Green Options

Today, the Irish government recalled all pork products linked to pigs slaughtered in Ireland, after lab tests found evidence of dioxin contamination in both animal feed and pork fat samples.

[photo by Tiffany]

When you picture a farm, you probably imagine rolling green pastures with happy cows grazing on grass and chickens doing their funny chicken walk in a big green field. That’s not quite the way that most farm animals live. The bulk of today’s meat comes from factory farms where animals live under terrible conditions. The factory farm’s main objective is efficiency: producing the most meat at the lowest cost. If that means the animals are pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and crammed into spaces where they can barely move, so be it.

For as often as we do eat, it seems as if most of us don’t think too much about what we’re putting into our bodies. With food production so far removed from our every day lives, it’s easy to ignore where our food comes from and what it’s impact may be. But what we put on our plates has a larger footprint than what we drive. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,

“Livestock production is one of the major causes of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Using a methodology that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.”

The things we choose to eat can obviously have an enormous impact on the planet and everything on it, including ourselves. Naturally then, our diet choices can say a lot about our ethics and beliefs. They can even be a political statement and a form of activism. I think that every choice we make has the potential to change the world, and certainly what I choose to eat has an impact.

The Organic Consumers Association announced Friday it was “expanding its boycott of Horizon and Aurora organic dairy products to include five national ‘private label’ organic milk brands supplied by Aurora, as well as two leading organic soy products, Silk and White Wave.” Aurora, who supplies “organic” milk for Costco, Safeway’s ‘O” brand, Publix, Nature’s Promise, and Wild Oat’s “organic” dairy line was found to be violating animal welfare law. In truth, Aurora operates like a factory farm, milking 2,000 to 10,000 cows, confining cattle to feedlots, ordering replacement cows, and potentially using antibiotics.

A farmer the OCA spoke with said “real organic dairy farms don’t need to buy replacement heifers.” The new cattle are brought in only on industrial scale farms where cows are pushed to high levels of milk production, sometimes slaughtered after only a year or two after they stop milking often due to stress. Check out the report to read more on how Bush kept Aurora rolling under the mask of the “organic” label.

I’ve always thought that many of the issues I am concerned about—the environment, human rights, peace, overconsumption, animal welfare—are all really one big issue. Everywhere I look I see countless connections between many social, political, and environmental issues. I may be involved in many separate causes, but they overlap so often that I feel that I’m really just part of one big movement. Which is why when someone asks me why I’m vegetarian, I am so overwhelmed with reasons that I don’t know where to even start explaining. The top ones are the environment, animal rights, and health, but no matter what you call them, they’re all one big issue to me.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this overlap, of course. And rarely have I encountered such a thorough examination of the connections between animal welfare and just about every other issue that concerns me than in the book Why Animals Matter by Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello.

As a writer of fiction, I constantly get the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The answer is, two places: I get out and play in the world a lot and I read a LOT! I wanted to share some of the books on my shelf, so that you too…can get inspired.

Food and food production was the first topic I tackled. I haven’t read it yet, but Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, sounds excellent. I enjoyed listening to a recent interview with him on Talk of the Nation and have it on hold at my local library. Michael Pollan also did a fantastic job with An Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Many people are familiar with Pollan’s writing, but I wanted to make you aware of some titles you may have missed.

I believe I stumbled up Fat Land by Greg Critser first. Being a health and wellness consultant, the subtitle, “How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World,” is what caught my eye.

The Humane Society of the United States just released a new video documenting the horrible truths behind America’s factory farming industry and our incessant hunger for meat (I know, only some of us). The video, narrated by James Cromwell, is certainly an eye-opener.

The video begins with some dissonant piano notes backing up images of pigs, cows and chickens with no room to move inside of their cages, side by side with thousands of other animals who will live the same horrible lives and find the same horrible deaths. Cromwell’s voice, all scratchy and wise, is the perfect pitch for this narration. The realization is immediate that the video will be a bit coarse, but nonetheless moving.

I eat meat. I always have. I think I always will. Yet this doesn’t change my disgust for the cruelty and disregard of the Factory Farming Industry. I didn’t really learn about industrialized farming until my Junior year in college. I had never really thought much about it. When I was growing up, my father raised cattle on my grandparent’s farm in rural Virginia—so a lot of the meat in our freezer was raised just down the road and if it wasn’t I always assumed it was raised somewhere else in a similar fashion— ahhh, the beauty of naivete.