More Americans are demanding higher quality meat–animals fed appropriate, antibiotic-free diets on small farms and slaughtered humanely–and they are choosing to eat less of it, too. Whether turned off by endless recalls, or turned on by the health and environmental benefits of eating less meat, growth in campaigns like Meatless Monday show a powerful shift in the Zeitgeist.

Meanwhile Big Meat is taking on the Environmental Protection Agency to maintain its right to let manure run into our waterways, as it defends the excess antibiotic use (80 percent of antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to livestock), inhumane practices, and consolidation of the industry as the only way to feed the world. The beef industry has even invested in a communications degree that aims to revitalize the consumer image of industrial beef.

The conversation around how we bring meat to the table is multifaceted and is the subject of a lively discussion on April 14 at New York University entitled “What’s the Matter With Mass-Produced Meat?”

The conversation around how we bring meat to the table is multifaceted and is the subject of a lively discussion on April 14 at New York University entitled “What’s the Matter With Mass-Produced Meat?”

Co-sponsored by Kitchen Table Talks and Eating Liberally, the event will feature Daniel Imhoff, editor of CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, Michael Moss, the New York Times investigative reporter whose exposé on E. coli-tainted industrial beef, “The Burger That Shattered Her Life,” won a Pulitzer Prize; and Marion Nestle, NYU nutrition professor who served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, and author of Food Politics and What to Eat, among other books. I am honored to moderate the conversation and welcome your questions below in the comment section or send me a tweet @civileater in advance of the panel.

The discussion will take place at Fales Library at New York University, 70 Washington Square So, Third Floor from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Please RSVP to rsvp@library.nyu.edu or call 212.992.7050. This event is free and open to the public, but please be mindful when you reserve a space as seating is limited. Books will be available for sale and there will be a signing following the event. Sustainable food and refreshments will be provided by Northern Spy.

More about the team behind the event:

Eating Liberally is a social network whose aim is to swell the ranks of ecologically enlightened “food citizens” through spreading the word about books, films, and other projects that promote an alternative, plant-based food chain powered by the sun instead of Sunoco.

Kitchen Table Talks is a regular conversation series about the American food system. Its mission is to build community and exchange knowledge and ideas that lead to specific actions to make meaningful improvements in our food system.

Photo: Nourishing Our Children Photos via Flickr

Tom Philpott over at Grist took down the evidence Klein quotes in the piece, and which inspired its title. Klein bit back, addressing the issue again and pointing to the growth of industrial agriculture in China, India, and particularly Brazil as a case in point about the inevitability of growth in agriculture. I thought I would attempt to challenge Klein’s assumptions once again.

Klein’s question about whether any industry has decentralized historically is, at least in the case of farming, a bit silly. Due to increasing climate uncertainty, and waning water and energy resources, the question is not whether industrial agriculture will decentralize, but when and how.

Any farmer will tell you that the weather is her biggest concern, and increasing uncertainty will push farmers by force to diversify instead of putting all their eggs in one basket–that is, unless the government keeps giving incentives in the form of crop insurance for farming monocultures. (As the Farm Bill debate heats up, cutting or changing crop insurance is on the table. But more likely direct payments–what farmers get whether they work the land or not–and conservation programs will be considered for cuts.) Instead, it might be rising oil prices and the changing availability of water, which scientists agree is on the horizon, that could overstep the ability for government intervention, and deliver a death blow to the industrial promise to feed the world.

Furthermore, farming is a unique “industry,” in that what it produces is perishable–and therefore time is of the essence, favoring a local system. Sure we’ve come up with methods of pre-picking fruits and using chemicals to ripen them off the vine, found profits even when jets and trucks are employed to bring these foods to the plate, and have convinced the consumer to except flabby tasting food. But these could be hurdles that get harder to leap.

Efficiency is the keystone in the pro-industrial argument, and yet industrial farms produce a sea of poorly-regulated manure, food that is then excessively processed and packaged, and encourage higher meat consumption by making it cheap. Klein’s argument that big farms can be more sustainable–pointing to the case of Brazil, which I will get to in a moment–ignores the fact that its model is inherently unsustainable.

Meanwhile, research suggests that organic yields are higher over time, and that industrial yields plateau and even peter out. In addition, organic production does things like protect soil micro-organisms that are necessary to get nutrients to plants and protect them from disease–considerations the industrial model doesn’t usually take into account.

So what of Brazil, the case Klein points to, from the Economist:

For them, sustainability is the greatest virtue and is best achieved by encouraging small farms and organic practices. They frown on monocultures and chemical fertilisers. They like agricultural research but loathe genetically modified (GM) plants. They think it is more important for food to be sold on local than on international markets. Brazil’s farms are sustainable, too, thanks to abundant land and water. But they are many times the size even of American ones. Farmers buy inputs and sell crops on a scale that makes sense only if there are world markets for them. And they depend critically on new technology.

Despite the contradiction here–like the fact that it states that the country “loathes” GM seed, and yet has the second-largest land mass planted in them (after the U.S.), and that the country supports small farms, and yet most are many times the size as those in America, and that farmers are buying inputs on a huge scale yet shun chemical fertilizers–Brazil is doing things differently and I’m sure the U.S. could learn something from their model. The article goes on to explain that between 1996 and 2006, the total value of Brazil’s crops increased 365 percent without subsidies. With a wealth of land and water resources, and value placed on agricultural research–notably in breeding grasses, cattle and their own GM soy, and using lime and lab-produced micro-organisms, making fertile previously unproductive soil–we are only seeing the beginning of Brazil’s industrial prowess.

However, the article paints a rosy picture of industrial farming, and fails to mention any of the environmental impacts this kind of high-intensity production is having. As one commenter notes, “The Cerrado – Brazilian Savanah [sic]- is the second largest area of Biodiversity in Brazil. Second only to the Amazon. Hence, large areas are being destroyed in order to produce commodities.” Another commenter alighted on the fact that a higher rate of insects in the tropics and vast monocultures would require higher rates of pesticide use and, “Thus, the critical headwaters of Brazil’s two major rivers become heavily freighted with toxic agricultural chemicals, with “externalized” consequences for river ecology and downstream users.”

On a recent trip there, I saw that on the consumer side, Brazil is also implementing some of the most forward thinking policies to end hunger–including universal school feeding and subsidized restaurants, both of which favor local buying, as well as urban agriculture programs, added markets for local farmers, and even writing into the Brazilian constitution last February that food is a right of citizenship. Further, Brazil has already achieved a Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger ahead of the 2015 deadline. But these actions were taken out of necessity, because when food is placed into a market context it fails to feed everybody equitably.

So are industrial agriculture and organic agriculture just producing different products, and some people will always be “dumb” enough to buy organic food (According to the House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-MN)? Big Ag would have us believe that there is room in the market for everyone. But without the government propping it up with subsidies, the industrial behemoth would not survive. Without abundant energy and water resources, industrial agriculture would be paralyzed.

In fact, it seems the future lies in hybridized farms–diverse production and multi-tasking farmers employing direct-to-consumer sales, eco-tourism, education programs, and even off-farm income to make their work viable.

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?

That’s the sort of feeling I get often when I watch many of the recent spate of food documentaries to be released.  Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system, and on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, but not their strategy.

It happened again while watching the British documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several ten-minute segments via YouTube because it hasn’t been released in the US, primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the producer (Tracy Worcester) by the film’s main “villain,” Smithfield Foods (the world’s largest pork producer).  Despite four letters threatening litigation, the UK’s Channel 4 played the film last summer.  But since no US insurer would back the film’s release here in the States due to concerns over threatened lawsuits from Smithfield, it has become essentially a black market film.  Thus as Americans have fought censorship by our government for more than 200 years, corporate censorship continues unabated.

Smithfield does, in one sense, have cause for concern: this film certainly does not show their company in the most favorable light.  Right off the bat the viewer is struck with some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated, apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities.  We hear from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots.  When this large corporation and their methods of competition had pushed the owner of a small family farm in Poland out of business, he said, “I don’t know whether I should retire, hang myself, or emigrate.”

In Poland in the early 90’s, there were 27,500 independent pig farmers.  Today there are 2,200 hoglots, and 1,600 of them are wholly owned by Smithfield Foods.  Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million pigs per year in 15 countries and accruing annual sales around $12 billion.  Each of those factory farms in Poland replaced 10 family farms with 2-3 minimum wage jobs.  Any objective accountant might call that efficiency, but one protester in the film had another way to describe it:

Why is it, when people are in bondage to their government it is called ‘tyranny,’ but when the oppressor is a multinational corporation, it is called ‘efficiency?’

It was precisely this form of “efficiency” the art and social critic John Ruskin had in mind when he said “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply.  The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.”

Smithfield is not alone under Worcester’s microscope: she takes large financial institutions to task as well.  In an interview with noted Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer, he points out that Big Finance has its fingers in absolutely everything–making 1/3 of all political contributions in the US.  This is a figure that is sure to only increase in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Citizen’s United case.  Big Money’s influence, along with that of many other large and wealthy corporations, dictates the type and scope of laws throughout the US and the world.  My daddy used to call this the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

That influence is precisely what makes the competitive practices of Smithfield (not to mention many other agribusiness conglomerates) patently unfair.  As Pig Business points out, if the likes of Smithfield had to pay for the damages they cause–to the environment and to human health–then any small farmer in the world could out-compete them.  But they don’t, because the game is rigged.

So most of the time agribusiness will take its profits and go obliviously on its way.  But if anyone points out that this emperor has no clothes, they have scads of lawyers and PR professionals to make certain no one hears.  Watching Pig Business on YouTube is one small way to get past their invisible hand.

When I moved to the country this past spring, I breathed a sigh of relief for the natural environment and abundant animal life surrounding me. Gophers are everywhere—supposedly they ran the Russians out of Sonoma County—their wild escapades are evident across the dimpled landscape of the 80-acre organic farm I call home. Jack rabbits run through the olive groves and coyotes cry their lonely songs at night.

Dozens of birds encircle the farm: owls, hawks, crows, blue birds, hummingbirds, robins. Their songs and dances endlessly entertain. I’ve been graced by fox, deer, badgers, skunk, and raccoons, not to mention the neighbors’ chicken, ducks, sheep, goats, horses, llamas, and ostrich. And, I’ve fallen madly for the cows in the grassy field across the way. The glossy girls do a little jig when they see me coming with my bucket of kitchen leftovers and garden waste, which I should be saving for compost.

Nothing prepared me, though, for the wild turkey who planted herself firmly in my front yard the first week I arrived. Although the farm is deer-fenced, a small hen kept showing up in the bushes near the gate. I kept shooing her over the fence, thinking I was helping her to meet up with the flock (or “rafter”) down the road. A few minutes later, she would hop back over the fence, effortlessly flying and gliding back to her same spot. Finally, I investigated her perch: a nest, filled with several large turkey eggs. Oh my; turkey babies!

I respectfully kept my distance, but the next morning, I noticed that one of the eggs had rolled out of the nest and into the garden. I panicked. What to do? Touch it and risk her rejecting the egg, or contaminating her whole nest? Leave it and know that one of the night animals would undoubtedly take it? I decided to let nature take its course and leave the egg alone. In the morning, it was gone. I sighed. I wasn’t a very good guardian.

Several weeks later, the eggs were gone and I saw a small rafter of turkeys making their way across the road. Hallelujah! The fuzzy poults were plentiful and beautiful and the mother hen watched cautiously over them. I watched with fascination for weeks as the brood grew up and interacted so gracefully with each other and their natural environment. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals, poultry farmer Frank Reese writes about his life long relationship with turkeys and his observation of this relationship:

I just always loved the beauty of them, the majesticness. I like how they strut…I love their feather patterns. I’ve always loved the personality of them. They’re so curious, so playful, so friendly and full of life….Having been around turkeys for almost sixty years, I know their vocabulary….The mother turkey is amazing to listen to. She has a tremendous vocal range when she’s speaking to her babies. And the little babies understand….Turkey’s know what’s going on and can communicate it—in their world, in their language.

Now, more than half a year later, the sassy teenagers pretty much rule the roost of our country road. All of the neighbors slow down to let them pass as they make their rounds and everyone keeps a watchful eye on the birds. Every day, the turkeys greet me happily on the road, their red wattles shaking as they run to hop over the fence.

I’ve been reading up on the hidden life of turkeys and thinking a lot about them lately, especially in connection to the sadness that befalls me each Thanksgiving, when 46 million turkeys are killed. I’ve also thought that, much like the rest of our industrialized food system, how little most people know about the animals they eat. Much has been made of the lack of intelligence of the turkey. They’re often portrayed as dumb or clumsy. I’m convinced that this incorrect depiction has more to do with our cruel breeding for fast growth and unnaturally large birds. Today’s turkeys are mercilessly supersized and cruelly raised, bred, and slaughtered. Frank Reese writes:

Not a single turkey you can buy in a supermarket could walk normally, much less jump or fly…They can’t even have sex. Not the antibiotic-free, or organic, or free-range, or anything. They all have the same foolish genetics, and their bodies won’t allow for it anymore. Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination…Tell me what could be sustainable about that?

This Thanksgiving, think about celebrating compassion, by sponsoring a turkey instead of eating one. You can adopt a turkey by fostering it through Animal Place and Farm Sanctuary has a great campaign to help adopt a turkey.

Photo: Vicki’s Nature

The article, entitled Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals, goes after the whole local food movement as a kind of effete endeavor by people who don’t know what they are talking about. And since the New York Times alerted its online readers to the article without digging much deeper, I will attempt to do so here.

Christopher Cook’s (Author, Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us) response on the listserv Comfood to the Omnivore’s Delusion skillfully frames many problems with Blake Hurst’s letter.

Cook points out that Hurst conflates and confuses the personal with the systemic – mis-identifying his family’s hard work and integrity with an industrial food system that is blatantly unsustainable, exploitative, unfair, and without integrity.

Corporate disinformation and public relations campaigns have used this media relations strategy since the tobacco Industry’s pushback against anti-smoking campaigns of the late 1960s. The strategy attempts to demonize the debate by creating straw men to be knocked down by corporate messages.

Today such disinformation efforts easily deflect farmer attention away from global corporate monopoly control of the food system that dictates prices and production standards/procedures towards agri-intellectuals and supposedly “wacko” consumers who, in the recent words of a Michigan politician, want to give “chickens the right to drive.”

This reminds me of Dario Fo’s famous play “The Accidental Death of An Anarchist,” which ends with the police inspector saying something like, “Whenever we get too close to the truth, a good scandal can distract our attention.”

Again, as Cook has so wisely pointed out, Farm Bureau official Blake is acting rationally, given the public subsidies, monopoly corporate control and general power relationships of the current global food system. (And Tom Philpott over at Grist has done the digging, check out his response to the article.) In other words, he is not “crazy.” But neither are we.

So what do we do in response to this carefully crafted industrial food corporate counterattack of which this letter is just a part? Blake’s own words offer some clues.

Blake wrote, “Farmers can raise food in different ways, if that is what the market wants.” This acknowledgment should be at the heart of our discussion with conventional farmers who are trapped in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome relationship with the industrial food system. They have literally bet “the farm” on oil intensive, water intensive mono-crop production techniques dictated to them by global monopoly food corporations.

Today, consumers increasingly want food raised in ways that reflect and respect their values: local food production, humane treatment of animals, no antibiotics or hormones, and based on building healthy living soil.

These consumers choices are not a conspiracy, are not wacko acts, but a simple expression of the free market system dictum, “the customer is always right.” It is simply good business for farmers to change the way they farm. Wal-Mart stopped purchasing fluid milk produced with rBGH (a Monsanto developed hormone to boast milk production) simply because their customers demanded it.

Blake also wrote, “[Bill] McKibben is certain that the contracts these (CAFO) farmers sign with companies like Tyson are unfair, and the farmers might agree.” The words, “farmers might agree” is an understatement. Poultry and swine confinement farmers have repeatedly sued their “integrators” (the corporations that vertically control the industrial animal system) over the last decade.

At issue are confiscatory producer contracts that make the small family farmers virtual serfs on their own farms. For instance, small contract poultry producers actually supply over 50 percent of the capital necessary to keep Tysons and Perdue and their like operating – yet have no ownership stake in the corporation and face “blacklisting” if they don’t do as they are told.

I propose we stand with small farmers, now trapped in CAFO industrial contracts, who are fighting back and help them move to sustainable, humane, local food production.

Local seed laws and local animal treatment laws offer one path for consumers and farmers to cooperate in a community-effort to reform the food system. That is why industrial food corporations push so hard for state pre-emption of local control over these issues (the Monsanto laws).

One final point deals with farmer access to alternative information.

Blake’s letter contains a number of fundamental mistakes about the nature and effectiveness of “organic” farming processes and results. Unless farmers can have access to the truth about ecologically intelligent farming, they will remain captives of the industrial system.

The Rodale Institute, with its New Farm publication and extensive website, offers information about effective, science-based alternatives to industrial farming processes. We need to support outreach campaigns by institutions like Rodale to help farmers and consumers alike.

As Fred Kirschenmann points out, “a food system based on cheap oil, surplus water, and stable climate is not sustainable. We all are going to have change or relationship to food production, whether we want to or not.”

Let’s help small and mid-size farmers like Blake Hurst escape the industrial system – rewarding their courage and hard work, offering them informational and policy support for a transition to sustainable agriculture, and making fun of AEI’s attempts to demonize the debate.