A meat industry website called SafeFoodInc.org purports to enlighten readers about the film Food, Inc. The website offers a section called “Myths & Facts” where it contrasts their meat industry spin with the documentary scenes. Some of their claims I agree with wholeheartedly, yet I come to a different conclusion than they do. Let’s look at the “facts” and think about them:

“The fact is that the broiler chicken industry has 1.5 billion chickens on the ground at any one time. To house them the Polyface ["humane"] way would require the use of 20 million shelters, towed by thousands of tractors, over millions of acres of land. The cost would be enormous, and so would the ‘carbon footprint’ of diesel-powered tractors and the additional land needed to support the movable shelter system.”

The conclusion: so-called “ethical meat” cannot be produced at the high rate and low cost that factory farming produces meat. The costs of “humane meat” are not just financial, either, they’re environmental too. Factory farmed meat is not acceptable because it’s so cruel, so terrible for the environment, and it spreads disease (like the Swine Flu). If you want to “eat meat responsibly” then you cannot eat meat regularly. It’s just that simple. Cut back or cut it out!

You cannot eat meat at every meal or even every day and do it ethically. You must reduce or eliminate your consumption.

More from the website:

“Americans purchase 35 billion pounds of chicken per year. To suggest that this tremendous demand could be met by small-scale farming with labor- and energy-intensive methods is simply a fantasy.”

This is true. The only way to satisfy current demands for animal products is to continue using factory farms. Regardless of where you stand on animal rights issues, meat consumption must be reduced if we’re going to move away from the highly destructive system of factory farming.

Factory farms are destroying the environment, they pose human health risks, and they are terribly cruel to animals. If you care about animals you need to reduce or eliminate your meat consumption. If you care about the environment you need to reduce or eliminate your meat consumption. If you care about human health you need to reduce or eliminate your meat consumption.

“Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He’s fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he’ll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population.”

Twenty years ago, people would flat-out deny the existence of factory farming and the routine animal abuse in slaughterhouses, laboratories, and other places of animal exploitation. They’d say the videos from animal rights investigators were “faked.”

Now, they don’t deny it, they defend it.

As great as this TIME article is at pointing out the atrocities of modern animal agriculture – the danger to human health, the animal suffering, the environmental consequences – it concludes in much the same manner as Food, Inc: laying all the blame and responsibility on the consumer. It basically concludes that if Americans weren’t such penny-pinchers, there’d be no such thing as factory farming.

What’s worse, rather than suggesting a truly sustainable alternative: veganism (that also happens to be cheap!), the article implies that if only consumers spent a little more money on dead animal flesh then everything would be OK. Nah, no need for government intervention or real activism, the so-called “free market” can fix everything. If everyone were just like The Omnivore’s Dilemma‘s style hero, Niman, we could have our cow and eat it too.

Only, there is no omnivore’s dilemma. There is only the omnivore’s stubborn refusal to go vegan.

Drastic times call for drastic measures and these are drastic times. Paying a few more pennies for free-range chicken won’t solve today’s urgent animal welfare, environmental, and diet-related health problems. Save your pennies and opt for beans and rice rather than the flesh of dead animals. That, and only that, will make a truly significant difference for you, the planet, and for animals.

—

Hat tip: Mr. Marcus.

“Just as African Americans were recruited by northern industry during The Great Migration, workers are recruited from small towns in Mexico to labor in the slaughterhouses. Workers who have lived around the Smithfield Plant for 10 to 15 years are vulnerable to early morning immigration raids, though the company bosses are never fined for hiring them in the first place. In the film, Pena [Eduardo Pena, a union organizer in Tar Heel, N.C.] asks us all to think of the mostly black and brown folk who are, he says, ‘processing your bacon, your holiday ham.’

“‘They have the same mentality toward the workers,’ Pena says, ‘as they do the hogs. You know, the hogs, they don’t really have to worry about their comfort because they’re temporary. They’re going to be killed. Likewise, he continues, the multinational corporations don’t worry about ‘the longevity’ of the worker. Covered with blood, feces, and urine from performing repetitious, mind-numbing tasks along the slaughterhouse assembly line, ‘basically you’re treated as a human machine.’

“Meat packing has become one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and only the most dispossessed see what really happens when warehoused animals are killed, cut, and covered in plastic.”

Emphasis has been added. The quotes come from Food, Inc.

Hat tip: Bea.

“Notice how thoroughly Seth Godin trashes factory farming without ever coming across as some holier-than-thou vegan. I think that for many meat-eaters, indirect arguments like this are non-threatening and enormously persuasive. And no matter how passionately you believe in veganism, it’s worth understanding the utility an indirect approach can offer.”

Well duh, Sherlock! Seth Godin is NOT a vegan, so even if he used a shaming, holier-than-thou approach, he’s still not a vegan and won’t be called a “holier-than-thou vegan.” It’s that simple.

That is, unless he’s lying about eating eggs, in which case, is the lesson from Marcus supposed to be that vegans should lie!?! Should we pretend that we eat animals in order to make meat-eaters feel less threatened by us? Should we avoid the word “vegan” like Godin does? Should we pretend that veganism is not a viable alternative to factory farming?

Godin says: “If I make an egg at home, I’ll use a free range egg from the farmer’s market, which I’ll happily pay 39 cents for. This egg tastes like an egg, and the extra money pays for a local farmer and a (slightly) happier chicken.”

So, is this indirect, nonthreatening approach we’re supposed to take actually a promotion of happy meat? Because that’s what it seems like. Now I’m no Francione groupie – in fact I find some of his ideas repulsive (like the sexist and elitist ones) – but he’s got a point. When it comes to vegan education, we shouldn’t be promoting happy meat. Yeah, that’s what Seth is doing.

Godin’s post is presenting a false dichotomy between factory farmed eggs and so-called free range eggs as if those are the only options. It would be one thing if he presented the full spectrum of options, including veganism – even implicitly, and offered the information so that consumers could make a better informed free choice. But that’s not what he does. He offers two options and encourages the reader to choose one. It’s funny that Marcus called Godin’s approach “indirect” because that’s the furthest from the truth. It’s a direct approach to happy meat promotion, not an indirect approach to veganism. An “indirect” approach would imply the option of veganism. And a useful, indirect approach for veganism would, uh probably, just maybe, come from a VEGAN!

So, yeah, I can agree with the statement that “no matter how passionately you believe in veganism, it’s worth understanding the utility an indirect approach can offer,” because that can be effective. (And that’s my motivation behind encouraging non-vegans to see Food, Inc. because the factory farming and slaughterhouse images are an indirect promotion of veganism.) But is Godin’s promotion of free-range eggs a good example of an indirect, nonthreatening approach to vegan promotion? The answer is clearly NO. Better examples:

• Eats Well With Others
• Living Without Meat
• BitterSweet
• Don’t Get Mad, Get Vegan

And while we’re at it, if we’re going to “trash factory farming,” we can do a lot better than simply calling them “prisons.” I mean, geez! Even Jon Stewart did better. He called factory farms “Abu Ghraib.” Because yeah, factory farms aren’t just prisons, they’re torture chambers.

We can do better. We can show people factory farm footage:

So sorry if that’s too direct and too holier-than-thou and too [insert stupid excuse that people who like to eat animals will use to reject veganism]. But this is Vegan Soapbox, not Make-The-MeatEaters-Feel-Less-Guilty-Box.

“Chipotle’s offer of free tickets to Food, Inc. would not seem to square up with the company’s beef procurement. That’s because Food, Inc. is critical of beef raised in large feedlots, yet Chipotle claims they buy some of their beef from Harris Ranch, a California operation with 100,000 cattle on feed in an 800-acre facility. Check out this map of the operation. Oops!! — Greg Henderson, Drovers editor.”

Interesting, at least.
Thanks to Bea.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO
(full feature-length film)
KING CORN
(preview)

SUPERSIZE ME
(full feature-length film)

RAW FOR 30 DAYS
(preview)

EARTHLINGS
(full feature-length film)
MEET YOUR MEAT
(full length film: about 12 minutes)

Hat tips: vegan.com and Naomi.

Here’s an official description:

In “Food, Inc.”, filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farms’ Gary Hirschberg and Polyface Farms’ Joe Salatin, “Food, Inc.” reveals surprising — and often shocking truths — about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Because the film puts the onus onto consumers to “demand” healthier food that’s produced in more environmentally sustainable ways and that’s more humane to animals, the viewer is left with a sense that the ball is in their hands. Viewers feel compelled to change their consumption habits, even if only to eat less fast food.

It may well create some new vegans! But not because it tries to make vegans. In fact, the film doesn’t even mention the word vegan or vegetarian once! Not once! In fact, it actively encourages “happy meat.”

I saw the film with some omnivores and even though the factory farms shown were generally clean and even though the farmers were sympathetic and even though there weren’t long scenes of blood or violence, the image of animals being killed was enough to make one omni claim the film was “a strong case for veganism or at the very least, vegetarianism.”

For more, please read the review that “Convenient Vegan” wrote when she saw a sneak peak >>

One of the farms featured in the film as an alternative to the factory farm is Polyface, the farm visited by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan represents this farm as the obtainable, desirable future in his book. And there is no doubt that it is a much smarter, more ecologically sensible farm than any factory farm.

However, meat production of any kind is not doing the environment any favors. Consider this quotation by Michael Tidwell, an environmentalist, writing for his magazine, Audubon:

“But with global warming, here’s the inconvenient truth about meat and dairy products: If you eat them, regardless of their origin and how they were produced, you significantly contribute to climate change. Period. If your beef is from New Zealand or your own backyard, if your lamb is organic free-range or factory farmed, it still has a negative impact on global warming.

This is true for several reasons. Again, the biological reality of ruminant digestion is that methane is released. The feed can be local and organic, but the methane is the same, escaping into the atmosphere and trapping heat with impressive efficiency. Second, no matter the farming method, livestock makes manure that produces nitrous oxide, an even more awesomely impressive heat trapper. Livestock in the United States generates a billion tons of manure per year, accounting for 65 percent of the planet’s anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions.

Even poultry, while less harmful, also contributes. Ironically, data released in 2007 by Adrian Williams of Cranfield University in England show that when all factors are considered, organic, free-range chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming than conventionally raised broiler birds. That’s because “sustainable” chickens take longer to raise, and eat more feed. Worse, organic eggs have a 14 percent higher impact on the climate than eggs from caged chickens, according to Williams.

“If we want to fight global warming through the food we buy, then one thing’s clear: We have to drastically reduce the meat we consume,” says Tara Garnett of London’s Food Climate Research Network.

So while some of us Americans fashionably fret over our food’s travel budget and organic content, Garnett says the real question is, “Did it come from an animal or did it not come from an animal?””

This isn’t some vegan radical talking. Nor is Audubon magazine notably focused on food production. And there is simply no getting around the points he makes.

Thanks to Peggy Koteen for sending me this quotation.