Why We Need to Rise up Against Industrial Agriculture (Again)

By Will Allen, AlterNet. Posted May 3, 2008.

This article is adapted from Will Allen's new book The War on Bugs (Chelsea Green, 2008).

With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else chop it up into sausage.

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle described the most disgusting practices in the preparation, preservation, and canning of rotten meat. His expos helped create the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which came into being to watch over food safety issues. That was a hundred years ago. Our food supply is now worse than ever, filled with pesticides and pharmaceuticals that are both unnecessary and which are radically harming our ability to survive in an increasingly fragile planet.

As many people know-or at least suspect-the FDA does not do much to protect us from hidden dangers in our food supply. It exists to protect large businesses, large-scale farmers, and corporations that produce various chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) plays a similar role, as recent reports document.

When Sinclair wrote the above description, most cows, pigs, and chickens were raised on pastures. Consequently, most animals arrived at the meat packers in a healthy state. That is definitely not the case today.

In the last 15 years the U.S. meat system has changed dramatically. We went from a time when most, if not all, meat animals were still raised on pasture, to the industrialization of our meat supply.

During this same time period, the directors of our federal agencies -- the USDA, FDA, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- advocated new practices: meat and dairy animals were confined; farms became factories. This gave rise to ever larger operations that required less space. The theory: animals don't lose energy (and weight) foraging for food on pastures so they can be ready for market earlier. Farmers would save money on feed. Everyone wins.

Or do they? In order to confine millions of animals in close quarters it was necessary to use antibiotics to prevent disease outbreaks and epidemics. As a result the federal government, many state governments, and universities became cheerleaders for intensive confinement, animal management-and actively promoted the use of chemicals to support its success.

By 2006 there were 97,000 feedlots that produced 78 percent of all the beef slaughtered in the United States. This represented about 28 million head of beef cows.

In spite of the anemic nature of most of our animal regulations, it is still against the law to slaughter for human consumption any animals that cannot stand and walk. But, as the Humane Society documented, the law is meaningless. They exposed USDA inspectors at a feedlot where animals that were too sick to stand were shoved onto the slaughter line with the front-end loaders of tractors.

200 million pounds of beef recalled in just the last twelve months should tell you something about the state of meat production. It is terribly flawed. In 2007, more than 60 million pounds of tainted beef were recalled. In 2008, 143 million pounds of beef have already been recalled.

The haunting question is how many more horrific meat tales are out there without a Humane Society whistle blower or an Upton Sinclair to document it?

Chew on these seemingly disparate facts, which show the results of our growing industrialized, chemical-soaked food supply:

In 1994, 73 percent of U.S. pigs were raised in pastures and pens on small farms. By 2007, 95 percent were raised in large confinement hog operations-that's 57 million heavily medicated pigs.

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Will Allen is an organic farmer in Vermont, and author of The War on Bugs (Chelsea Green, 2008). He is currently a co-chair of Farms Not Arms, is a policy advisory board member of the Organic Consumers Association, and serves on the board of Rural Vermont.

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