The Pork in The Road – Part I

Two paths are before us—but only one leads to a sustainable future of healthful, humane food production. Which one to take? (Hint: Follow the pig with the spring in its step.)Here, for your consideration, is a tale of two pigs. Pig One was bred to be lean and fast- growing. It lived its entire life inside a low-slung Iowa barn, shoulder to shoulder with 1,500 identical swine. It stood and slept on a slatted concrete floor that allowed feces and urine to dribble into a basement-like holding area directly below, where the excrement stayed for a year, filling the barn with poisonous concentrations of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide gases —enough to kill the barn’s inhabitants were it not for ventilation fans the size of jet engines. The pig ate a diet of slaughterhouse wastes such as dried blood, poultry litter, and rendered flesh from—yes—its dead brothers and sisters. To survive long enough to reach market weight, it had to be fed regular rations of low-level antibiotics. The pig wasn’t even assured a humane death, destined as it was for a plant where poorly trained and overworked employees killed, gutted, and butchered 10,000 hogs a day: one every four seconds. The meat it provided was so dry and bland that it had to be injected with saline solution to make it palatable.

Pig Two, by comparison, was a plump, hearty porker that spent its life running, rooting, and cavorting with a crew of a few hundred other heritage hogs on 60 acres of pastures and woodlots in upstate New York. It dined on roots, nuts, and rations of corn- and soy-based feed containing neither animal by-products nor antibiotics. Its manure and urine were fertilizers that enriched the land for future pigs. And when the time came, Pig Two died painlessly in a small, family-run slaughterhouse where skilled butchers processed just two dozen hogs at a time. Its meat was juicy, rich, and satisfying.

We may be losing as much as 64 tons per acre of precious Corn Belt soil each year, an erosion that’s eating away at the foundation of our current food system.

This tale of two pigs—drawn from fact, not fairy tale—represents the current state of food production in this country. Pig One symbolizes the legacy of a revolution that took place in the middle of the last century, when our agriculture abandoned 10,000 years’ worth of farming traditions based on human know-how and sustainable natural processes in favor of an industrial model dependent on machinery, drugs, and chemicals. Pig Two, by contrast, symbolizes the stirrings of a counterrevolution whose adherents refuse to equate the idea of our food’s “future” with things like excessive processing, the profligate consumption of resources, and the inhumane treatment of animals. The backlash against six decades of industrial farming is now cohering into an actual movement, based on an alternative approach to raising food that manages to be forward-looking and old-fashioned at the same time. It’s being led by thoughtful food producers who have dedicated themselves to using time-tested, sustainable practices whenever possible—and marshaling the newest science and technology whenever it’s called for.

….next week Part II
The Pork In the Road
by Barry Estabrook
Three-time James Beard Award winner for journalism
Author of Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture
destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit and, more recently, of
Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat.