Pork Past and Pork Present: A Fall from Grace?
And while we’re at it, here’s an enthusiastic review of Righteous Pork Chop by Nicolette Hahn Niman (yes, the Niman ranch Niman). It’s from Eat Me Daily, a blog that always has offbeat, interesting and well written articles.
“From family farms brimming with healthy, free-range chicken, cattle and hogs, we steadily marched toward a Dickensian, standardized, faceless system in which animals are caged from birth to death in sunless buildings with minimal human contact, no room to move, deprived of their ability to nurse their young, forced to wallow in their own waste and fed a steady stream of drug, animal byproduct and hormone-loaded feed.”
I have to get this book. I have to visit a modern pig farm to see for myself. I have no doubt that they are not a bundle of fun. And the urine problem has to be dealt with.
At the same time, for years I’ve been suspicious about this story of a sunlit past and thundercloud covered present. As Adam’s link on lambs fed on milk and dried peas makes clear, not all animals in the past wandered freely nursing from their mothers. Even a passing browse through history or literature is enough to remind us that very many humans in the past (and today) had a struggle to survive and that animal welfare was not at the top of the list of their concerns.
Keeping lots of animals is a difficult and often dangerous job. Anthropomorphizing animals does not help in the effort to get clear about what constitutes good treatment.
And if the underlying agenda of industrial agriculture is to make money (shock), it’s worth bearing in mind that other agendas often lie behind the small farm movement.
I’m watching and waiting.
Rachel
I think you should head off to Granja Carroll in La Gloria, on the border of Veracruz and Puebla :-)
Here’s an interesting article about their farms in this area of Mexico. I read somewhere else the areas where the pig excrement goes are the size of football fields.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/09/AR2009050902531_pf.html
Here is another excellent reference to this with a number of good extra links, including the one above.
http://danielhernandez.typepad.com/daniel_hernandez/2009/05/the-pig-conglomerate-vs-the-villagers.html
Returning to one of our original conversations, I still think a big farm like those at la Gloria does more damage than the accumulated effects of an equivalent number of small farms.
I take your point, though, about the possible over-romanticizing (does this word exist?) of small farms
I wouldn’t mind doing that Paul. Thanks for the links. This is a topic that really interests me so I will be returning to it. But I will wait a few days because I don’t want the blog taken over by pigs, or small farms come to that.
Agreed. I train people to treat – and myself treat – livestock throughout Africa (though mainly here in Burundi now) and conditions of smallholder livestock care is simply not so wonderful.
Ok, herded stock may be out in the sun and so forth during the day, but then crowded into small quarters during the night, usually for about 12 hours, and food-water sources are often minimal. But it should be remembered that the animals do about as well as their human ‘counterparts’, who generally suffer from seasonal malnutrition and a variety of health problems.
Historical records suggest these conditions were about the same in European and north american farms… maybe until Disney and Mikey Mouse came by and (as you suggest) helped to anthropomorphize the beasties?
Yup. I’m planning to post on what I know, namely dairy farming in England, soon and even in a wealthy country in the latter half of the twentieth century it was not the Disney picture. Waiting for a moment to read some of the very interesting links you have posted in the last week or so.
I think maybe it would be good not to think in either-or terms. Check out this report at
http://www.ncifap.org/ from the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production. This commission was put together by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It’s not that we shouldn’t have commercial agriculture, it’s that these factory farms have gone way overboard in their efforts to maximize profit and minimize costs. They cause serious damage to communities, jobs, air, water, soil. The antibiotics they use are very, very difficult to remove from water, certainly not something agroindustry wants to invest in.
And there is something between treating animals as nothing more than production units and thinking they are just like people. We know much more than we used to in Dickensian times when not just animals but many people were treated terribly (think Oliver Twist). Mammals for sure are sentient beings who may not have the intellect of human beings but who do feel pain and other emotions: survival depends on being able to feel. Thus, we might want to do better in our treatment of not just animals but also people since we at least should know that humans as well as other animals can feel pain as well as pleasure. One would think that the knowledge that animals can’t understand so much where their pain comes from or how to stop it would lead to a quality of mercy.
On animals, Jewish tradition teaches that we should understand the costs to animal of our meat-eating habits and thus express our gratitude. In the novel Alburquerque (spelled thus), Rudolfo Anayo describes a scene in which boys have to slaughter and kill a pig in order to understand the price of eating pork.
And the point by Diana Buja is a good one. Where we live here in a colonia in the state of Veracruz, animals are treated as well as humans for the most part. Sometimes better, as when they understand the importance of the animals to their own well-being.
Esther, lovely blog, how have I not encountered it before. Looking forward to reading back in it. Thanks for the long thoughtful post. I’ll be addressing many of your points, including the Pew Report, in up coming posts though as I said in another comment I don’t want to swamp the blog with pigs.
Hi, Rachel —
Thank you for the compliment!
I found your blog a little while ago. Initially I thought it was a food blog, but it is really a lot of fun to follow your wanderings through many subjects!
I especially smiled at the Bimbo-Lala article. If only Bimbo would buy some decent packaged bread bakery….
I’m enjoying your La Gloria series and hope to link to it in a couple of days.
I guess another issue to address is the way in which the animal is used. Pigs are interesting as formerly in the UK, USA etc the fat content was as important, if not more so then the meat. Now this has changed a great deal. It is actually quite interesting to compare photographs of bacon in England 1930’s with the present product. This shift in use has consequences for the way the animals are bred, raised, fed, slaughtered etc. In some ways we are talking about different animals.
Rachel – I have quite a bit of personal experience with commercial piggeries, and smaller scale farming. If you would like some additional information the email me.
Thank you! I just wanted to tell you…about bread, not pigs, that our local Chedraui now has orowheat…several varieties. I do prefer unwrapped, unsliced hearty bread, but in our neck of the woods, that’s not an everyday thing.
Sounds silly, but wouldn’t it be possible to make your own?
Oh what a lazy cook I am!