Good Food
Versus Green Eggs and Ham

Artful propaganda by industrial meat producers has succeeded in persuading most Americans that our meat and dairy products still come from bucolic farms like the one pictured on this month’s cover.

In reality the vast majority of America’s meat and produce are controlled by a handful of ruthless monopolies that house animals in industrial warehouses where they are treated with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty. These meat factories destroy family farms and rural communities and produce vast amounts of dangerous pollutants that are contaminating America’s most treasured landscapes and waterways.

In North Carolina today hogs produce more fecal waste than the human population. But while human waste must be treated, hog waste is simply dumped into the environment. Giant warehouse facilities shoehorn 100,000 sows into tiny cages where they endure bleak and tortured lives without sunlight, rooting opportunities, straw bedding or the social interactions that might give them some joy or dignity. Concrete culverts collect and channel their putrefying waste into 10-acre, open-air pits three stories deep. Noxious vapors choke surrounding communities and endanger the health of neighbors, destroy property values and civic life. Billions of gallons of hog feces ooze into America’s rivers from these facilities, killing fish and putting fishermen out of business. The festering effluent has given birth to lethal outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida, a toxic microbe that causes massive fish kills. Scientists strongly suspect Pfiesteria causes brain damage and respiratory illness in humans who touch infected fish or water.

Beef and dairy cattle, poultry, hogs and sheep and the facilities that house them are doused with toxic pesticides and the herds are fed antibiotics and hormones necessary to keep confined animals alive and growing. Residues from those chemical wastes saturate our waterways, fostering the growth of drug-resistant super-bacteria.

These new industrial techniques have allowed a few giant multinational corporations to put a million American chicken farmers and most of America’s independent hog farmers out of production and gain control of our precious landscapes and food supplies. In North Carolina, 27,000 independent hog farmers have abandoned that business in recent years to be replaced by 2,200 factories, 1,600 owned or operated by a single company, Smithfield Foods. In this way, America’s rural communities are being shattered and our landscapes are being occupied by giant corporations who have demonstrated little concern for our national values or welfare. They are driving the final nail into the coffin of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of independent freeholds owned by family farmers – each with a stake in the system. They are undermining America’s national security by putting our food supply in the hands of a few ruthless corporations rather than millions of American citizens.

Family farms are replaced by stinking factories, manned by a miniscule and itinerant work force paid slave wages for performing some of the most unpleasant and dangerous jobs in America. The market dominance by corporate meat factories is not built on greater efficiencies, but on the ability to pollute and get away with it. The whole illegal system runs on massive political contributions by billionaire agriculture barons who must evade laws that prohibit Americans from polluting our air and water. They rely on this political clout to undermine the market, reap huge government subsidies and pollute. If existing environmental laws were enforced against them, these multinationals simply couldn’t compete in the marketplace with traditional family farmers.

Waterkeeper Alliance has been on the frontlines fighting corporate takeover of American food production since our first day in business in 1999. This January we settled a case with Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest hog producer, forcing the company to clean up 275 meat factories in North Carolina. Our historic settlement put industrial meat producers across the country on notice they will have to meet a higher standard of performance. Most importantly, this settlement will, for the first time, force the factory meat industry to closely monitor its pollution and its impact on surrounding waterbodies and groundwater. The Smithfield agreement sets the stage for the next phase of Waterkeeper Alliance’s Pure Farms/Pure Water campaign to civilize the industrial meat industry. It’s time that the agro-industry either figures out how to produce meat without poisoning our drinking water and destroying our fisheries and communities, or get out of the food business.

But reforming the system is as much about personal choices as it is about winning our environmental campaigns. A growing number of America’s consumers are coming to recognize what great chefs have long known, the best quality meat comes from good animal husbandry.

Americans can still find networks of family farmers who raise their animals to range free on grass pastures using natural feeds without steroids, sub-therapeutic antibiotics or artificial growth promotants. These farmers treat their animals with dignity and respect and bring tasty, premium-quality meat to customers while practicing the highest standards of husbandry and environmental stewardship. They give the rest of us an opportunity to do right by eating well.

When we demand the highest quality food, Americans promote our farmers, our democracy, our children’s health and national security. Waterkeepers work with traditional farmers, ranchers and fishermen across the country who share our vision for a sustainable American food production – grown by farmers who earn a living wage and contribute directly to the economic, environmental and political health of our nation.

For these reasons we are heartened by the proliferation of organic food markets and products. Organic sections are migrating from gourmet to mainstream supermarkets. A growing number of chefs and restaurateurs – who represent the vanguard of our thinking on food – are converting to sustainable foods. Retail sales of organic foods were $10.4 billion in 2003 and are expected to be more than $15 billion in 2006. That’s still a small piece of the $550 billion retail food market, but organic sales have maintained an impressive growth rate of 17 to 20 percent per year (against only 2-3 percent growth for the rest of the industry.) Americans know good food when they taste it, and choose sustainability even when it costs more.

This issue is filled with the voices of farmers, fishermen, chefs and consumers who are standing up for good-tasting foods and American values.

Sustainable food tastes better. It is more nutritious and safer for you, your family and the environment.