I often joke that there are three things that keep me from turning vegetarian: sushi, Thanksgiving dinner, and carnitas. After reading this expos?© in Rolling Stone on death by pig shit, I may never let another morsel of Christmas ham, crispy bacon or long-simmered carnitas ever come near my mouth again.
Extra Credit: I played around in Google maps until I found many of the farms talked about in the article. If you read the article then follow the maps link, zoom in and pay close attention to the scale (think football fields); zoom out and look for the pepto-bismol colored “lagoons.” See how many farms there are and how close they are to towns and creeks. Just some “food” for thought.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Puddlejumper // Dec 22, 2006 at 4:14 am
Yuletide greetings from Scotland.
x
2 John White // Dec 22, 2006 at 5:10 pm
A couple of points:
1) Lots of work is being done to advance the use of anaerobic digestion to reduce animal waste, generates methane for power generation, and ends with fertilizer.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion
Colorado state project:
http://www.state.co.us/oemc/programs/agriculture/hog_wastes.htm
CO video tour (very good overview):
http://www.state.co.us/oemc/programs/agriculture/hog_wastes/video.htm
Mixed conclusions on economic viability:
http://tinyurl.com/utfh9
2) There is a such thing as small-scale, sustainable hog production.
Michael Pollan profiles Polyface Farms:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/05/no_bar_code.html
Michael Pollan on eating meat (more Polyface):
http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/010403_organic.cfm
There’s hope!!!
3 John // Dec 22, 2006 at 8:48 pm
Happy Baby Jesus Day to you, too, PuddleJumper!
Great links–I’ve been thinking about organic and free-range pork.
4 G. Jones // Dec 27, 2006 at 12:17 pm
I used to say that the only thing that kept me from becoming vegetarian was shrimp, and then someone pointed out to me that I should become a vegetarian who eats shrimp.
And so I did.
You could become a vegetarian who eats sushi and takes Thanksgiving off.
5 Denae // Dec 29, 2006 at 1:26 pm
As someone who has done research on both hog and poultry farms and has raised hogs and poultry, if you are going to boycott something, boycott poultry. Poultry is raised in the most inhumane and environmentally degrading way. Most people will quit eating beef first but most cows are raised by small farmers or relatively small operations and only for the last couple weeks of their relatively long lives are they in cramped quarters, but even that isn’t as cramped as poultry and it isn’t that terrible on the environment. Cows are not usually given antibiotics unless they need it - yet poultry and hogs are usually given antibiotics in their feed because the tight quarters lead to disease. Chickens also are given arsenic in their feed because it makes them hungry, it makes them get big faster and then they will be “finished” faster.
Sometimes it is really depressing being an environmental scientist, I have learned things that most people are content to not know.
6 John // Dec 29, 2006 at 4:45 pm
GJ, I’ve toyed with that concept in the past, and I’m thinking that I need to get more serious about it.
Denae, you’ve got a point. My problem is that I favor mammals over birds (I’m species-ist). I’ve given up beef, and rarely eat pork, but seem to have replaced all this mammalian flesh with its (plucked) feathered counterparts. That said, this does give me greater incentive to cut back on the chicken, too.
Apparently a lot of fish are farmed in pretty horrifying circumstances as well. If nothing else, greater awareness can’t hurt anyone. As tough as your job might be, I’m grateful that you’re bearing the bad tidings!
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