Curiosity Killed the Cattle

In a quest to find more answers surrounding our food identity crisis, I also came about the largely controversial and disturbing truth of where our food comes from. Although artificial ingredients lists or misleading diet advice may be unsettling to some, nothing is more stomach-turning as the conditions of large-scale animal processing plants.

Imagine a image vividly painted by Bryan Walsh and Rebecca Kaplan, authors of a Time Magazine cover story “America’s Food Crisis and How to Fix it.” A pig is “ packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another” (Walsh, Kaplan) lives in a fenced manure lagoon. It’s also injected full of antibiotics and fed chemically fertilized corn and five months later it is slaughtered. That pig, turned sausage and bacon, then contributes to the “an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population.” Additionally, any rain would carry the pesticides used to grow the corn would then contaminate surrounding marine ecosystems as well as nearby homes. (Walsh, Kaplan)

Obviously Walsh and Kaplan’s visualization is not what we want we want to picture while tucking into a breakfast platter of sausage links, bacon, and canadian ham. However this horrific image helps depict a gross reality. Having a healthy helping of pork, can not only pose unhealthy threats to your body, but also have a high environmental and ethical cost.

Revealed by the investigation of journalists like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, this truth is exposed the shocking documentary “Food Inc.” Contrary to the picture of a storybook farmer and his barn, pigs and cattle are raised in concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The only reason these livestock can be accessible to us for such affordable prices is because about 1,000 cattle or 10,000 chickens and pigs are loaded, fattened, and slaughtered in these industrial “farms.” To keep these living animals alive in such unlivable conditions, they also have to rely on antibiotics. Representative Louise Slaughter, an advocate for limiting antibiotic use in farms, says “These antibiotics are not given to sick animals. It’s a preventive measure because they are kept in pretty unspeakable conditions.” In fact the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), revealed that 70% of all antimicrobial drugs used in this country are used on animals rather than humans. (Walsh, Kaplan)

A prime example of one of America’s most successful industrial meat companies is Tyson Foods. One of the Tyson’s poultry plant operates in the small town of Waldron, Arkansas. Here the locals regard the plant as a “an entire small-town economy consolidated onto one property.” Equipt with its own trucking line, feed mill, hatchery, and slaughter house, this plant “churns out chickens from their beginnings as eggs to finished food products that are worth millions of dollars each year.” (Leonard) However, Waldron suffers economically. In addition to creating unhealthy conditions for humans, animals, and the environment, the concentrated meat industry does no good for the economy of surrounding small towns.

So does this mean we should boycott the meat industry? Would the best solution to stop consuming meat and animal products entirely? I love myself a nice juicy steak, but at what ethical, environmental, or even health cost? Although I’m not in constant exposure to the the many wrongs of the meat industry, I feel a sense of responsibility to further not endorse CAFOs and their meat monopoly. So, I tried to give up all meat.