Drive through Don Oppliger’s Feed Yard in Clovis, New Mexico, and you’ll see 35,000 head of beef cattle confined to pens that stretch across the flat, barren landscape. The constant shuffling of hooves raises a bacteria-laden dust cloud that’s carried by the prevailing winds into west Texas, where it joins the plumes of hundreds of other feedlots. At one end of… return to article
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Reader Comments (64)Page 1 of 1 pagesOink ... Moo ... Hotdogs and Hamburgers.
Meat and meat byproducts like lips and assholes.
Yummy?
They use everything,
but the squeal and the moo,
for real, they even use the poo.I haven’t been able to bring myself to eat a hotdog for many years.
When I was a kid we lived on a small farm and I thought nothing of it , or almost nothing, when my dad chopped the head off a chicken every now and then. I collected eggs every day from our little flock of chickens. Ahh ... the idyllic innocence of youth, but it never bothered me until I had the opportunity to see larger commercial farms and the conditions that they kept the animals in to ‘feed the city people’ as they explained it to me. After seeing the wholesale slaughter it did make the individual slaughter back at home a subject for more serious reflection, especially when it became my chore to chop a chicken eevry now and then.
Now I live in town but we have a small organic free range poultry farm nearby for fresh eggs and poultry. Even the grocery stores have organic products available. It’s a better and more responsible choice. Not only for poultry and eggs but fruits, vegetables, rice and beans too.
These days I make an effort to eat less animals and make better choices when I do and try to remember to be thankful to be at the top of the food chain.
Posted by David in Canada on Mar 25, 2006 at 2:55 AM ... and doesn’t the piggy in the picture at the top of the article look sad?
Posted by David in Canada on Mar 25, 2006 at 2:55 AM One of the points this writer tries to make about factory farms is the environmental damage they cause and how they monopolize vital resources like water causing cost increases for the community. They mostly exist because of the monopolization of the market for poulty, pork, and beef by four big food processing and packing conglomerates who control between 65 and 80% of the market for these products. These big conglomerates pressure the intermediate factory farms (called Consolidated Animal Feedlot Operations-or CAFOs by the industry and the USDA) by downward monopsonist pressure on the “gate prices” of their livestock thus forcing more intensive breeding and use of anti-biotics, steroids and growth hormones, and other such inputs to compensate for the squeeze applied by the “Big Four.” There has been a great shift in the proportion of the food dollar going to factory farm intermediaries over to the big packing houses and mega-retailers like the Walmart Supercenters. Even the factory farmer is being sqeezed out and those remaining have become less independant ranchers than an intermediary link in a global agribusiness chain controlled by the big packing monopolies.
Often this creates uneconomic and wasteful activity like independant free range ranchers in Iowa for the first time having to ship beef at big losses over long distances instead of to an IBP (Iowa Beef Packers) packing house nearby because companies like IBP now own their own herds and don’t need to pay the local ranchers much. The price to the consumer keeps increasing though the unit cost to the big packing houses declines as do the prices to the independent ranchers and CAFOs. This issue is the concentrated and monopolized market for highly processed food by big business and the social impact they have on the industry and local communities in general. The organic food, farmers market, and sustainable agriculture movements seem to have some goog answers.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 25, 2006 at 6:44 AM The author, Mark Winne, does a fair job of covering the environmental issues, and articles like this are, of course, always welcome. But the article does suffer from some shortcomings. To name a few, it
(1) ignores the moral issue of exploiting animals for our purposes,
(2) pays slight attention to the shamefully cruel nature of the business of raising non-human animals for consumption (or entertainment, clothing, experimentation, and so on),
(3) ignores the health effects on humans of eating meat vs. a plant-based diet,
(4) ignores the fact that methane is the leading contributing factor towards global warming (see, for example: http://www.earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm),
(5) fails to mention that the use of grain to feed livestock is dreadfully inefficient and robs the poor of substance in order to feed the rich a steady diet of animal products, and
(6) doesn’t discuss the wide variety of animal product substitutes available to us today.
Because of these shortcomings, I’m not sure that the article will have a large impact on individuals’ food buying decisions, which is a necessary ingredient for reform of these horrific practices. But it does sensitize readers to the subject, and that’s always a good start.
Posted by nyvegan on Mar 27, 2006 at 12:55 AM nyvegan,
Your observations are quite on the mark! This is an issue about which I am gravely concerned as well! The environmental impact of factory farming is only one major concern among which are the inefficiency use of grain for food energy which as you point out consists of a transfer of resources from the poor to the rich as well as the ethical treatment of farm animals.
I do think that the entire issues turns less on our consumption habits or attitudes than on the role of agribusiness in the globalization of capital. The article touches on the concentration of livestock production for the national market the small number of farms producing the majority of poultry, pork, and beef. The free range, or organic ranchers, are all but squeezed out of the market. Most of the farms that produce meat for the big packing houses are an increasingly concentrated number of factory farms who are locked into long term contracts to insure those farms a steady market for their livestock. To get the contracts the ranchers take a per head cut in the “gate price” of the livestock over the term of the contract. Downward price pressure is further applied by the increase in the size of corporate owned herds which the “big four” often purchase from each other in order to artificially depress the gate prices. This causes the ranchers to overbreed and over use steroids to offset the decline in income from livestock price cuts which aggravates the negative impact of factory farming. The big four see an increase in their profit margins increasingly at the expense of the ranchers and consumers. About ten years ago a number of ranchers filed a class action suit against the illegal monopoly pricing practices of the big packing houses based on the 1921 Packinghouse and Stockyards Act which was to protect ranchers from the monopoly power of the big packers. To date it is still tied up in the 11th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals.
The issue seems to be the increased monopolization of our national food production system. Much of this is tied in with the highly profitable fast food market which sells poor quality junk but are a steady market for factory farm production. A good example is KFC and other chicken joints that buy on contract from factory farms that use steriods in the mass breeding of chickens. The same is true of beef. These practices would be far less harmful to consumers and small producers if our meat consumption dropped to healthier levels and most consumers switched to organically produced products.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 27, 2006 at 8:35 AM A VERY good article, BECAUSE it told us, reminded us, of what we all knew already !
“”“In other words, our food system may be looking at a doomsday denouement before the middle of this century. It is becoming increasingly certain that the water will run out, the land will no longer absorb the torrent of nutrient waste spread upon it, and the over-bred, antibiotic and hormone-injected animals will eventually succumb to their natural limitations. Poole puts it this way, “The factory system of food production will simply implode.” Until the citizens of the heartland rise up in sufficient numbers to hold their government and the corporations accountable, this is both the best and worst we can hope for. “”“
Here in france I hear that the 5 central buyers for the hypermarkets have moved themselves technically ‘offshore’, maybe to switzerland, so less or no tax to pay, and they can play the transfer-pricing game to the maximum. HewlettPackardFrance did the same, cut the tax-take here by 80%.
So on every imaginable scale of reference, going from the water-table to the governmental revenues from corporations, the system we have is going down the pan.
Well, apart from buying bread from my neighbour who grows wheat and mills and bakes the flour, and my local cheese-makers etc, I will be on the streets this afternoon against our government who are 100%FOR all that we oppose.!!
It is pitifully inadequate, but we are trying to spread the word, wake people up.
So if my american friends see a few burning cars and excited kids somewhere around Paris, on CNN etc, just look on it as media-froth. Hundreds of thousands of very ordinary bods will be out in cities, and small towns in rural areas like mine, not burning cars.
Posted by frog on Mar 28, 2006 at 4:10 AM Frog,
Since the 1990s, an increasing proportion of US livestock products are marketed outside the US mostly in East Asia. Japan was the single biggest buyer of US beef until the “mad cow” disease fear. I believe they now are purchasing our livestock products again. What is amazing is how US pork and chicken are quickly entering the growing Chinese and Korean markets where the raising of pigs and chickens are a widespread tradition. The real logic to this is to somewhat offset the trade deficit with East Asian countries. This can never really be done with US agricultural products. The US only exports about $40 billion dollars worth of food annually about 20% of which is livestock products. Most of it goes to Japan, China, and South Korea. The US won’‘t balance the trade with these countries with these products. What it will do is create a taste in the large cities of Asia for chemically loaded meat products while impoverishing both US and Asian small farmers and forcing them off the land to become cheap labor. The more this process skews the distribution of income the more there is a market for expensive US meat products. At one time these countries were self sufficient in meat which was only a minor part of the local diet at best. Now we are pushing meat slowly but surely in cultures where fish, whole grains, and fresh vegetables were the basis for the local diet. They are sure to be as unhealthy as we have become with our meat based diet.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 28, 2006 at 4:55 AM Cabby,
As usual I learn a lot from your post;.
The competitive advantage of US production in those horrendous feedlots is due to vast economies of scale, proximity to feedstuffs, zero environmental regulation, and much of it also susidised also I guess by various Farm Bills.
I am not at all sure if there IS a logic to offset trade deficits, some flawed masterplan. More like the march of folly.
I agree this druggy system may work for a while, at the same time as similar producers such as Brasil increase production, but in the not so long term must come crashing down.
Completely mad, but I also drive a car, while waiting for the cheaper electrique bike to arrive here to diminish my car-use by 30%.
Posted by frog on Mar 28, 2006 at 5:30 AM Frog,
One of the significant reasons that I found these trends so interesting is that the US used to import a good deal of beef from overseas mostly because it was cheaper to graze and slaughter cattle in the third world than in the US. Rising beef prices in the early 1970s began to push indigenous small holders off the land in such places as Guatemala and Brazil where much deforestation was carried out in the name of grazing land for cattle. This gave rise to political crises and ecological ones. The cattle was slaughtered and processed more cheaply in Latin America and exported to US markets with the profits pocketed by the big US meat packers and food conglomerates. Now that there is sufficient cheap labor from Mexico for US domestic factory farms , we have more domestic production and even exports to Asia. Big conglomerates have created concentrated international production and supply chains that have eliminated many small independant producers and integrated many of the large and medium size ones into these vertically integrated production chains on a dependant basis. It is really all about monopoly capital on a global scale. In the end, the export of capital and the concentration of investment is at the heart of the issue of wealth concentration and the social and other problems caused by this economic trend.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 28, 2006 at 5:53 AM “(1) ignores the moral issue of exploiting animals for our purposes”
The bible says its okay to farm animals. Good enough for me!“(2) pays slight attention to the shamefully cruel nature of the business of raising non-human animals for consumption (or entertainment, clothing, experimentation, and so on),”
This is also a stupid hippy statement. How do you begin to assume whether the pig enjoys standing in pig crap or not? Maybe he does, you don’t know, because he didn’t tell you. My friends do shamefully cruel things all the time to entertain themselves.“(3) ignores the health effects on humans of eating meat vs. a plant-based diet,”
When meat, fish, poultry, dairy foods, and eggs are missing in the diet, several important nutrients could also be missing in action. Most vegetarians dont consume adequate amounts of protein, iron, zinc, and vitamin B12, calcium, and vitamins A and D. Even though fatty meats may be limited on a vegetarian diet, a steady diet of fatty dairy products could cause the amount of artery-clogging saturated fat that is consumed to be off the Richter scale. Also, a vegetarian diet isn’t guaranteed to keep you svelte if it is a predominately junk food vegetarian diet that is loaded with high calorie cookies, cakes, candy, and sweetened drinks.
Huh?“(4) ignores the fact that methane is the leading contributing factor towards global warming (see, for example: http://www.earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm),”
Youre probably right, but today we have many scientists working on using methane produced in landfills and farms as an energy source (some already do). I can’t blame the pigs entirely, I fart too.“(5) fails to mention that the use of grain to feed livestock is dreadfully inefficient and robs the poor of substance in order to feed the rich a steady diet of animal products, and”
There are many people working proffesionally to modify livestock feed to be more efficient. They don’t just use grain.“(6) doesn’t discuss the wide variety of animal product substitutes available to us today. “
Theres a reason we don’t use animal product substitutes. It’s because its not cost-effective. In every single grocery store I’ve been to, vegetarian alternatives are MORE expensive, not less expensive. When you barely have enough money to eat each day, I guess that affects your decision more.I dont agree with you, but I think the author did a great job. Please consider the role of a news source is to provide information, not give a slanted opinion. He used real cause-and-effect examples to illustrate the problem instead of Hippy bullshit.
Posted by spayced on Mar 30, 2006 at 7:11 AM Re Mark Winne’s Meat Industrial Complex
I thought that this was a pretty good article, but confusing in that he fails to recognize some basic differences in the chicken, dairy, hog, and beef cattle industries. I was also not clear in his definition of what constitutes a “factory farm”. The factory farm term is generally so muddled that just throwing it out there without definition is pretty useless. I have my own idea of what it is, but I can tell that he uses the term somewhat differently.
I would like to see him focus on the hog industry, which has only recently seen the rise of huge hog farms and the piglet to plate vertical integration that is central to factory farming. There may still be opportunity to reverse some of this trend…......but bundling the discussion with other types of livestock which do not “fit” logically with the issues of today’s hog farming only serves to fritter away a rapidly receding opportunity.
Posted by J Petersmith on Mar 30, 2006 at 6:01 PM According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service over 231 million pounds of US pork were exported to foreign markets in the month of January 2006 alone. The US is the world’s pork export leader. Its two main foreign markets are Japan and Mexico. US pork exports exceed that of beef and poultry due to fears of diseases like poultry influenza (AI)and mad cow disease.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 31, 2006 at 5:50 AM RE: Comments by “spayced”, in response to my posting of March 26.
First, our laws are based on the Constitution, not the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Talmud, the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, or any other religious scripture or work of faith says – nor should they be. Futhermore, the Bible is an unchanging text, while our cultural is constantly adapting. If we put aside what we know about our legal system and the sciences to pursue this argument, we learn from Gen. 1.29f that the giving of dominion over animals is not a touchstone for any abuse we wish to impart; instead, it is granted such that subsequent upon its bestowal, God commands a vegetarian diet. Hiding behind the Bible in order to justify factory farming is simply duplicitous and indefensible.
The consciousness of non-human animals can be demonstrated through similarity of behavior to that of humans, they share neurological similarities and can thus feel pain, and their demonstrated ability to communicate and solve problems. Little debate over the sentience of animals has survived beyond Descartes’ archaic view of animals as living machines. With regard to pigs, these animals have been favorably compared to the brightest of chimpanzees. They are taken from their mothers just weeks after birth, put into small cages, and slaughtered at 6 months, 12-15 years short of a full life. By observing their neurotic behavior it is immediately obvious that they do not “enjoy” themselves.
Regarding the shamefully cruel acts performed for entertainment, your friends should seek professional help. Cruelty to animals is 1 of 3 leading childhood warning signs regarding the potential to be a serial killer.
A balanced vegan diet is healthier than a balanced diet that includes animal products. Malnourishment is not a leading problem among vegans, but meat eaters face several consequences from their diets. High levels of meat consumption lead to elevated risk of colon, rectal, breast and prostate cancers, heart disease and atherosclerosis. Eating of animals has been tied to obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and bone, kidney, eye and brain diseases. Other dangers include parasites, hormones and antibiotics, and the larger accumulation of pesticides and herbicides found further up the food chain.
The human body requires a small fraction of the rich supply of vitamins and minerals available in balanced vegan diets, and claims to the contrary are delusional. The comment about dairy products is correct, and there are many other reasons to avoid these.
Methane in landfills is confined and transported directly from source to use without venting. But our vast livestock herds have been become instruments of global climate change. The world’s ruminants contribute 80 million metric tons of methane every year as bacteria break down grass and hay in their rumens, and another 22 million come from their manure.
More than one-half of the world’s grain is used to feed livestock. About 6 lbs. of grain are required to produce 1 lb. of pork. The WorldWatch Institute says reducing American meat consumption by 5% could save enough grain to feed 25 million people. The Institute for Food and Development Policy reported that more than 14 million children starve to death every year. Yes, “modifications” are underway to increase the feed-to-flesh efficiency. Genetic engineering and growth-enhancing hormones come to mind.
Most citizens of poorer countries eat vegetarian food rather than meat because they are too poor to buy meat. Vegetables, rice, pasta, legumes, fruit and textured meat substitutes are generally less expensive than meat. The world’s poor would disagree with your premise on the relative costs.
Other “hippies” who shared a similar perspective on the plight of non-human animals include Tolstoy, Van Gogh, Einstein, Thoreau, Gandhi, Kant, and Da Vinci. The truth is never very deeply hidden - you just have to look for it.
Posted by nyvegan on Mar 31, 2006 at 7:07 AM I think that poor countries with starving children don’t buy grain to feed them because either they don’t have the money to buy grain, or else they are using the money that they do have for other things than buying grain. If they wished to buy grain, grain merchants would show up with the grain for them regardless of the US meat consumption charts.
I would like for US hog production to revert to primarily small operator status. This would be better, I believe, for our environment, for rural communities, and for the pigs. There is enough solid data here to make persuasive, focussed arguments. To attempt to add on an animal rights argument, perhaps dragging in highly questionable or worse “facts” from animal rights sources would seem to be a hindrance to securing any progressive change….......
Posted by J Petersmith on Mar 31, 2006 at 5:08 PM RE: J. Petersmith’s comments of March 31 –
US beef exports have incresaed sixty-fold in the last 3 decades (Source: USDA, certainly not an “animal rights” source). Almost no grain from these countries went to livestock 30 years ago, but now more than ¼ of their grain supplies are used to produce meat (Source: Worldwatch Institute, not an “animal rights” source). From your first class in economics, you should know that prices vary as a result of a balance between product availability at each price (supply) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand). As the rich desire more meat, they drive prices up for the disenfranchised, oftentimes out of the reach of the latter. This is inevitable with a food distribution system in a world with such great disparities of wealth. To say categorically that poor countries don’t buy grain because they don’t want to ignores the realities of the marketplace and the options available to the poor, and it serves as a tremendous injustice to the plight of the world’s poor. People should feel outrage at the plight of the starving children, not provide excuses to rationalize the bacon they had at breakfast.
If the US hog production would revert to primarily small operator status from large scale monocultural farms run by rich white male CEOs with interlocking directorates, that could reduce many of the threats to our environment, our health, and the institutionalized cruelty to animals. The consequences of the large-scale production are inevitable, following an anti-ecological, mechanistic capitalist model designed to maximize profits without regard to the negative externalities. Unfortunately, hog production will not simply “revert” to small operators without resolute action by concerned citizens.
My comment referenced chronic diseases, world hunger, global warming, nutrition, and toxic ingredients in our food chain. Animal rights is one of many common threads in this fabric of injustices. The very practices that are the worst for the animals are the worst for peoples’ health, and those which are the worst for the peoples’ health are also the worst for the environment. From William Boyer’s Myth America: Democracy vs. Capitalism, we learn that “Cattle production and beef consumption now rank among the gravest threats to the future well-being of the earth and its human population.” Boyer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii, not an “animal rights” source. So I ask, if the institutionalized cruelty of pigs in factory farms is not an animal rights issue, then what is?
Finally, readers should know that I practice critical thinking, and I have a personal library of more than 300 books on these topics. I choose my facts very carefully and referenced many for the benefit of those who would like to further research the issues. I chose the ones I did precisely because they were the most objective, verifiable, and relevant facts to my post, in contrast to the opinions expressed in the referenced post. Finally, to suggest that the factory farming of hogs should be discussed outside of the spectrum of animal rights is akin to debating the war in Iraq without talking about the welfare of our soldiers or that of the Iraqi citizenry – it must be included in any serious debate for progressive change.
Peterson is on the right path, but I would suggest that readers approach the topic with a broader perspective and investigate the interconnected web of issues, including animal rights, and you will be dumbfounded at what is really happening. As I said earlier, the truth is never very deeply hidden—you just have to look for it.
Posted by nyvegan on Mar 31, 2006 at 6:32 PM I know that livestock exports are a recent development in US agriculture. Our traditional exports have been grains particularly wheat. It could be that much of the live cattle exported to the third world is grazed on land formerly occupied by poor tenant farmers and small holders displaced in order to make way to feed cattle to be slaughtered and re-exported as meat to affluent consumers in the rich countries, This deprives the poor in the third world from adding to the local supply of food staples like corn, sorghum, barley, wheat, rice, and certain vegetables. Expensive imports from the US follow and trade deficits are followed by damaging IMF stabilization plans. This happens in Central America frequently in countries like Mexico and Guatemala. The proposed CAFTA agreement will probably worsen the situation.
I think the sudden explosion of all manner of livestock exports has to do with globalizing mass food production for fast food chains and other corporate structuring of the global food supply. In the end, as you suggest, small producers and consumers suffer as capital is globalized through a restructuring and centralization of the food distribution system.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 31, 2006 at 9:31 PM In the seventies, the local market for wheat was near $5.00 per bushel, and wheat could be bought at the port of Houston in the $5.50 to $6.00 range. After the wheat boycot was used as a weapon against the USSR in 1979 the price crashed by about 50%. For the next 15 years, wheat could be purchased for export at the port of Houston for about $3.00 to 3.50 a bushel. I’m not sure that the cheap wheat price (and corn and other grains generally follow wheat in pricing), made much of a difference in impoverished countries. Indeed, it may have hurt their own export prices, and left them more impoverished than they were..
It’s too complicated an issue for me to understand, but there is more involved in the pricing of agricultural commodities than simple supply and demand….....And it seems to be true that hungry, impoverished countries are frequently ruled by right wing dictators who are more interested in spending the revenues of their countries for weapons, palaces, Swiss bank accounts and hot babes than in purchasing foodstuffs for their populations…..........
I think that it will be very difficult to roll the clock back on the factory farming of hogs. Perhaps the best that can be done is the passing of stringent legislation to minimize their environmental impact. But anyway, centrally, you are dealing with a few very big time pork producers and pork packers, and many potential small time pork producers. Pork chops will probably be served at lunch. I think that any message that says that eating pigs and raising pigs and training pigs are all morally wrong will go over like the proverbial lead balloon. I would at least like the chance to make my points and get out of there before you start on that…..........
Posted by J Petersmith on Mar 31, 2006 at 11:15 PM Petersmith
You may find that animal rights and human rights have a strange way of going together ?I recommend “Fast Food Nation” to any who haven’t yet seen it !
Posted by frog on Apr 1, 2006 at 8:13 AM Petersmith
The dictatorships you’re mentioning do not care about the local population’s well-being - they are notorious for it and examples are numerous. Why, then, the US foreign policy traditionally supports, even installs, such unscrupulous political systems in foreign countries? Why is US policy so hysterically against Hugo Chavez’ social programs and programs for Venezuela’s national emancipation, for instance? And, mind you, Venezuela is blessed with oil unlike scores of other poor countries but still has to cope with the problem of nation-wide poverty. Why??
Your understanding of the problem of global poverty is at the level of blaming the poor, undereducated, single mothers for being the “welfare queens” - can’t be narrower than that.
Posted by citizen on Apr 2, 2006 at 6:55 AM I was not blaming the poor in impoverished countries for being hungry, it was nyvegan who claimed that I was. I may have not been clear in my comments, and that would not be a first, but I simply meant that a simple drop in the world market for grain will not result in relief for the hungry of those countries. As I pointed out, there have been long intervals when world grain prices were ridiculously cheap, and it did not help to any marked extent. I was not at all suggesting that the poor of these countries were buying beer or cigarettes instead of food….....and yes I have heard this said about our domestic poor and hungry, but this is not my opinion or contention, so can we please get beyond this….........
I went back and re read my post of March 31, and it did kind of read that I was blaming the parents of starving children for buying other things than food for their children. A later post clarified that I was pointing out that the PTB in these countries were the ones who were spending the countries resourses for things other than food….........Again, sorry for the lack of clarity.
One of nyvegan’s links, to the Institute for Food and Development has an interesting bit on 12 myths about Hunger in the third world. These are issues that I would like to learn more about…......JP
Posted by J Petersmith on Apr 2, 2006 at 7:20 PM I see that we don’t do links here in this forum…........that reference was to www.foodfirst.org…............JP
Posted by J Petersmith on Apr 2, 2006 at 7:25 PM The more factory farming is driven by fast food and other institutional markets, the more overproduction by large-scale corporate producers lowers prices putting small scale, family based agriculture out of business in the US thus concentrating land and earnings from the sale of livestock products and field crops. Dumping in the third world logically follows such overproduction in the US and the consequences are drastic. The traditional agricultural systems in the poor countries become transformed and linked to the US food distribution system. These countries become integrated into a globalized food production chain involving the local creation of concentrated, often foreign owned and/or controlled, plantation monoculture and factory farming and ranching for export as they adopt the myriad ecological problems of pesticide toxification, manure overloads, destruction of soil bio-diversity and soil quality, and ground water and air pollution. Synthetic fertilizers also reduce the nutritional quality of field crops thus cancelling out the value of the added production yields leaving only the added expense of the fertilizer input. Small scale peasant agriculture is displaced with disasterous social and political consequences. The transformation of the local food system as a monoculture dependancy in the global food system leaves staple food deficits for the poor and balance of payments deficits for the national government which must now import food for consumption. This system only benenfits the rich in both the North and South of the world system. It is economically and ecologically harmful for all else.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Apr 2, 2006 at 10:52 PM Yes, Peter, it appears I misunderstood your post and was hasty to reply on top of it. My apologies.
The most recent example of multinational corporations destroying food production in foreign countries is Monsanto bringing GM, patent protected, wheat into Iraq and forbidding local farmers to use their own seed - they have to buy it from Monsanto for each new crop. It’s not even economy anymore - it’s bullying. I just wanted to illustrate what cabdriver exposed as a general, global, phenomenon.
Did you see documentary Darwin’s Nightmare? It’s another horrifying example of the mechanisms and consequences of globalization.
Thank you for a good link.
Posted by citizen on Apr 2, 2006 at 11:16 PM Tip of the hat to citizen….....
I’ve enjoyed reading your posts on this issue. I found this article on Truthout.org, and followed their link here. I’m a wheat farmer and cattle rancher and lifelong liberal democrat, and am particularly interested in issues like factory farming. Our family has raised hogs also, in the past, and in my teens I took care of a very large hen house of ours, which produced fertile eggs that were taken to a hatchery in Paris, Texas. I would not be able to go into the hog or chicken business today, because of the cheap hogs and chickens produced by the giant agricultural machines.
I was not at all familiar with this site, but it looks interesting, and the forums seem hospitable, so you may see me hanging out for a while…......JP
Posted by J Petersmith on Apr 3, 2006 at 12:49 AM I must offer my little help to a democrat farmer/rancher: University of Nebraska - Lincoln’s Department of Animal Science has a web site which many a rancher had found useful: Beef Cattle Production at http://beef.unl.edu. I’m sure you’ll find their web site to be a contents rich one.
In this context, I would particularly like to attract your attention to a proceeding from the most recent Nebraska Beef Feedlot Roundtable. The proceeding’s titled Rendering Industry Changes and Implications, at http://beef.unl.edu/beefreports/roundtable200606.shtml. There you can see factory farming from inside: what and why they feed the cattle, and at what extent USA universities are in function of the factory farming. I’m not in the industry but I was still fascinated with the reading. Scared, to be honest.
Cheers!
P.S. Hmm, the first time I posted this comment it didn’t show up on the page, so I have to post it one more time, just in case.
Posted by citizen on Apr 3, 2006 at 3:28 AM From Mark Winne’s article: “It is becoming increasingly certain that the water will run out…” No. It’s certain, period.
It’s good to see people care. It’s not good to see that the problem is capitalism, which those who care believe in. How are you going to fix this mess? Are you going to create a benign capitalism? Are you going to simply make everyone care enough? I don’t think so.
I liked the article, nevertheless. It’s certainly scary when the food we depend on for our survival is threatened in so many ways. Agribusiness is de-naturing the livestock, the seafood and the vegetable sources of food that we depend on, because that is exactly what capitalism is all about. The profit motive leaves no room for the life motive, even if idiots who see only what’s in front of their noses, for only a short time, think otherwise. They don’t even have enough sense to protect the water that all life depends on for survival.
Posted by Arby on Apr 3, 2006 at 9:07 AM JP you missed inverted commas after ’ = ’ and at end of address
your 31march—
““I would like for US hog production to revert to primarily small operator status. This would be better, I believe, for our environment, for rural communities, and for the pigs. There is enough solid data here to make persuasive, focussed arguments. To attempt to add on an animal rights argument, perhaps dragging in highly questionable or worse %u201Cfacts%u201D from animal rights sources would seem to be a hindrance to securing any progressive change…....... “”How ‘small’ is a small operator ?
Down the road from here, in Britanny, the water has been increasingly polluted over 25years, mostly by intensive indoor pig-farming, billions of euros have been spent with little improvement seen.
The product of these enterprises is called ‘meat’, but I rarely buy it. Watery and tastefree.
Posted by frog on Apr 3, 2006 at 9:20 AM Arby
How are we going to fix this mess ?
Obviously we can’t make ‘everyone care enough’, but the minority of those who care is increasing worldwide.If we extrapolate from what cabby so cogently demonstrates above, and this article, the whole world will become even more of a disaster than it is already. The same mechanisms are at work everywhere, the consequences are for the moment less obvious where we live, in the rich North.
Land Reform , sustainability, redistribution of income and wealth , somehow, are the only answers .
Citizen calls the system bullying rather than economics. Well I was always bemused in long-ago classes by the absence of references to power in most conventional economics !
Circumstances are forcing us to realise the harsh reality of such a blinkered approach.Even Adam Smith recognised that “businessmen” had to be held in check by the State .
Posted by frog on Apr 3, 2006 at 9:24 AM RE: nyvegan mar 31
“First, our laws are based on the Constitution”
I agree. Please point me to where the constitution refers to animals as anything other than property.I agree with your lengthy post regarding the intelligence of pigs and their ability to feel comfort and pain. However, my point wasn’t whether the pig knew he was dirty; he knows he is dirty. We agree on this. The point was whether the pig PREFERS to be dirty or not. Some humans dont care if they are dirty, others can’t stand it.
I believe you misunderstood one of my statements. My friends are not cruel to animals. They aren’t serial killers either. They do things that may seem uncomfortable and cruel to themselves, not animals.
Cruel Example: Boxing. Boxing is a painful sport that is enjoyed by the people who participate in it. Football? Rugby? I broke my leg playing rugby, it hurt like hell, but I loved every minute of the game!
Ideas about what is cruel and what is not wasn’t decided by the pigs. You didn’t ask them, they didn’t vote. It was decided by YOU.
“The WorldWatch Institute says reducing American meat consumption by 5% could save enough grain to feed 25 million people. “
This is a tricky statement. Look carefully at how it is worded. It doesnt say whether that grain would just get thrown away, or actually make it to those 25 million people. My guess is it would just go rotten in some american farmers storage. The farmer isnt selling it for less than it costs to ship there, he’s not going to be happy to get rid of it at a net loss.
A lot of the things you brought up about starving people is all economics. I’m sorry, it’s a sad fact that economics rule the food business. This has less to do with food efficiency and more to do with shitty localized economies.“Most citizens of poorer countries eat vegetarian food rather than meat because they are too poor to buy meat. Vegetables, rice, pasta, legumes, fruit and textured meat substitutes are generally less expensive than meat. The world’s poor would disagree with your premise on the relative costs. “
They buy what is cheaper for them.
I buy what is cheaper for me.
What’s the problem? I live in wisconsin, we grow cows here, not fruit.
Posted by spayced on Apr 4, 2006 at 12:53 AM RE: Spayced, April 3.
Regarding the Constitution, it was written by and for animals. Humans are part of the animal kingdom. As a reminder, humans and chimpanzees are between 95% and 98.5% genetically identical.
But, as you suggested, that similarity doesn’t (at present) offer non-human animals legal rights as used in the context of human rights. They are currently regarded as the property of their human owners – as were human slaves. Fortunately, as with slavery, child labor, criminalized child abuse and women’s rights, the Constitution provides flexibility. Under the Commerce Clause, Congress can pass laws regarding human behavior not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. The Constitution recognizes the rights of those who defend non-human animals. Relevant legislation includes the Federal Humane Slaughter Act of 1978, states’ humane slaughter laws, and anti-cruelty statutes. Florida has banned pig gestation crates.
Other countries have surpassed us. Switzerland recognized non-human animals as beings, not things, in 1992, and Germany added the protection of non-human animals to the German Constitution in 2002. Israel banned dissections of animals in elementary and secondary schools and foie gras. Several localities in and out of the US have banned circus acts and rodeos (see: http://www.circuses.com/pdfs/AnimalActs_Legislation.pdf).
Concern over the plight of animals in the developed world has never been stronger or more effective. PETA distributes more than 200,000 copies of its vegetarian starter kit every year. Given the vast numbers and the extent of the suffering, and the senseless, gluttonous reasons for that suffering, outrage over their welfare is driving change. The EU outlawed veal crates, stall and tether-cages, and battery cages.
Regarding pigs’ preferences, look beyond the picturesque PR images of happy pigs rolling in mud. For the uninformed, these sites tell the story:
http://www.hsus.org/farm_animals/factory_farms/the_pig_factory_farm/index.html and http://www.factoryfarming.com/gallery/pigs20.htmBecause your “cruelty” comment was in the context of animal cruelty, and because I interpreted cruelty as a disposition to inflict pain or suffering on others, not willful endangerment, I presumed that you were referring to animal cruelty. I am sorry for the misinterpretation.
Industry determines what is “acceptable” treatment of farm animals, for the most part. It would be astonishing to hear them label their behavior as anything other than “humane” and “in accordance with existing laws”. But many of the behaviors would be criminal if performed on dogs or cats. The industry demonizes animal rights activists as “domestic terrorists” in a strategy designed to give a defensive cast to their business, to serve a role in thought control, and to shape our perception of reality. When the horrors are exposed by vigilant activists, the industry downplays the wrongs, blames a few “bad apples” and goes on with business as usual. When we fail to accept animals as beings worthy of consideration in their own right we lose much of what makes us human.
On relative costs, Wisconsin is famous for providing a wide variety of vegetable crops. I believe my statement to be true on front end costs, and it is certainly accurate in total costs, when including the extensive negative externalities. To your question, “What’s the problem?”, I suggest you read the article again and then my first post. This industry thrives off of the uniformed and the indifferent.
Finally, I offered the Worldwatch statement to show the extent of the waste inherent in our meat-centric society. Furthermore, grain is routinely shipped globally. The positive net effect of the increased availability of grain is not at issue. Whether the actual gain feeds 15 or 25 million people does not defeat the logic that the use of grain to feed farm animals is a horribly inefficient use of grain.
Posted by nyvegan on Apr 5, 2006 at 5:10 AM RE: Cabdriverinchicago, April 2.
My turn to repay the compliment – very insightful comments. I do think that our attitudes and consumption habits form the foundation for the fundamental wrongs in our exploitation of animals, our poisoning of the environment and our bodies, and many of the ills in our food chain. When people buy meat, they cast votes for factory farms and the assorted ills (institutionalized cruelty, health problems, environmental destruction, inefficient use of vast quantities of water and grain, global warming, and more). But the globalization of food production greatly compounds those wrongs, further patronizes the corporations behind these practices and exports our wasteful ways.
Noam Chomsky, one of the original sponsors of In These Times, articulated it well:
“The free flow of capital creates what some international economists call a virtual senate, meaning financial capital can impose the social policies that it chooses on governments, and it can punish those that it chooses by capital flight that naturally restricts democracy and undermines the possibility that people can participate in socio-economic planning.”
RE: Petersmith, April 2
12 Myths About Hunger in the Third World on the site you referenced is a (very) short version of “World Hunger: Twelve Myths” by Frances Moore Lappe. She has published other books that bear reading, including “Hope’s Edge”, the sequel to “Diet for a Small Planet”, and “Democracy’s Edge”. She wrote almost 30 years ago about how people are robbed of their land and skills as local food crops are traded in for cash crops as food production is globalized.
RE: Frog, April 3.
That is precisely the right question – How are we going to fix this mess?
Posted by nyvegan on Apr 6, 2006 at 4:24 AM Here is an interesting overview of meatpacker involvement in the vertically integrated factory farming of hogs. The report is a couple of years old, but the decribed dynamics continue, and the percentage of US hog production controlled by packers has progressed.
http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2003/12/28.html
Senator Tom Harkin has introduced a bill, The Competitive and Fair Agricultural Markets Act of 2006, which attempts to correct at least some of the problems caused by factory farming of livestock, as well as grains and vegetables. Note that a wide assortment of groups are supporting this bill.
http://www.agribusinesscenter.org/headlines.cfm?id=952
..........JP
Posted by J Petersmith on Apr 6, 2006 at 5:30 PM JP Noble initiatives by tom harkin and those two republicans, but this is a helluva long way from theodore roosevelt and the now “”“disappeared”“” Anti-Trust legislation ?
Posted by frog on Apr 6, 2006 at 6:31 PM JPTook me an “edit” to get the second one right, but perseverence !
The delights of broadband have arrived in this Normandy province, thanks to Euros from local government. So now I can watch GWB saying “fellas, I didn’t want to be a War President”, at the same time as I can read Mick Smith who exposed the Downing Street Memos.
Thanks for the links, goodstuff. But rolling back that oligopoly power is going to be a fight, so must have grassroots .
nyvegan Thankyou for the very good Chomsky quote on the virtual senate. We all already knew it, but it sums up so brilliantly the Globalista situation we all are seeing.
20years ago, I fattened two wild-boar cross pigs outdoors here, they had an enjoyable but short life, rolling over when they saw me to have bellies scratched , but we ate them. Country life.
Don’t know if I’d do it again, but I am not yet a vegan. I do notice that my “meat”-consumption is declining, due both to the lack of quality in the product and disgust at the production methods.If I lived your side, I would also strongly consider the inhumane treatment of humans in this Globalisa system. one victim,duane mullin, and fast food nation is a good read too
So what are we going to DO ?
My personal way, here, is to favour local small producers of bread, camembert and goat-cheese, eggs and chicken, veg I do myself, support the Confederation Paysanne ( a very minority farmers Union), get out on the streets, and spread the word.
Conventional hi-tech farmers here are a very powerful lobby, for the moment, but they actually are becoming increasingly unpopular. New intensive methods, increasing pollution by them, mean that ordinary country people are beginning to look twice.
When the 18year lease to a farmer ran out on his field, my neighbour decided to take it back. I’ll plant trees, to heat my kids when oil goes higher, and anyway, all he does is spray, spray, spray.
Obviously, your situation on land ownership is far more advanced than ours in france . We have all seen or read the Grapes of Wrath.
Seems to me that all sorts of people, from traditionally and ‘ideologically’ different backgrounds, like nyvegan and jp , might find common ground, somewhere….....
Posted by frog on Apr 6, 2006 at 7:22 PM Yes, Frog, dining on locally made bread and cheese, perhaps washed down with a fresh local wine…........I think that making one’s point doesn’t get much better than that…......Is Cherbourg in your neighborhood? I always wanted to go there and get me one of those umbrellas…......JP
Posted by J Petersmith on Apr 6, 2006 at 10:42 PM Before my heart attack five years ago, I loved to sink my teeth into meat. Now I realize we can live quite a comfortable life without it. I crave meat once in two or three months, with no dairy products consumption whatsoever. It occurred to me that our olds would have meat on a rare occasion.
Meat eating nowadays is a cultural, not a nutritional, thing. Meat industry built the cult of meat eating as a symbol of good life and wealth, so much so, that factory farming corporations talk today about “value added” meat: better cut, better marbled beef, or more lean (younger) pork. It’s obscene.
With FDA generously supporting the industry, it is hardly possible to change this culture, if at all. I saw in my rehabilitation program sixteen years old kids with heart attack, but even that is not going to change anything without a massive campaign under the auspices of our governments.
Posted by citizen on Apr 7, 2006 at 1:16 AM JP—missed the film, but all my neighbouring farmers young in the 1960’s went to Algeria, and 200+ from this region were killed.
Cherbourg is just 60miles north of here . They now build nuclear submarines.On a more positive note, the municipality took back the water utility from one of our infamous multinationals last year. It was robbing the french consumers with high prices, same as in africa, latin america. This is a growing trend, where local initiatives have global implications.
Please excuse me if I was rabbiting on too long about our seemingly idyllic country life, but the serious points remain !
With FDA generously supporting the industry, it is hardly possible to change this culture, if at all. I saw in my rehabilitation program sixteen years old kids with heart attack, but even that is not going to change anything without a massive campaign under the auspices of our governments.
Citizen None of our Northern world governments are going to do anything sensible soon !
Well, not until we get organised and make them.
Posted by frog on Apr 7, 2006 at 7:18 AM RE: Citizen, Apr. 6.
Please visit http://www.vegsource.com/esselstyn/ . Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, one of the leading cardiovascular surgeons/researchers from the The Cleveland Clinic, the leading clinic for cardiac care (per US News & World Report), has had the most successful results ever recorded in the reversal of coronary disease, and his treatment includes low or no statin medications.
Patients become “heart attack proof” (Dr. Esselstyn, American Journal of Cardiology, 8/99) by getting cholesterol levels to below 150 (the avg vegan cholesterol level is 128), the level below which no one has ever been documented as having died from a heart attack. A plant-based diet with less than 10% fat will prevent coronary disease from developing, halt the progress of existing disease, and even reverse the disease in many patients. Good luck.
RE: dairy, your abstinence from this stuff is wise. Humans are the only species to drink milk from the mother of another species. Who drives by a field of grazing cows and thinks, “Boy, I’d really like to crawl under that girl and suck on one of those udders to get some mammary secretions meant for its babies”? It’s as natural as a dog nursing from a giraffe. Human children have no nutritional requirements for cow’s milk. Cow’s milk is laced with allergy-inciting bovine protein and often contains hydrocarbon pesticides, bovine growth hormone, other chemical contaminants and saturated fat.
=> 11 separate human population studies have tied dairy consumption to prostate cancer.
=> In a study published in the American J. of Clinical Nutrition, researchers found strong reasons to believe that a causal association exists between high consumption of full-fat dairy and increased coronary heart disease risk.
=> Tests of Japanese women who followed a more Western-style, meat- and dairy-based diet found they were 8 times more likely to develop breast cancer than their counterparts who eat a plant-based diet with no dairy.
=> Cow’s milk is the number one source of allergies in children.
=> Consumption of dairy is also tied to colic, chronic ear infections, insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, acne, obesity, flatulence, constipation, mucus, and more.
=> The dairy folks tell us that you need the calcium in milk for strong bones. An American J. of Epidemiology (1994) study tells us that there is a positive correlation between diary consumption and hip fractures.
=> Now they tell us you’ll lose weight drinking milk. Even 2% milk provides 50% of its calories from fat. Water? No calories, no fat.Now we’re told “Great cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California”. Many of that state’s dairy cows are crowded onto muddy, feces- and urine-soaked lots devoid of even a bush or even a blade of grass. They are repeatedly impregnated and are genetically and chemically manipulated to produce abnormally high quantities of milk. Many of the male babies are taken from them and put into dark, filthy, tiny veal crates for the rest of their lives. This is worse than the punishment we dole out to the worst prisoners. Their crime? Being born. Think of it as a slice of veal in every glass of milk. And cows are “happy”? Pure Orwellian – War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
The dairy pushers spend more than $300 million every year just at the national level to pay dietitians, doctors, and researchers to endorse dairy products, to retain a market for their products.
How does our government allow this to happen? Frog hinted at the duplicity of our “leader”. Here are two links that aren’t so subtle, and say a lot about the character of those in charge: http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/r210_35.pdf
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8260059923762628848&pl=true
Another appropriate Chomsky quote comes to mind: “You can’t possibly take the official pretexts seriously and anyone who even repeats them is saying ‘I’m a servant of power and a total hypocrite.’”
Posted by nyvegan on Apr 7, 2006 at 9:38 PM nyvegan,
Thank you so much for an avalanche of useful information! I was out of town these days so I couldn’t respond earlier, as a civilized person would be supposed to.
Now buckle up: my first meal in hospital after my angioplasty was mashed potatoes (starch) with a generously sized pork chop! Nutritionists in our rehab program told us we could consume up to 30% of average daily fat consumption. Our exercising was reduced to 15 mins of treadmill plus ten to fifteen mins of sluggish stretching. When I look back now, from a five years distance, I suspect those guys were not interested in healing people. It appears their motivation was to have recurrent patients, so impertinent their program was. Luckily, I realized after a month of compulsory program that what they were doing was not nearly enough for a healthy human being, let alone for people jeopardized with cardiovascular diseases.
From my current perspective, what Dr. Esselstyn’s doing sounds perfectly reasonable even not taking into account raw data supporting his concept. I can contribute my personal experience to support his program:
Right after my heart attack, my HDL level was 38, my LDL/HDL ratio was 2.9. As time went by, I spontaneously needed less and less meat, to end up with a diet very similar to what Dr. Esselstyn recommends. My diet was reduced to a pinto and lima beans stew, plus lentils and spices, of course. My snacks are fresh veggies and fruits. The only difference between Dr. Esselstyn’s recommendations and my personal experience is my regular daily consumption of 12 g. fish oil (twelve 1000 mg capsules); cooking with olive oil; and a bottle of Mediterranean red wine a day. The final result: HDL 78, LDL/HDL ratio 0.7, with my sum total cholesterol level 147! I would like Dr. Esselstyn to comment this data.
One more relevant thing is my exercising: I do 5 miles power walk a day (65 mins), 5 to 6 times a week, plus half an hour of honest stretching with deep breathing. When I first began my exercising, I could do only fifteen push-ups, to end up with 48 these days. All disturbing pains in my hands and feet disappeared. I would say I’m a healthy person now. Believe it or not, I’m doing two marathons a week now - I walk about 26 miles on Saturdays and Sundays. Even if I’m to die these days, I’ll die feeling myself a healthy man. Oh, I almost forgot: I still smoke more than a pack a day - I’m a meek man.
But I’m not talking about myself - I’m talking about confirmed by personal experience ways for the people out there to improve their health. How are we to disseminate the news? I would love to take my part in a campaign for promoting a healthy living. If you have any ideas, or if you know someone who could start such a campaign, I would be happy to contribute as much as I can.
Posted by citizen on Apr 10, 2006 at 7:36 AM RE: Citizen, April 10.
In Albert Einstein’s words, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” Anything you can do to educate others will pay huge dividends in ways that are hard to fully appreciate.
Sadly, your hospital experience isn’t unique. I was hospitalized after a bicycling accident, and the nurses, who didn’t understand what a vegan was, had me speak with the nutritionist.
Nutritionist (after “confirming” that she knew what “vegan” means): Can you eat eggs, cheese, and fish?
Me: No, as a vegan, I do not eat any animal products.
N: I understand. Is cereal with milk OK?
Me: It would be, only if my wife could bring soy “milk.”
N: Is toast with butter OK?
Me: Only if the butter is soy “butter”, since I do not eat animal products.
The next day, the meal delivered to me again contained animal products. The point here is not to malign the nutritionist – she was genuinely interested and tried to help. But as your experience also suggested, the doctrinal constraints were so steadfastly implanted that she couldn’t even conceive of a world where eating the cooked flesh of slaughtered animals wasn’t a “good” thing. As George Bernard Shaw observed, “Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity.”To promote a healthy living, you can begin with your hospital, as I did. I wrote the hospital board and explained the health benefits of a vegan diet and urged them to put their patients, particularly those with cardiovascular problems, on it. I provided relevant evidence and asked them to educate all of their patients on the topic, for the myriad health reasons discussed earlier in these posts. I explained that it would do them, their staff, their patients, and our world much good, while giving them a reputation for being a forward-looking institution genuinely concerned about their patients’ health, not one interested in generating repeat business.
I am speaking to everyone in the “food chain” of my son’s schools to ensure that he is not given cow’s milk (or sodas and other toxins), and I’m sharing information with the school and other parents so they keep their children healthier. This is crucial for the little ones, as many of the health problems are cumulative, building up over decades to manifest themselves as cancer, coronary risk, asthma, diabetes and more (source: Joel Fuhrman, M.D., “Disease-Proof Your Child”).
You can buy a guide to healthy, tasty and convenient foods, such as The New McDougall Cookbook, for loved ones.
For additional tips, this site (targeting animal activists, but helpful to all) offers a roadmap: http://www.animalactivist.com/actguide1.asp
Incidentally, Dr. Esselstyn recommends that you totally avoid oil (including fish and olive oil), dairy and meat products.Now, about that smoking, maybe you’d like to see CAT scans of my mom’s lungs before suffering another 10 years prior to her passing …
Posted by nyvegan on Apr 10, 2006 at 4:29 PM From the Independent, a leading British paper, we see another group attributing the spread of avian flu to factory farms:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article356440.ece
So add bird flu to the list of negative externalities such as chronic diseases, world hunger, global warming, malnutrition, and the poisoning of bodies and our ecosphere that are brought to us by factory farms. The disjuncture between marginal and social costs is not solved by the free market, as is clearly evidenced when consumers buy “cheap” meat without regard to their health, the health of their environment, or the lives of the animals trapped in this ugly business.
Posted by nyvegan on Apr 10, 2006 at 9:39 PM This will be a little off track from what nyvegan has been discussing, but I have gotten somewhat of a burr under my saddle, and want to see if this makes any sense at all to the rest of you.
First of all, I don’t care for McDonalds. I consider it a third rate cafe that I only grab a burger there if I’m on the interstate and there is not much of any other choice.
That said, I have sat idly by while a long line of bullies has beaten up McDonalds for transgressions real or imagined or maybe just because they can. McDonalds is like some obnoxious rich kid who is beaten up daily and never fights, just wants what to know what to give them so they will leave him alone until tomorrow. As time goes on, even though I don’t really like him, I get tired of his crying and whining, and the laughter of his tormentors.
Now this week I read, first, that McDonalds is being extorted by the same mob that squeezed some major bucks out of Taco Bell to send to the tomato pickers in Florida. They also now want to make the rounds to McDonalds and pick up some weekly cash in a plain envelope. This will also go to the underpaid employees of the Greater Everglades Tomato Ranch.
Then I read that Greenpeace is upset over rainforest acres being illegally cleared for soybean agriculture, and that the said soybeans are being bought by Cargill, and are being shipped to Europe and then distributed to many different places for many different purposes. Greenpeace’s plan to do something about this outrage? That’s right…......go fuck with McDonalds.
Can we please do better than this? If the Everglades Tomato Company underpays its workers can we please go and throw rocks through the CEO’s windows, or pelt his family with rotten tomatoes. Or how about if Greanpeace summons up the fortitude to fight the big boys. I sent them a link to the addresses of Cargill corporate offices in Europe. And leave McDonalds alone unless they deserve it , and in these cases they don’t And don’t give me crap about it being in a good cause, or about it being effective, or that McDonalds is, after all, a wimpy little shit that nobody likes. All that may be true, but it doesn’t matter. It still is not fair…......JP
Posted by J Petersmith on Apr 11, 2006 at 12:15 AM JP
McDo certainly does fight when it thinks it can win, and then can be as big a bully as you could imagine ! Check out the McLibel case in the UK, which lasted nearly 20years, the full might of McDo against two penniless individuals. The guy was a postman, forget the girl’s occupation, but both poor .However, I do get your point, though ‘fairness’ has nothing to do with it ! This is about effectiveness.
McDo is still one of the big shits, though I believe no longer expanding quite so fast.
I have already recommended Fast Food Nation, which starts with McDo, but covers the gamut of agribusiness. I do so again !
One example cited is the slowing down of line-speeds in slaughterhouses, due to pressure on McDo from animal rights activists. McDo was the right target, because as a huge customer they could impose policy back up the chain. The benefit to human workers was enormous, as horrible accidents are caused by line-speed. Google “duane mullin” for one.
Another example is that when beef exports to Europe were resumed, line-speeds were slowed down, because european health inspection standards are far higher, and would have rejected the quantities of shit and general infection which the American consumer eats !I have no particular sympathy for Greenpeace, but any pressure applied anywhere does serve to increase awareness. After all, if we disagree with the tactics of a particular campaign but share the objective, our job is to do it better, surely ?
Here in france Monsanto had the courts sequester the bank accounts of the Confederation Paysanne, a small union of small farmers opposed to the stranglehold of agribusiness. That is bullying.
As in the McLibel case, we have to find ways of publicly shaming the huge corporations—the question is how.nyvegan the Independent article now paying, costs a GBP !
Local vets here are tasked with controlling backyard flocks, when the real disease problem is worldwide intensive factory-farming.
Seem to remember that 00000’s of tons of poultry in UK come from Thailand . Much of it to ASDA, a Walmart company. Crazy !
Posted by frog on Apr 11, 2006 at 8:01 AM It may be naive to maintain that an outmoded concept like fairness has some relevance in today’s world….....but of course I’m naive….....I never said that I wasn’t.
After 9/11, when Bush invaded Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with it, I was telling folks that this was, among other things like crazy, unfair. Even some liberals, like Thomas Friedman, were maintaining that even though it seemed unfair, that it was important to get the message over to the Muslim world that If They Fuck With The Bull, They Get The Horn…......This was going to be effective, so they thought, and fairness had nothing to do with it. But as it’s turned out, unfairness has blanketed that country, and the effectiveness of their aggression is an elusive dream….......
The campaign by SHAC against the use of animals in medical research reeks of unfairness…......but it is justified because it is “effective”. I guess I am not as big a fan of effectiveness as I am of fairness and justice, even though I have my own causes that are important to me….....
Back to McDonalds (and, BTW, at least after 9/11 Bush did not invade McDonalds), in this McLibel thing, I think that they wanted to be a bully, and they went into the ring with these two poor Britons with both fists swinging, and when the dust cleared the Britons were untouched and McDonalds was reeling and bleeding from hundreds of self inflicted punches. Some bully….......JP
Posted by J Petersmith on Apr 11, 2006 at 11:47 PM shac7
So if I say I think animal -testing centres should be closed, I’m a Thought Terrorist. Unfair, and unjust.
Posted by frog on Apr 12, 2006 at 2:06 AM Frog, of course I don’t think what a person thinks is ever unfair or unjust. If you think that animal-testing centers should be closed, that’s just an opinion, as good as anyone else’s, not terrorism in any way…...
My point in using this example is to say that targeting a medical researcher’s babysitter’s mother’s coworker’s aunt for abuse is unfair and unjust, even if it results in the researcher being unable to get a sitter on the night of a big event.
I realize that this example is off topic, and really does not have any thing to do with factory farming, but is an extreme case of a campaign of harrassing (or worse) secondary targets peripheral to the real target. Whether these Bush laws are a productive approach to their mischief, I don’t know. Incompetent politicians tend to construct incompetent laws.
For what it’s worth, my opinions wrt SHAC were largely shaped by this recent article in Salon…......
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/02/07/thugs_puppies/index.html
Still, my concerns presented here had to do with McDonalds, and not
to do with the targets of SHAC….............JPAnother attempt at a link….....
<a >Thugs for Puppies</a>
Posted by J Petersmith on Apr 12, 2006 at 3:22 AM JPyou are missing the ” after the = and before the > at end of link. Edit function a great help.
Thanks for your link.
Sure is a nasty campaign.
Similar to the targeting and even murder of US docs who did abortions.
HLS also looks like a nasty company, in a nasty and increasingly unnecessary business. I did not look at the videos, but they were bad enough to get the company fined, obviously.Unfair is a word that brings back childhood—- “its not fair !”
I wouldn’t call Friedman a liberal, just another warmongering hack for the neo-cons . I tried to read Earth is Flat, which a traveller left here—too heavy for the plane—and it’s absolute rubbish !
The invasion of Iraq was more than unfair, cruel , callous and immoral.
I reckon McDonald is big enough to look after itself . Big enough to scare the Press on many occasions, but not those two .
We have similar objectives, and try to be effective , but always within the framework of what we consider ethical. Fair enough ?
Posted by frog on Apr 12, 2006 at 6:10 AM A friend asked me if unfertilized eggs from free-range chickens are “OK” in the eyes of vegans. Below is a summary of my response to him, reproduced here in part as a reply to a poster in another worthy but not directly relevant forum (http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/discuss/2444/P800/).
“Free-range” hens may be stuffed into a barn and never get near a door, or the weather may be too cold for a door to ever be opened. Most free-range hens still don’t have room to stretch their wings, they are de-beaked, and are painfully slaughtered. They are not free, and their treatment is “humane” only in the eyes of the industry, which defines that word however they wish. Some additional considerations before having that next egg:
1. The exploitation of nonhuman animals for our sake is morally wrong. Each animal is a unique somebody, not a disposable something.
2. The egg business is a shamefully cruel business. Day-old male chicks are killed (usually in a high-speed grinder). Hens soon become exhausted in about 2 years and are slaughtered for food or buried alive. Chicken farmers were notorious for starving hens, now replaced by nutrient restriction, for forced-molting (Google it).
3. Eggs are unhealthy for humans. Eggs are loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol, and may increase your risk of heart attacks, diabetes, and other diseases. “Industrialized” chickens are fed antibiotics and other drugs. Forced molting predisposes the birds and their eggs to Salmonella infection. Industrialized chickens are prone to bacterial infections and exposed to pesticides. The practice of recycling manure, dead chickens, feathers, and condemned animal parts back into animals’ feed is also believed to spread diseases. Avian flu stems from broiler breeder chicken farmers who place the animals in high density barns, allowing viruses to mutate and spread rapidly. Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, the only two researchers in human history who have successfully reversed heart disease, have included an exclusively vegetarian diet as a part of their programs.
4. Chicken farms are large sources of pollution. Raising animals for food requires more than half the water used in the US, and animal farms may be the largest source of pollution of our water and topsoil. Presently, there are 64 egg producing companies with 1 million plus layers and 11 companies with greater than 5 million layers. There are approximately 260 egg producing companies with flocks of 75,000 hens or more, representing about 95% of all the layers in the U.S. In 1987, there were around 2,500 operations. Chicken farms produce ammonia gases that fertilize the algae in estuaries, leading to an overabundance that decomposes to fuel the growth of microorganisms that suck oxygen out of the lower layers of water. This creates “dead zones” that are void of fish, shellfish and other aquatic life for part of each year.
5. The use of grain to feed livestock is dreadfully inefficient. According to Dr. M.E. Ensminger, Ph.D., an internationally recognized animal agriculture specialist, “…a given quantity of grain eaten directly will feed five times as many people as it will if it is first fed to livestock and then is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products.” It is disingenuous to comment on the plight of the starving children of the world while ignoring the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance in order to feed the rich a steady diet of animal products of any kind.
6. Humans do not need eggs to survive. We can and do live even better on a vegan diet than on a diet based on animal products.
7. Egg substitutes (bananas, flaxseed, tofu, egg replacer, fruit pectin, applesauce, etc.) are widely available.
Posted by nyvegan on May 25, 2006 at 4:01 AM Hi NY Vegan,
I have posted on this thread too. Right at the top.
Organic free range eggs.
The organic egg and poultry farmwhere I buy fresh eggs allows the chickens free run of a large field and they go in and out of the barn as they please. Their beaks were not trimmed and they can strectch their wings all they want.
1. I do not believe that eating an animal is morally wrong. Animals eat other animals. It is a simple fact of life. It may be that some people and industries exploit animals and treat them cruely, which I would agree is morally wrong, but eating an animal is not.
2. The egg farm I choose to buy my eggs and poultry at prides itself on their humane treatment of their chickens. Not every chicken farmer is a slavering barbarian mistreating chickens.
3. Saturated fat, and dietary cholesterol, has been demonized for some time. I use organic virgin coconut oil, loaded with saturated fat, and am quite confident it is good for me. Eggs are too. I eat eggs fried in coconut oil on a regular basis for years and have very healthy cholesterol levels/ratios.
4. Yes. I grew up on a farm. We always added the manure from the chicken coop to the compost and dug it inot the garden every fall. I wish the chicken and egg industry was as conscientious.
5. Yes. Inefficient. I am aware of the realities of the food chain and know that we could be doing a better job of feeding the starving people of the world.
6. We don’t need eggs to survive but I do not believe that a vegan diet is better than a diet that includes animal products. There are pros and cons to both. One is not right and the other wrong.
7. I like bananas, and buy organic ones, and use flax seeds and flax meal, organic too, on a regular basis.
I may have some links on the other computer that you may find interesting reading. About saturated fat and such. I will try to find them and post them here for you.
I like talking about food and diet and nutrition. Thanks for talking with me.
Posted by David in Canada on May 25, 2006 at 5:07 PM Oh ... and you mentioned unfertilized eggs. What are your thought on fertilized eggs?
Back in high school I had a friend and I was visiting at her farm and we were looking in the fridge for something to eat. I saw the eggs and suggested we eat eggs but she assured me I probably wouldn’t want to eat those eggs as they were fertilized, her parents ate them. Some of them you could actually see the chick inside. Freaky. We ate something else.
Posted by David in Canada on May 25, 2006 at 5:18 PM RE: David, 5/25
1. We are animals. Is it OK for all animals to eat all animals? Some human cultures practice cannibalism. Since they do it, is it morally “right” for us? Maybe we should just eat cannibals. Or did you mean that we should only eat other species? Humans cannot be justifiably denied rights for arbitrary, prejudicial, or morally irrelevant reasons. Race is such a reason. If you eat animals, that makes you a speciest, who behaves differently toward others species just as racists do toward other races. Some cultures eat dogs and cats, so are you suggesting that they should be on the menu? (BTW, much of the fur trim on imported garments is dog and cat fur). What happens to nonhuman animals certainly matters to them, just as what happens to us matters to us. Do our rights exceed theirs by virtue of our biology? Our customs are filled with moral inconsistencies.
The behavior of carnivores who eat to survive does not excuse our practices. Unlike ours, wolves’ digestive systems have developed from eating small mammals, and they cannot survive for long on tundra (although wolves in captivity can live longer lives as vegetarians). But our teeth, hands, nails, and digestive systems are ideally suited for a vegetarian diet.
We should limit our freedom in our behavior toward nonhuman animals because they are affected by that behavior – they suffer greatly at our expense. In Tom Regan’s words, nonhuman animals are “subjects of a life” (i.e., they have some subjective awareness of their own life), which gives them inherent value, and therefore have moral rights. Moreover, human cruelty toward nonhuman animals causes us to behave more cruelly toward one another. So, we cause animals to suffer greatly, consumption of meat is unhealthy for ourselves (see #3, above), and harms others (see #4 & #5, above). So, yes, eating animals is morally wrong. But deep down you knew that, as your reaction to fertilized eggs demontrates.
2. Your farmer would be in the top 1% or so if in the US. But when farmers say their treatment is “humane”, it is “…not sometimes false; it is always false” (Regan, “Empty Cages”). What does your farmer do with male chicks? With sickly chicks? Do hens live out their full 7-20 year lifespan, or are they slaughtered after 3 years? “Humane” is defined by industry and our governments, but try that treatment on children or your family dog and see how the interpretation of “humane” flips.
3. Sounds like a cognitive problem called confirmation bias. Cholesterol is a function of diet, exercise and heredity – don’t confuse cause and effect. The two doctors I referenced above exclude animal products, fats, and oils (including olive and coconut oils), and they are the only ones to reverse heart disease.
4. Unfortunately, factory farms are in the business of killing chickens, not growing wonderful organic vegetables in the field, so they dump concentrated manure and ammonia into streams without regard for downstream effects.
5. You would appear to be in the minority here. Do something about it and become a vegan!
6. Wow. Where to start? I have more than 300 books extolling the problems of eating animals. But I have not seen ANY earnest “cons” to vegan diets, from a (1) human health, (2) global health, or (3) moral standpoint. Provided, of course, that they provide for balance, variety, and moderation, as with any other diet. Vitamin B-12 deficiency has been cited, but is rarely a problem in proper diets, and one multi-vitamin every six months ensures that it isn’t. Protein is HIGHLY overrated, and animal protein is the source of most of our chronic diseases (see T. Colin Campbell’s “The China Study”). Vegetable protein is far healthier and easy to obtain. And these are only the personal health aspects, not the other issues we’ve discussed. An infant should not be strictly vegan, though, as they need their mother’s milk, and their mother is, after all, an animal.
Posted by nyvegan on May 25, 2006 at 9:54 PM Hi NY Vegan,
Thanks for your reply.
We are more than animals, such is my understanding at least, otherwise your argument is over before you began.
If I am eaten by a wolf, or a cannibal, the next time I go camping I wouldn’t be angry with the wolf or cannibal. They are just doing what wolves and cannibals do.
I would like to share a beautiful little story with you.
There was this man. He had a dog. He loved the dog more than his wife.
His wife would say “You love that dog more than me.” and the man would reply “Yes, but the dog loves me more than you do.” The answer frustrated her.
The man liked to go hiking in the mountains, the wife did not, but the dog enjoyed hiking too. The man and the dog were out on a hiking trip in the mountains together when the man lost his footing. He slipped and tumbled violently down the rocky and jagged mountain face.
When he awoke he was at the bottom of the mountain. He was mortally injured, broken bones and bleeding, his insides hanging out of gaping wounds in his belly, and knew he was going to die. The dog was there too. Unhurt, sitting and watching him. The man and the dog stared at one another.
Finally, as the man felt death approaching the dog stood up and came close to him, laid down and began to eat the man’s spilled intestines, all the while staring into the man’s eyes.
The man, gasping his last breath said “Thank God. At least one of us won’t starve!”
Posted by David in Canada on May 26, 2006 at 2:42 AM Hi NY Vegan - David here again. Back to your points.
1. See above. But I will add that even plants have some subjective awareness of their own life. And, if I may be so bold as to ask, are you pro-life or pro-choice when it comes to abortion.
2. My farmer is in a relatively small farming community in Canada, same as I am. I believe my farmer’s claim that he treats his animals humanely is not false. And I take a little bit of umbrage at your assertion that such a claim is always false , I don’t care what Tom Regan says. Collectivist statements like that smack of complete intolerance. My farmer and others like him, I am sure there are some, started up an organic free range poultry farm in order to be more humane to the chickens as well as the people who eat the chickens.
3. Cognitive problem? Confirmation bias? I could say the same about your bias against eggs. But I won’t. But I just did. Oh well.
Confusing cause and effect? You mentioned eggs as sources of saturated fat and cholesterol. I mentioned that I eat eggs and other saturated fats as well and do not have any health problems from doing so. Please explain how I am confusing cause and effect?
Please excuse me if I sound prickly but you are coming across as condescending. Please don’t patronize me. Am I subhuman because I eat an egg?
I will also add that I do not expect any health problems from eating eggs and saturated fats. Quite the contrary. In a well planned and balanced diet that includes small amounts of animal proteins, like eggs, poultry and a few others on occasion, I have excellent health and expect the same for many years to come.
4. Unfortunate. Agreed. Since eliminating it entirely would seem impossible, would you agree that lessening the quantities and dealing with the matter in a responsible manner, like organic farming practises, legislation and reguation to compel corporate farms to do better, would be better than the staus quo.
5. Being in a minority is nothing new to me. I have a couple vegan friends. Nice people. They have tried to convert me but have not succeeded. My sister was a vegan for many many years and I had a small part in bringing her back to eating some animals. I truly believe she is better off for it.
6. “Cons” to a vegan diet? You just named one or two. Zinc and vitamin D deficiencies also leap to my mind. Anemia and hyperthyroidism are possible problems of vegan or vegetarian diets that are not well planned and researched so as not to be deficient in all the necessary proteins and nutrients just as there are problems for poorly planned diets that include meat too.
I am happy to see you mention that babies don’t have to be vegan.
A mother’s mammory glands produce milk with saturated fat after all ;)
Posted by David in Canada on May 26, 2006 at 2:48 AM Are efforts to eat less animals and making wise choices when people do eat animals worthy of any merit to you.
Does it have to be all or nothing?
Posted by David in Canada on May 26, 2006 at 2:50 AM My only defense, in one word.
PERMACULTURE.
Mitigating at least?
Posted by Rabbit on May 26, 2006 at 3:46 AM An excellent defence it is.
Thanks and well said Rabbit. I find you ....... Not Guilty.
Go forth and be happy eating animals in a conscientious and thankful manner.You too NY Vegan. You are free to go forth and be happy not eating animals in a conscientious and thankful manner. I admire and respect your position on the matter.
Posted by David in Canada on May 26, 2006 at 5:01 AM RE: David, 5/25
Biologists, the authorities on the animal kingdom, would disagree that we are “more than animals” (but that has nothing to do with the validity of my arguments – a validating argument is one in which it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false). We share more than 95% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzees, which may belong on the hominid family of species (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0520_030520_chimpanzees.html).& Through prospitious genetic mutations, we have developed greater thought processes than our “cousins”. With knowledge comes responsibility. We can easily find vegan food, yet many sit down to foie gras or veal without giving it a second thought. We don’t kill animals for survival, but for convenience, vanity, or, even more tragically, for entertainment (horse racing comes to mind this week). The opaqueness of the supply chain has led us to become willfully ignorant, just as when we buy a baby crib made from wood from the Amazon rainforest at Wal-Mart. That doesn’t excuse our behavior.
1. There is currently no reason to believe that plants experience pain because they are devoid of central nervous systems, nerve endings, and brains. Unlike animals’ body parts, many plants can be harvested over and over again without dying. Additionally, rather than eating animals, you can save many more plants’ lives (and destroy less land) by eating vegetables directly, rather than eating animals who ate plants. Regarding abortion, space is too limited to elaborate here, but I will say that I am consistent in my beliefs as it applies to self-awareness, extenuating circumstances aside.
2. Please note that I do not deny his relative “humaneness”, only the absolute characterization that he is “humane”. Ask him the questions in my point #2, above and we’ll revisit this. I am thrilled that he is there instead of a Wegmans, but I’d be even happier if he had a vegetable farm, for (1) human health, (2) global health, and the (3) moral standpoint, as discussed.
3. A confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. To compensate for this observed human tendency, we have to use the scientific method. I have muddled with these issues my whole life, and have approached them with critical thinking and the scientific method in the last five. The evidence that egg consumption is bad for human health and global health, and is morally unjustifiable is about as well-defended as any issue I’ve ever seen. I fought a confirmation bias for 20 years to prove this to myself, until I turned away from the industry’s rhetoric and used critical thinking.
If you ate a fried Snickers bar every night and were in good health, you could attribute that to good genes or exercise, but certainly not to the fried Snickers bars. Your health could be better if you didn’t eat those foods, and the effects are cumulative – so don’t think that eating eggs now won’t impact you in 10 or 20 years. This is not speculation, as the doctors mentioned above can testify. I don’t mean to be condescending. Everything major point I’ve made is based on sound evidence and logical thinking, and I’ve said it to help all animals, human and otherwise, including you.
4. Absolutely!
5. I would like to hear the evidence for your belief. I’ve seen no evidence to substantiate such a belief.
6. The problems you mention are problems stemming from a lack of balance, variety, and moderation in a vegan diet, NOT from the vegan diet. If I ate nothing but (vegan) sugar, I couldn’t attribute my ill health to a vegan diet. I am aware of no such problems from a reasonable vegan diet. But space does not permit me to list all the chronic diseases that come from the consumption of animal protein. There is no debate on this point within the medical profession.
Of course every little bit helps!
Posted by nyvegan on May 26, 2006 at 4:03 PM Hi NY Vegan,
Just a quick note to thank you for your reply.
The next time I need eggs or a chicken I will try to tell my farmer that you are happy about his efforts and I hope to ask the farmer those questions the next time I need eggs or a chicken and let you know.
And when I do let you know about the answers, I may explain why I think that if we are not more than animals then it invalidates your arguement that it is immoral for a (human) animal to eat an animal.
I haven’t had any animals or animal products since Wednesday. Tomorrow is Saturday and I will be making french onion soup and will use some butter and chicken broth. The ingredients, onions, butter and broth, all organic I might add. Even the sea salt claims to be organic.
As you said every little bit helps. Until next time ... Be well.
Posted by David in Canada on May 27, 2006 at 1:57 AM And I like your Snickers bar analogy. But an egg is better for you than a candy bar.
Posted by David in Canada on May 27, 2006 at 10:41 PM And I would like to share this perspective : It’s Not Enough to Be a Vegetarian .
Posted by David in Canada on May 28, 2006 at 3:37 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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