Bringing home the bacon is a common expression, but if people looked into where their bacon is coming from and what it is doing to the environment they may think twice about bringing it home.
Tracey Worcester wrote and directed the film Pig Business in a four-year exploration to find out where and how pork is produced, what impacts the industry is having on the environment and rural communities, and whether animal welfare is being addressed. The first U.S. screening of the documentary was held on Wednesday evening in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in an event cosponsored by the Center for Food Safety and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Also participating in a panel discussion after the screening was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and a high-profile environmental lawyer.
In the film, Worcester examines the pork industry through interviews with farmers, residents near hog farms, meatpackers, and politicians. The focus is on sprawling factory farms known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, that are largely controlled by major meat producers like Smithfield Foods, which processes about 27 million pigs a year with annual sales of about $12 billion and operations in 15 countries.
“These farming factories break the law, they spread the manure on the ground and then it goes into the waterways and it kills the fish, sickens the people, the property values plummet, and it turns neighbors against neighbors in the rural areas,” Kennedy said. “Part of the business plan in this industry is to empty the rural parts of America and liquidate it for cash.”
According to University of Iowa researchers, a hog produces 10 times as much waste material as a human being. One of Smithfield’s facilities in Utah has 850,000 hogs, which means that one facility produces more sewage every day than all the residents of New York City combined.
“Pigs are not seen as animals, but as raw materials,” Worcester said. “It seems economic development is not determined by the needs of people but by the need for companies to grow and compete in the global market.”
This is a template for many of the environmental issues that are in this country, said Kennedy. Choosing between economic prosperity on one hand and environmental protection on the other hand is a false choice, he argued, and in 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to economic policy.
Kennedy, Worcester, and Kucinich contend it is possible to change the food-production system by avoiding meats with no welfare label and by favoring local producers over mass processors.
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