I love the taste of pork, but I wish I didn’t
Not after reading this article about pig-farming in Rolling Stone. This is the teaser at the top of the article:
America’s top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.
The pollution is only half of the problem. The other half is the treatment of the pigs. Here’s the bottom line: pigs are at least as smart as dogs. Would you eat dogs? Would you treat dogs like this?
Smithfield’s [a large pig-farming enterprise] pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
But I can’t ignore the pollution either. It’s a huge problem:
The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.
Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. . . . Major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit.
Like I said. I love eating pork, but I wish I didn’t. Not that I eat it very often–I eat pork about once per month. But I think it’s time for me to stop.
A hydroponic tomato grower would love to use that waste flow. It’s nearly perfect fertilizer. I know someone who tried to set up such a co-generation/waste-treatment cooperative. Local regulations would not accommodate such a set up!
There are old-fashioned pig farms that don’t use these cruel, wasteful, industrial techniques. You just have to pay twice as much for your bacon.
Ever see the movie “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”? It is based in a futuristic yet backward city which is powered primarily by swine waste and prison labor. (The movie also contains scenes of religion in it’s purest form, a tribe which became stranded in the desert and has created it’s own folklore. It is one of Mel Gibson’s best.)
It seems like the pork “factories” of today are far worse than anything the movie creators could imagine. I have seen similar descriptions of the BEEF industry. In fact, the CHICKEN industry is right up there too. I hate seeing the dogs mistreated in Asia. I think I am going to stop eating meat too(except hamburgers).
Not sure where you are, but around here (NC mountains) it’s not very difficult to find a farmer from whom you can buy humanely raised pork. We’ve opted to grow our own pork and lamb, and hope to start trading for beef from a friend at some point. When we’ve bought our pork from a neighbor it was actually slightly less expensive than storebought.