The Meaty Truth (2 page)

This is what happens in factory farms to the twenty-seven billion animals raised for food each year. The filthy, primitive conditions are so severe the animals are continuously given therapeutic doses of antibiotics, anxiety pills, and painkillers to survive long enough for slaughter. Still thousands of animals go to their deaths with cancerous tumors and open, pus-filled sores, which are processed into the meat we eat.

The Perfect Storm: Setting the Stage for Disaster

How did the American farm become an industrial-horror machine? Technological innovation, unprecedented consolidation, the desire for “cheap” food, and the explosion of fast food restaurants created the perfect-storm opportunity for this disaster to take place. While hailed at the time as “progressive,” cheap and unhealthy food produced in these disastrous conditions rather turned out to be a giant leap backward.

Meat and dairy food production is dominated by a few large companies—namely Smithfield, Cargill, JBS, and Tyson. The reality is the food we eat, more likely than not, is produced by one of these companies. Simply put, food is power. These large corporations figured out that if they could control all aspects of food production, they could control and generate more profit for themselves and their shareholders.

Moving from the Chicago Stockyards to the rural countryside where the local communities have no power to oppose them, corporations have contracted with local farmers to create factory farms. We may optimistically
think that these corporations are creating jobs based on the contracts with these farmers. Wrong. They put these farmers into debt. The farmers enter into agreements enticed by profits and benefits they almost never see. The corporations’ employees are required to front the costs for the factory farms, which are not cheap. The $700,000 up-front cost isn’t pocket change for most farmers.
⁵
At the mercy of their binding contracts, these employees become controlled by the corporations from rising debt that keeps them in the factory-farming business. Since the market is heavily consolidated, it leaves little room for competition. The monetary value of the animals is completely in the hands of the corporations, which are able to manipulate the market to set prices. These farmers have only about one or two slaughterhouses to take their animals to and those costs are almost always set by the corporations.
⁶
We all know from basic Economics 101 that the ability to manipulate market prices is not capitalism and erodes fair competition.

Remember American History class where we learned about the Steel Trust, Sugar Trust, and Tobacco Trust monopolies in the early 1900s?
⁷
A few individuals controlled more than 55 percent of the markets in these commodities, limiting competition and wreaking havoc on the American ideal of capitalism. When the top four companies in any sector control between 40 and 45 percent of the market, these markets are considered consolidated. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was designed to bust these trusts and monopolies to allow for fair competition in the marketplace.

Today’s agribusiness corporate structures sound all too similar to these historical monopolies. For example, in 1970 when farms were beginning to become factories, four meatpacking firms controlled only 21 percent of the beef market.
⁸
A 2009 Congressional report showed that the top four beef-processing companies controlled 71.6 percent of the market.
⁹
The poultry, dairy, and pig markets showed similar concentrations, each above 60 percent. The most recent study from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2012 evidences that these sectors are only becoming more consolidated. The top four beef-processing companies now control 85 percent of the market.
¹⁰
Overall, the top four food and
agricultural companies control 83 percent of the market. This is far from equal and fair competition.

The meat and dairy industries of today are dancing to the same tune as the earlier trusts and monopolies by dangerously limiting fair competition in the marketplace. Instead of the government the Sherman Antitrust Act to regulate the industry like the other trusts in the past, agribusiness lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill have made it possible for the livestock agriculture industry to effectively evade these charges. The hands-off approach the United States Department of Justice and the USDA have taken toward this unfair competition is shocking as it goes against the very core principles of fair markets that Americans pride their country on maintaining. Clearly, we need to look again at the definitions of “fair” and “capitalism” to reform our current food market.

Finally, the Obama Administration in 2010 proposed new antitrust rules that could add some regulation and teeth to the Stockyard and Packers Act. The goal of the Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) “is to level the playing field between packers, live poultry dealers, and swine contractors, and the nation’s poultry growers and livestock producers.”
¹¹
Well, it’s about damn time. This actual attempt at regulation did not sit well with the meat, dairy, poultry, and pork associations. Mark Dopp, the policy director for the American Meat Institute, claims that “this rule attempts on many levels to undercut all the progress that’s been made in the meat industry.”
¹²
Representatives of Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride Chicken add that they view these rules as “one-sided” and “unrealistic.”
¹³
Unfortunately, agribusiness can wield substantial legislative influence. The final rules issued in February of 2012 had lost most of its teeth in addressing anticompetitive practices.
¹⁴
We cannot afford to let these corporations continue to evade antitrust laws and erode the core of American business practices.

Dominating food production gives these companies unfair power economically, politically, and socially. Agribusiness corporations infiltrate the very organizations designed to regulate them and generously support government elected officials. Seems a little fishy, doesn’t it? The agribusiness
corporations even figured out a way to influence legislation, to limit what the public can access about what is actually happening down on the “farm.” In fact, thirteen states have veggie libel laws that make it
illegal
to speak out against factory farming.
¹⁵
What happened to freedom of speech? Even Oprah Winfrey got sued because she merely stated that she would never eat a hamburger again after hearing how the animals were treated and what they were fed.
¹⁶
The fact that a corporation has the power to sue for expressing a personal opinion is troublesome. Corporations rely on keeping what happens on the factory farms out of the public’s eye to maintain their business style. Unchecked and almost too big to fail, these corporations are allowed to set rules that harm animals, ruin our health, and destroy the environment. The problem is that the corporations are already failing us.

Technology: Friend or Foe?

Technological innovation does not always equal a better world. Bombs and warfare might be considered technological progress, but that doesn’t mean they create a peaceful world. In fact, we view them as threats rather than as peacemakers. Similarly, factory farms might seem like progress, but they are in fact a threat to our health, finite resources, and the welfare of billions of animals. The innovations that made it possible to move animals from their natural outdoor homes to closed-in, filthy, and primitive conditions are not creating a better or healthier world. If anything, they have backfired. Factory farms are creating more problems by changing a once solar-powered, open-air farm into a carbon-powered factory: a perfect environment to breed pandemic viruses capable of wiping out whole populations, destroying our waterways, and using up our precious resources at alarming rates.

The purpose of factory farming is to produce the most animals in the least amount of space and time. By using massive quantities of soil-depleting fertilizer for feed crops, switching animals to an unnatural diet of grains, and overusing a slate of antibiotics, agribusiness corporations made it possible for factory farms to exist.
¹⁷
A farm animal’s natural diet is grass from the outdoors. In a factory farm, they eat fattening grains. While grains
are healthy for humans, soybeans and corn make animals severely sick because they cannot properly digest them. Instead of addressing this problem by giving animals their natural diets, the corporations are wasting research money on genetically modifying the stomachs and intestinal tracks of cows to have them digest grains. Crazy? We agree.

Today, most of the grain grown, about 80 percent, goes to feed animals raised for food rather than to feed humans. To keep up with the demand for grain, farmers overuse fertilizer that depletes and destroys the land and causes soil erosion while running off into our waterways. This means we need more land to grow crops. To produce more grain for the animals, about fifty-five acres of rainforest are destroyed each year for each pound of meat.
¹⁸
We can no longer sustain this level of catastrophic environmental destruction to feed the animals we eat. We are speeding toward disaster by continuing down this reckless path.

Remember swine flu? These superbugs are launching from factory farms since their tight quarters are the perfect breeding grounds for disease. To combat the dozens of potential diseases and bacteria in the area, the animals are dosed with a cocktail of the same antibiotics used to treat human illnesses.
¹⁹
This therapeutic use of antibiotics has created massive, antibiotic-resistant pandemics. We are even finding antibiotics in our waterways and in our fish.

Doctors, researchers, and international organizations warn that this ridiculous practice is making us rapidly approach the end of the antibiotic era.
²⁰
While the FDA recognizes this looming threat, it has done little, if anything, to combat this problem. In addition, the FDA allows corporations to continue receiving genetically modified feed, growth hormones, and a long list of additives, including the same components used in warfare materials, fireworks, and bleach, that are not proven safe for public consumption. Why do corporations engage in these public health threats? Growth hormones allow animals to reach market weight in weeks rather than months. These growth hormones are notorious for triggering the growth of cancer cells. Feeding junk food and drugs to the animals is not helping us. Is this really technological progress?

Fast Food Factory

It isn’t news that fast food burgers are not remotely healthy for us. All fast food meat, chicken, and pork come from animal factories. The infamous golden arches, along with Carl’s Junior, Burger King, and other joints are one of the main reasons factory farming has managed to reach such high levels of corporate consolidation.

Factory farming and fast food go hand in hand; both are based on the same principle of serving massive quantities of really cheap food. It is no surprise that a large push to produce more animals to get into Happy Meals to feed our children as cheaply and quickly as possible came from this industry. This trend continues, as McDonald’s is one of the largest purchasers of beef in the United States.
²¹
In the United States alone, McDonald’s purchases 800 million pounds of beef and 725 million pounds of chicken per year, making its buying power huge.
²²
It is also one of the largest purchasers of dairy, as McDonald’s buys about 231 million pounds of cheese in a year. In total, this nine billion-dollar grocery bill is more than the entire United States’ military food budget.
²³

Fast food companies desire to buy uniform cuts of meat to achieve the exact same-looking burger and chicken nugget sizes, all at very low prices. In the past, the processors would buy a few animals of different shapes and sizes from hundreds of regional farmers and small, family-owned farms. Cattle were openly bid on, allowing a competitive market.
²⁴
But this system isn’t ideal for ninety-nine-cent “finger-lickin’” chicken. These same-taste, same-size patties provided the incentive for meat processors to buy from only large and intensive producers to meet the fast food companies’ demands. The quality of food, the cost of our health, and the condition of animals’ lives is an entirely different story.

Behind Factory Doors: An Industrial Horror

Each year an estimated nine billion broiler chickens, 113 million pigs, thirty-three million cows, and 250 million turkeys are raised for consumption.
²⁵
That is thirty million animals killed
per day
. Now is the time to pull open the factory doors and really see how our food is “raised.”

Let’s start with how America’s most popular meat—chicken—is produced. Walk into a shed in the Delmarva Peninsula where Kentucky Fried Chicken comes from, and you will see a 490 feet x 45 feet shed housing about thirty thousand broiler chickens. Imagine living in a space smaller than the size of an 8½-inch x 11-inch piece of paper. This is how much room each chicken gets for its entire life. There is barely room to breathe, and the animals are covered in feces and waste from other birds. The air is so thick with ammonia from urine that if it were not for the twenty-four-hour-required ventilation fans, the birds could drop dead on the spot from the level of poisonous gases. The level of toxic fumes is literally blinding. Ammonia is stored in the chickens’ muscle tissues, which we will eventually eat.