated with factory-farmed meat and fish for so long. We’ve done so, Foer argues, by telling ourselves a fable about our relation to the animals we eat.

Our story about meat is a longstanding one with the quality of a dream. We like to imagine animals and humans living side-by-side on rural pastureland. In exchange for a life free of suffering, animals “consent” to being eaten. Foer spells out this “myth of animal consent” to expose our “ambivalence about the violence and death dealing inherent in eating animals.” Probing our psychological relationship with food, he makes an argument for vegetarianism but ultimately proposes a more humane system for raising and killing animals.

As a novelist, Foer’s main concern is for his materials, namely words. So to tell this story, he deconstructs the language of food, devoting an entire chapter to redefining words used to describe factory farming. “Suffering” is not as much about the science of pain as it is about our ability to feel what the object of that pain is experiencing. “Cruelty” is a conscious apathy toward “unnecessary suffering” and it depends on our “ability to choose against it, or to choose to ignore it.” “Cage-free” literally means that birds are not in cages but actually says nothing about their living conditions. “KFC” no longer stands for fried chicken but more often for animal cruelty (“workers were documented tearing heads off live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes, spray-painting their faces, and violently stomping on them”). He titles one section “Our New Sadism” wherein we hear revolting testaments to human barbarism. So when Foer quotes a factory farmer (“You simply can’t feed billions of people free-range eggs”), we hear instead Foer’s definition of “free-range”: “Imagine a shed containing thirty thousand chickens, with a small door at one end that opens to a five-by-five dirt patch—and the door is closed all but occasionally.”

Foer then sets out to engage with others about eating meat. His hypothetical debates with Michael Pollan on eating animals lead Foer towards a critique of The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he states that the book ultimately is a “disavowal of the real horror we inflict.” When he takes an illegal trip to a poultry farm with the animal activist named “C,” we relive Foer’s disturbing experience and read C’s testimony. There are voices from a factory farm, a small scale poultry farm and a small pig farm. There is a vegetarian cattle rancher who believes in her decision not to eat meat but is aware that “the meat industry affects everybody … all of us, living in a society in which food production is based on factory farming.” There is the voice of Foer’s own grandmother, a World War II survivor whose relationship with food means everything from “terror” to “gratitude.” There are voices of the voiceless chickens, fish, pigs and cows whose short lives are documented step-by-step in chapters on raising and processing within factory farms and industrial fisheries. What began as one person’s desire to know what meat is — “where does it come from? how is it produced?” — becomes our universal problem.

But perhaps the most striking and sobering question asked in Eating Animals is, “What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?” What do we do on the day when we discover that most of our meat is tainted? Don’t these facts force us to ask what it means to be human?

Foer’s argument stops short of considering this question only in his consideration of food production and the environment. He does offer a two-page definition for environmentalism as “concern for the preservation and restoration of natural resources and the ecological systems that sustain human life.” He does not, however, press the reader to consider the false stories we tell ourselves about our responsibility for global warming. We are given an elementary lesson on food production and greenhouse gas emissions. We learn about dead zones and the toxicity of manure lagoons. But he glides over pivotal questions about the meat industry that takes into account the importance of a healthy earth.

Still, Foer has a specific agenda: reinvent the system with the help of “modern technology and traditional husbandry” and restore the growth of husbandry-based ranching. It is helpful that Foer, a strict vegetarian, recognizes that Americans like to eat meat and they probably always will. Therefore, admitting that “ethical meat is a promissory note, not a reality” places his agenda at an appropriate distance from our current food mentality. If we want change, then we must subscribe to a story filled with different facts than the ones we accept unthinkingly. “The secrecy that has enabled the factory farm is breaking down:” 76 million Americans get sick each year from the food they eat. Less than 2% of the American population works in agriculture. Long-line fishing kills 4.5 million sea animals a year—and this is just the number of dead animals thrown back into the sea as by-catch. Numbers help tell the story of a world that should be valued more than our cravings.

Last week, The New York Times reported that this administration has said it will take a harder line on anti-trust legislation, in diverse sectors of the economy including agriculture.  Perhaps its premature to tell what this will look like, but enforcing the laws that we already have on the books would be a great start to building a better food system.

This is because the largest sectors of the agribusiness world (grain, meatpacking, biotechnology, etc) are monopolizing food from seed to supermarket shelf and thereby deciding what we can (and can’t) buy and eat across this country, and by extension, the world.

These are the companies that are trying to efficiently process tens of thousands of cows per day — cows that have been lined up in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and fed grain (more efficient than using land to feed them their natural diet of grass), pumped with hormones and other antibiotics to keep them from dying, which means a glut on the market of cheap (anti-biotic-filled) beef. And these are the companies that are creating the seeds — those seeds that the farmer can’t even save for fear of litigation — to grow the crops that require the use of their pesticides, and which produce a proliferation of fast food.

Yes, efficiency is the bottom line in our current agricultural system. Not safety, not health, or least of all taste; no, for a corporation that is beholden first to it’s shareholders, its all about the quickest way to get to the bottom line. Besides exacerbating obesity, heart disease and diabetes cases, this kind of thinking can only be limited in its long term ability to maintain itself, because it refuses to take a holistic approach to creating goods for the common good. In other words, we know it can’t be sustained, and therefore it is not sustainable.

But these mega-companies aren’t fully to blame, because this is what our economic system has been set up to do for thirty years or more: build a conflagration of trusts.

Will Obama pull a Teddy Roosevelt and begin a new era of trust-busting? Here’s hoping he will, and that he begins with Big Ag.

Last week on The Leonard Lopate Show, when he was asked how taking a harder line on anti-trust law could effect the food industry, Michael Pollan responded:

“It’s very significant, actually, because you have more concentration in the food industry than in just about any other industry. Most anti-trust experts say that if 4 [or fewer] companies control 40% or more of a marketplace, it’s not competitive. And in food we have that in meatpacking, [where] there are 4 companies that control 85% of the beef, [and in] seed production, fertilizer production… there is this tight little hourglass in the food industry, [which means] lots of farmers, very few buyers, which forces farmers to take prices, they have no control over prices at all. So if indeed we were to push an anti-trust agenda in the food industry, it would be the best thing for farmers and the best thing for consumers.”

In other words, there are only a handful of people pulling the strings of our food system. And something as fundamental as food should not be so minimally represented, for food safety and health reasons, but because it also violates our human rights.

To this I ask, is this food system not an oligopoly, a market form most at risk for collusion? all the more reason to investigate the mega-firms that form through the process of mergers.

That “hourglass” concept Pollan mentioned comes from William Heffernan and Mary Hendrickson’s report Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System (1999) [PDF], which revealed the “food chain clusters” forming through constant mergers within the food system, and also gave the first comprehensive data on concentration ratios of each firm in the food sector. (An updated version from 2007 is here [PDF].)

One of the biggest fall-outs of this phenomenon has been the price paid in rural America. From Heffernan and Hendrickson’s report:

“In the past when family businesses were the predominant system in rural communities, researchers talked of multiplier effects of three or four. Newly generated dollars in the agricultural sector would circulate in the community, changing hands from one entrepreneurial family to another three or four times before leaving the rural community.  This greatly enhanced the economic viability of the community.

Large non-local corporations… see labor as just another input cost to be purchased as cheaply as possible.  The “profits” then are allocated to return on management and capital and are usually taken from the rural community.  They go to the company’s headquarters and are then sent to all corners of the globe to be reinvested in the food system.  One can ask the question, why were agriculturally based rural communities, with an ample natural resource base, more economically viable than mining based rural communities which also had an ample natural resource base?  The answer lies primarily with the economic structure of the major economic base.  Increasingly, our agriculturally based communities, like regions with major poultry operations, are looking like mining communities.”

Having an hourglass of production power also means the creation of giant facilities to produce our food as fast as possible. E coli bacteria present in a giant shared sink with thousands of servings of spinach has the potential to do more harm than a similar, isolated incident on a small farm would. In creating factory-like facilities to process and package our food, we are exponentially increasing the risks of food contamination. This is the single best argument for decentralizing the food system.

But yes, there is yet still another reason to bust up these trusts: agribusiness has had excessive influence on our government. Represented by a billion dollar lobby in Washington, agribusinesses have maintained a revolving door bringing lobbyists, lawyers and board members into powerful public positions. One of the other problems that arises when mega-companies begin to influence government in this way is that they then become “too big to fail,” when we should be asking ourselves (to quote Mike Lux) if they were “too big to exist” in the first place.

However it happened, the facts are clear: Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, Tyson and Smithfield are probably breaking the law, and that law needs to be enforced. It may be that the government for too long has been complicit in creating predatory pricing via billions of dollars in subsidies handed out to the factory farmers of mostly genetically modified corn and soy, but I would like our new administration to take a good look at possible price fixing; aggressive marketing, especially to children; intimidation practices, including Monsanto’s intimidation of farmers who have been found to have GMO contamination in their fields, also their intimidation of seed cleaners, and of previous governments; barriers to entry, for example, the assumption of massive amounts of debt on the part of the farmer to build CAFO facilities and thus getting trapped in a contractual agreement with Smithfield, Tyson, etc; and tying, for instance, Round-Up Ready seeds require the use of Round-Up herbicides, meaning that both markets are cornered by Monsanto.

It’s time to admit that hyper-efficiency is not working. It may seem counter-intuitive, but being a little less efficient creates room for checks and balances. We need redundancy, and some fostered competition. It is the only way to assure the health of our nation and the safety of our food supply.

I have personally written three pieces on the flu (here, here, and here).  My newspaper article in particular received a tsunami of feedback.  While I might normally receive a handful or two of emails after each of my EcoChef columns, in this case I received nearly four times that amount.  What was particularly interesting about the feedback was that is was so clearly bifurcated:  praising me for exploring these issues and asking for more clarification or lambasting me for my ignorance and stupidity for writing such nonsense.

In my defense, I want to clearly point out that I have never claimed there was a direct link between the H1N1 and CAFOs, from the Mexican Smithfield plant or any other.

That said, the ecologist in me is fairly certain that CAFOs have a role to play.  Why?  Because in host / parasite interactions, the parasite (influenza variant) needs high densities of its host (in this case pigs, humans, and birds) to thrive.  At low host densities, the parasite can’t spread and reproduce, and it slowly diminishes (and/or becomes less harmful to the host).  It is in high density situations that parasites can really do some damage.

A common, uncontroversial example:  Human hospitals. They have recently come under fire for being breeding grounds for extremely virulent and harmful pathogen strains.  Hospitals have high densities of sick and often immobile patients, who are regularly given antibiotics and other microbials to fend off these infections.  Over time, unfortunately, these only make the pathogens stronger.

In the animal world, the closest thing to a human hospital that I can think of is a CAFO – a confined animal feeding operation.  They, like hospitals, have high densities of often relatively immobile animals.  These animals are often so “sensitive to disease” (read: sick) that they need regular administrations of antibiotics to keep them alive.  Over time, unfortunately, these antibiotics only make the pathogens stronger.

Compare this with the small fraction of free range pigs that are given antibiotics. Dan Bagley of Clark Summit Farm says he’s given one pig antibiotics in five years – that’s 0.4% of his pigs / year vs. frequent antibiotics administration to 100% of the pigs in a CAFO herd.

So far, everything I’ve written is scientifically true but also abstract.  So, let’s get to the meat of the matter:  what do we know now about the origin of this last worldwide virus outbreak?

The unfortunate fact is that we are probably never going to know the whole truth.  But we do, fortunately, know this:  the H1N1 swine flu did come from pigs, although they were probably not the most recent host.

Jason Gale reported on Bloomberg that the first genetic analysis of the virus has recently been completed by Richard Webby and his team at the World Health Organization Collaborating Center in Memphis,

According to Gale’s article:

By analyzing the sequence of hundreds of amino acids coded by each of the flu virus’s eight genes, Webby found the virus’s closest relatives are an H1N1 flu strain that has circulated widely among North American pigs since the late 1990s, and one from Europe that’s been in swine for at least three decades.

The article does point out that there are also recent avian links (perhaps from duck ponds being used to wash pig houses?).

The bottom line is this:  there is a direct pig link in the genetics.  This is science, not speculation.

That doesn’t point a smoking gun at CAFOs specifically.  They may or may not have been involved.  But, if you look at the numbers of pigs in CAFOs (huge) vs. free range animals (a very small percent), the probabilities point in the factory farm direction.

Which brings me back to an email response I received to my Oakland Tribune article.  Jeremy Russell of the National Meat Association, wrote:

Dear Mr. French,

Your column today ‘Know where your pork comes from’ shows that you
have been keeping up with neither the news nor the science about H1N1
and pig production.

Public health officials in Mexico have found no evidence of a link
between the outbreak and the swine herds in Veracruz. Furthermore,
part of the purpose of a confined feeding operation is to protect
swine herds from viral infections which come from the outside and
contain them inside if and when they do occur. I would expect an
ecologist to understand this.

There is a reason the operation in Mexico is not unique — it is built
on a model that is effective, efficient and biosecure. And with sound
management practices waste discharge can be avoided entirely. In
fact, EPA last year set a zero-discharge standard for CAFOs in the
United States. (EPA has all the info posted at

http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/afo/cafofinalrule.cfm)

It’s your responsibility as a columnist to get the facts right, and
your linkage between H1N1 and modern pork production practices is
ignorant at best.

Sincerely,
Jeremy Russell
Director of Communications and Government Relations
National Meat Association

I think it is clear that the science proves Russell to be wrong on all accounts.  To respond to his last point first – we now do have a clear link between H1N1 and modern pork production.  Done.

But more importantly, there is a significant body of evidence that pig CAFOs are not even remotely biosecure.  For example, Rachel Ehrenberg reported in Science News:

The manure generated by thousands of cows or pigs doesn’t just stink — it may seriously affect human health.

New research examining two decades’ worth of livestock production data finds a positive relationship between increased production at industrial farms and infant death rates in the counties where the farms reside.  The study reported in the February American Journal of Agricultural Economics implicates air pollution and suggests that Clean Air Act regulations need to be revamped to address livestock production of noxious gases.

Infant death from noxious gases?  This is just part of the CAFO problem.  These reports from the pig-loving University of Iowa discuss other serious health, economic, and environmental issues – including the effects of manure spills, fish kills, impaired watersheds, and decreased recreational opportunities: Study 1, Study 2.

There are numerous points in each of these reports that directly contradict Russell’s claim of biological containment. Still not convinced? What about an extensive 2½-year examination conducted by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (PCIFAP), which says:

Air quality degradation is also a problem in and around IFAP facilities because of the localized release of significant quantities of toxic gases, odorous substances, and particulates and bioaerosols that contain a variety of microorganisms including human pathogens. Some of the most objectionable compounds are the organic acids, which include acetic acid, butyric acids, valeric acids, caproic acids, and propanoic acid; sulfur containing compounds such as hydrogen sulfide and dimethyl sulfide; and nitrogen-containing compounds including ammonia, methyl amines, methyl pyrazines, skatoles and indoles.

The H1H1 swine flu outbreak has been devastating, even fatal, for many.  One “silver lining” of this worldwide problem is the attention it has placed on modern pig farming practices.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: why do we have these CAFOs in the first place? The pork industry tells us it’s to protect the pigs. This is an obvious red herring, as pigs have coexisted with humans for thousands of years. And ironically, it is this partial separation and concentration of pigs and humans that makes strains of bacteria like the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA for short) so virulent (a separate and possibly more serious phenomenon).

Successful free-range pig farmers are making a strong comeback, spurred along no doubt by the success of Willis Farm’s collaboration with Niman Ranch. CAFOs are a failed experiment in farming that survives on subsidies and legal protectionism. If CAFO farmers were required to pay the full social, economic, and environmental cost for their practices, we would surely see a decline in this destructive practice.

–

A final personal note: I am not “against” the meat industry. I spent part of my childhood on a farm where I learned to raise, slaughter, and butcher the animals that we grew. I am not squeamish about meat production, and I personally eat meat and cook it professionally. However, we need to return to a method of raising animals that is productive for the environment, not harmful to it.

I have long worried about the impacts of the massive confined animal feeding operations, the so called CAFOs. They worry me because of the stress they create in animals, the pollution problems that effect air and water quality around each CAFO, and the need for continuous sub-therapeutic feeding of antibiotics to suppress disease and stimulate growth. The antibiotic issue is of particular concern to me due to the virulent infections that seem to be emerging like MRSA,Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which are antibiotic resistant.

Whether or not these stories out of Mexico about the Smithfield hog CAFO prove to be true, if this pandemic spurs a swine holocaust my sense of shame over our mistreatment of a long allied species will be deep. I suspect I will not be the only human feeling guilty. It happens over and over. Chickens, sheep, cattle and hogs suffer slaughter when we feel threatened. We kill in mass numbers to stem the source of infection or so we think. The mass killings seem more like an ancient ritual, perhaps more psychologically therapeutic, than preventative in these modern times.

The farmers and ranchers suffer too. Their long-tended herds are lost and they must start again. This is costly in time, money and emotion. A quote from an Egyptian Agriculture Ministry official in a news story today was especially troubling. He said the farmers would not be hurt because they can sell their meat. Obviously, this official has little understanding of supply and demand pricing in a commodity system. The price will crash when 350,000 hog bellies hit the market in one week.

The root of the problem is that we are treating biological systems as if they are factories. Yes hogs like herds, but not in confined places. The herds are sometimes very large. On more than one occasion, I have seen dozens of feral pigs running together in the coastal mountains of California. Hogs have been domesticated for 7,000-10,000 years. So we have lived with them in villages for millennia. But only in recent decades, have we turned hogs into cogs in our meat manufacturing sites that house tens of thousands of animals in one place. The industrial hog factories forgo the chance to provide every hog with heaven on earth before the hogs provide nutrition to people. Hog heaven before slaughter seems like a better deal for all involved in light of recent developments.

There are still some farmers willing to pasture their pigs. It costs more, but the pigs, farms, and communities are happier and healthier. The Niman Ranch farmers in Iowa and Poly Face Farm in Virginia are two of the best known, but there are many others, particularly family farmers serving regional buyers. Perhaps if the world got back to pasturing pork and hog heaven, the stress, pollution and pandemics – today’s clear and present dangers – would no longer be so closely associated with swine. That is my hope anyway for the “other white meat” so many of us love to eat. ]]> http://civileats.com/2009/04/30/hog-heaven-or-hogocaust/feed/ 6 http://civileats.com/2009/04/21/righteous-porkchop/ http://civileats.com/2009/04/21/righteous-porkchop/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:00:58 +0000 jklemperer http://civileats.com/?p=3170

The title of Nicolette Hahn Niman’s compelling new book, Righteous Porkchop, is honest, and indicates one of the book’s strengths—its exploration of the moral issues behind our broken food system. As a vegetarian rancher she is uniquely poised to be even more righteous than most. Not only has she abstained from eating meat herself since young adulthood, she spends her days sustainably raising cattle for others to eat. Who can top that?

Of course, this wasn’t always the case. Not even 10 years ago she was a young single gal in the city, recruited by Bobby Kennedy, Jr. to head up the Waterkeeper Alliance’s new industrial hog campaign. With a background as a lawyer, she set out to take industrial hog farms (primarily in North Carolina) to task via the legal system for their gross environmental transgressions. She worked crushing hours, giving up her healthy lifestyle and her social life. But along the way, she won several important legal battles and put the issue of industrial hog farming on the map. In addition, in a story line you just can’t make up, she met and fell in love with Bill Niman, an older-than-her sustainable cattle rancher and entrepreneur, and her life was changed forever. P.S. he calls her “porkchop.”

In addition, her work with Waterkeeper led her inside the belly of the beast—or inside the poop lagoons of the beasts, anyway, and the book follows her journey. The reader makes discoveries alongside her, experiencing her righteous indignation and disbelief upon seeing those farms, as well as her heartbreak over the treatment of the animals she meets. As she explains, “the assembly lines of industrial systems function well for the mass production of inanimate objects. But they are complete failures at respecting the individuality, instincts, and needs of living creatures.”

Niman takes the reader sharply and clearly through the evolution of industrial farming in this country, from its origins in poultry, up through hogs, then cows, and then fish. She expertly explains shows the connections between these various industries; and how this country’s industrialist mindset, and its desire for more efficiency and lower cost has brought us a livestock system that externalizes all costs and all inefficiencies. With her as a guide, you can’t help but see the ludicrousness of a system that produces so much poop, in such a fashion that there is absolutely nowhere to put it. Or produces food that is cheap for the consumer but leaves the farmer in a lifetime of inescapable debt.

And no one, by the way, is off the hook. For those vegetarians in the mix (although I wonder how many vegetarians besides Niman herself will read a book with the word “porkchop” in the title), you find out that industrial dairy farming of milk and eggs is just as bad, especially in the realm of animal cruelty. All of which could leave an eater feeling very despondent and out of options—hence one of the final chapters called “Finding the Right Foods.” This is one of the weaker parts of the book, I think, in which Niman describes a kind of motivated foraging that I, and likely most of you, attempt each day, one that is really helped by living in the fertile areas of this country’s west coast (Bolinas, CA). For the average reader, this kind of scavenger hunt might be less feasible; but until we have an overhaul of the food system, I suppose it’ll have to do. This chapter is evidence of where the book tries to be all things to all people, and where it falters, if only slightly. It’s memoir meets muckraking; shopping manual meets farming history.

The book stirred up a lot for me, and really got me thinking about our task at hand. At the heart of the sustainable food movement are many issues—ecology, animal welfare, community, sustainability, and, yes, morality. And this is where we sometimes hit roadblocks. I know that on a personal level I struggle to communicate the work I do at my job or the way I shop for food without an implicit value system looming over the conversation. Nobody likes to feel judged, and sometimes people stop listening when they do. With Niman’s book in my back pocket, I’ve got one more tool in my box. But the question that lingers for me at the end of this righteous book is: how do we tell this story of what’s wrong with our food system, and how do we suggest an alternate way without sounding self-righteous? Without pushing away the people we need to listen?

The food policy wonks leaped, quickly exposing the holes in McWilliams’ alarmist piece.  (My two-cents is here) It seemed that leaving out the important details above left the author without a leg to stand on, yet The Atlantic was quick to give McWilliams a platform. He weakly defended his position, calling the National Pork Board funding matter a distraction, and half-heartedly admitted that he may have been wrong to leave out the details of seropositivity.  His limp-wristed retort included an admission that he was in fact a sustainable food supporter, playing devil’s advocate.

The only problem is, as McWilliams admits, this was a piece for lay readers, who without further information, could stop buying sustainable pork after reading such claims (and they won’t just be going vegetarian, as the author might have hoped).

Its worth congratulating the food writers who gave a retort to this piece, and it speaks to an important fact McWilliams seems not to have gotten: established sustainable food advocates and newbies alike can handle transparency.

This got me thinking about what a more considered and productive devil’s advocate would have done in this situation.  Instead of seeking only to shock the public with misleading information, a more nuanced critique (I’ll admit, it might not have made it into the Times, but thats another matter) could have presented the possibility that free-range pork is not all it’s cracked up to be, and balanced out this one-sided slam.

The root of the story, and the one I’d like to understand better, is the role of antibiotics in pig husbandry, and by extension, whether antibiotics are necessary or positive in any way.  An honest contrarian would have also disclosed the role of other serious pathogens like MRSA, which have been found in industrial pig operations where antibiotics are being used liberally to fatten up pigs. This would have served to give a better picture of hog confinement in general –  otherwise, McWilliams is only hurting the cause he claims to care about.

A well-rounded critique of the work sustainable food advocates are doing in all arenas is valid. However in misleading the general public, and laying the contrarianism on thick, McWilliams didn’t start a conversation, but instead just threw in a rotten tomato.

The issues our food system faces are very serious, and one thing we can safely say is that industrial-scale animal operations have seen their day in the sun. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the treatment of the animals they eat, and from a food safety perspective, we can pretty confidently say that industrially raised meat is less safe. (Fortunately, there is more than one study to back this up). That being said, we have a lot of work to do, and everything we do will not be perfect.

Unfortunately, it seems that McWilliams has fallen prey to the wiles of marketing.  In seeking to market himself as a contrarian, he has even penned a book called Just Food: How Locavores are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.  Now honestly, did he pick out that title to scare the trichonosis out of people, or what? If he were a true sustainable food advocate, perhaps he would have written a book titled, A Closer Look at Locavorism: What’s Not Working and How We Can Fix It.  I might have been more excited to read that.