Food News Feed

Rumblings ahoof that 2006 may be the year many people kick the bacon-for-breakfast and ham-sandwich-for-lunch habit, but I'll believe it when I see it. Charlotte's Web arrives just in time for Christmas '06 (with an allstar cast: Dakota Fanning, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Robert Redford), and rumor is, that animal welfare groups will use the film to gently remind viewers of the deplorable conditions our porcine friends endure in the name of a pork chop dinner.

And coming to a computer screen near you, The Meatrix 2, in March 2006.

There were two substantial articles devoted to the evils of factory pork farming that found their way to these pages last year. First, from an unlikely source, The American Conservative Magazine, where Matthew Scully wrote: "Of the many conservatives who reviewed Dominion, every last one conceded that factory farming is a wretched business and a betrayal of human responsibility. So it should be a short step to agreement that it also constitutes a serious issue of law and public policy. Having granted that certain practices are abusive, cruel, and wrong, we must be prepared actually to do something about them." Read the full article here: Fear Factories. May 23, 2005, The American Conservative. {Note: Scully is a journalist and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. His book, "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy" was published in 2002}.

We also reprinted Pete Well's factory farm travelogue, induring the stench and inescapable rot of pork production for Oxford Magazine's annual food issue. Here's an excerpt. "The crooked path, then, runs like this: A farmer breeds pigs and weans them. Then he hands them over to somebody else to feed and fatten. At about six months, when the hogs have grown profitable to sell, they are trucked away to a plant in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana. If his neighbor down the road cures ham, he will have to re-import the freshly killed pork from a company that can't tell him where the pork was raised. Not that it really matters, since commodity pork is a standardized, uniform product that tastes the same all across the country. The threads tying pigs to the land, farmers to their pigs, ham and bacon to their place of origin—what the French call terroir—have been neatly snipped. This is what we call factory farming—all the risks of agriculture accounted for by cages for sows and prophylactic drugs and feed formulated by scientists. The hog has been bred to fit into this pork-making machine. Somebody must benefit from the arrangement, but it's hard to see who it is. Not the pigs, who instead of rooting around in the dirt spend their lives in crowded indoor pens, turning into nervous wrecks. Not the farmer, who gets to keep his house unless the commodities market sends pork prices so low that he has to sell his herd at a loss. The consumer, at least, gets cheap pork chops! Pale gray before cooking and after, they are as delightful to eat as a wet stack of newspapers. The ruthless logic of capitalism has produced a system so floridly, spectacularly illogical it might have been dreamed up by a benign Soviet commissar."
You can read the full article here: Animal Farming By PETE WELLS - Oxford American Magazine - Spring 2005.

A final flashback: Sue Coe's 1989 graphic novel on factory pork farms is online. You can view it here: Porkopolis.