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Pork's Dirty Secret (2006)
- warfangle 17y agoGoogle Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=tar+heel+nc&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Tar+Heel,+Bladen,+North+Carolina&gl=us&ei=0h6OS_6rKo7rlAff77iLDQ&ved=0CA4Q8gEwAA&ll=34.747369,-78.838792&spn=0.005492,0.012156&t=h&z=17 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=tar+heel+nc&ie=UTF8&hq... You can see clearly pictured one of the pink lagoons mentioned in this article. If you zoom out a little, you see scores of them. Edit: most of the fields you see surrounding them are producing crops that are dangerous to eat due to their nitrate levels (according to the article)
- _delirium 17y agoThe detailed descriptions of the process in this article make for a sort of fascinating train wreck. On the one hand, the sheer scale of the operation is impressive. On the other hand, it seems to have this strange air of shoddiness. When I think of factory farming, I tend to think of a future age of hyperefficient farming, with cows milked by machines and everything precisely regulated. But this seems more like an age of very dense farming that is held together with duct tape and rusting bailing wire, not much of a sci-fi vision. I mean, huge lagoons of pig excrement with trucks falling into them?
- warfangle 17y agoAbsolutely. I think forcing these factory farms into more wholesome practices might accomplish a few things: 1) More research into sustainable farming techniques 2) More research into automation that makes these sustainable techniques feasible at a market cost Unfortunately, the companies that can afford to do that research are too busy using their money to genetically modify their crops and pump their livestock full of drugs. If the government forced these guys to cut back through sanctions, the cheapest food might not be the most unhealthy anymore. Issues of environmental and public health concerns are one area where I actually agree with stronger governmental powers vs corporations - people won't vote with the dollars because it's a) necessary to live and b) they usually live so far away from the heinous conditions that they don't even know about it - or worse, don't care.
- bmj 17y agoI'm not sure it's possible for factory farms to change, especially when raising animals. If you talk to someone who raises animals in a sustainable way (if you don't personally know a farmer, read Joel Salatin), they will tell you there is absolutely an upper limit to what can be produced sustainably. I purchase all of the meat my family eats from a local farmer (who only sells directly to consumers) and he said while he could easily double the number of customers, he wouldn't be able to maintain the same practices (this includes everything to what the animals eat--grass only in the case of ruminants--to where the animals actually lived--all are pastured in the style popularized by Salatin). I could be old-fashioned and myopic, though. Maybe someone can figure out a way to have the best of both worlds. Regarding cost, I no longer worry about the amount of money my family spends on groceries. Yes, we spend $5/pound for beef, and $2.50/pound for chicken, but this is stuff we are putting in our bodies--it's what keeps us alive. I feel that price shouldn't be the driving factor in what we eat.
- toothcomb 17y agoYou are forgetting the huge subsidies that further hide the real cost of meat from the consumer. Raising animals is such an inefficiant way to farm food, people seldom question this. Unless you can't use the land for anything else. There simply isn't enough land to go around.
- bmj 17y agoAgreed, and such subsidies tend to prop up factory farming operations, not small operations. In fact, the government makes life quite difficult for small farmers (again, read Salatin).
- ido 17y agoI know this is the situation in some fertile & densely populated countries, such as the Netherlands. In other places, such as here in Austria for example, nobody is going to use the alpine pastures that cows graze on for growing anything else. I am pretty sure it is the same in Switzerland and Bavaria, and probably other mountainous regions such as in Japan and Greece (although the grazing livestock in these places might not be cattle).
- indiejade 17y agoWritten mostly based on some old research gathered from this piece (also based on the parent article): "A Few Good Reasons to Not Partake of the Swine": http://indiejade.livejournal.com/23835.html http://indiejade.livejournal.com/23835.html Ergo: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124822 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124822
- Adam503 17y agoThat train wreck has already happened to North Carolina once. Hurricane Floyd. The great pig feces flood. Only cat 2 winds but 20 inches of rain. * 51 storm-related deaths in North Carolina, 90 on the East Coast, making this the deadliest storm sinceHurricane Agnes in 1972, where 122 died. * 30,500 hogs, 2,000 cattle, 250 horses, 2.1 million chickens, and 737,000 turkeys lost in North Carolina. * Four hog waste lagoons burst and 47 overflowed; 24 water treatment plants flooded. * Over 7,000 homes were destroyed; 17,000 rendered uninhabitable, and at least 10,000 people were displaced in NC alone. Almost 70,000 people in the state applied for emergency assistance. * Overall damage in NC exceeded six billion dollars, making it NC's most costly natural disaster ever, exceeding Hurricane Fran in 1997. New Jersey also listed Floyd as its worst natural disaster. * Thirty-seven counties in eastern NC with a combined area of 18,000 square miles (an area twice the size of Vermont) flooded. * Ten states were declared disaster areas...." http://www.cfspress.com/overwhelmedbyfloyd.htm http://www.cfspress.com/overwhelmedbyfloyd.htm
- sstone 17y agoThere is an interesting documentary related to this: Food Inc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqQVll-MP3I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqQVll-MP3I
- dzlobin 17y agoEveryone should see this, and read some Michael Pollan. FWIW Commercial pork is absolutely tasteless and shouldn't be eaten anyway, look around your local markets for some berkshire or other heritage pork, and discover what pork really tastes like.
- mattew 17y agoEveryone should vote with their wallets. I make a concerted effort to purchase pork that has been raised in a sustainable and compassionate manner. I eat at restaurants like Chipotle who care about the farmers that they do business with. Where and what you buy is the way to change things.
- chipsy 17y agoI've tried cooking some cheap pork recently and have to admit that about 50% of the time it's left me with a vague sickly feeling regardless of how I prepared it. This article has pushed me over the line; I'll probably toss the batch I have. It was one of the bad ones anyway.
- Zarkonnen 17y agoThis reads like Dante's inferno.
- malte 17y agoFor everyone interested in this topic I strongly recommend "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer: http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp/0316069906 http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp... I became a vegetarian before reading this book, but reading it only made me more convinced that to stop eating meat and fish was one of the best decisions in my life.
- utnick 17y agocan you summarize what the book says about fish? is there an article similar to this about fish farming?
- malte 17y agoYou are lucky. There is an extract from the part dealing with fish farming on the Guardian's website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/23/jonathan-safran-foer-fish-farming http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/23/jonathan-s...
- toothcomb 17y agoThanks for that informative and thoroughly depressing link.
- malte 17y agoThe whole book is informative and very depressing at the same time. However, I think we need to face reality and stop denying the wrongness of today's meat processing practices (at least those of factory farming). As Paul McCartney puts it: "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian."
- GFischer 17y agoHmmm... not sure about that remark... I've slaughtered a lamb myself, then ate a very good roasted lamb (it was very distressing, though). I also put down my dog when we had to (which was way more distressing than that), so it might not be for everybody.
- Hopka 17y agoIt's also interesting what the company says in return: http://www.smithfieldfoods.com/RollingStone/ http://www.smithfieldfoods.com/RollingStone/
- mmaunder 17y agoIf the article is incorrect then Smithfield can and should sue Rolling Stone for libel. But they're not going to because it's true.
- toothcomb 17y agoIt's what they don't deny that still worries me. I was hoping that the family being consumed by the lagoon was a non truth. I read it as tragic comedy (shame on me)
- viggity 17y agoThe want the whole thing to go away, even if you're in the right, a lot of times it isn't worth suing. Look at Barbra Streisand - some dude took pictures of her beach house, she was upset and sued him over it. So instead of the handful of people seeing the photos, the law suit hit all the news stations and tens of thousands of people saw the pictures.
- Confusion 17y agoWhat kind of position is that?! Someone accused you of wrongdoing and the only valid defense is suing the other? What happened to correcting each other? Accepting that misinterpretations and mistakes are human?
- davidw 17y agoI like to eat pigs and live in Italy. Salsiccia and polenta is particularly good, and I'd be happy to grill some up for any visiting hackers, served of course with plenty of good red wine. What's this got to do with Hacker News, in any case?
- fiaz 17y agoI agree with you. It is not the usual HN type article, and it is far removed from the usual articles that draw me to HN.
- _delirium 17y agoThe interest for me is mainly in the view of this giant industrial process, and the surprising ways in which it isn't as efficient or streamlined as I would've expected. I can see how it's a bit outside the usual range, but for me it seems more technology focused than most of the TechCrunch articles that get linked, for example.
- danparsonson 17y agoNon-tech stories are hardly unprecedented: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1155108 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1155108 If you're an inhabitant of Earth then large-scale environmental damage driven by global spending habits concerns you too. Sorry about that!
- davidw 17y ago"What concerns me" does not make it hacker news, IMO. There are plenty of other sites where people can discuss what concerns them ad nauseam. Edit: let me expand that a bit more. There are many things that I think are far more important than startups and hacking. Politics (in the US, Italy, the EU and worldwide), the economy (as above), the environment, child rearing, and so on and so forth. However, these tend to be "flame-bait" topics which are best left to other sites lest they overrun this one.
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- nickpp 17y agoIf you want to see the continuation in Eastern Europe (Romania): http://www.awionline.org/www.awionline.org/pubs/Quarterly/07-56-04/07_56_4p1415.htm http://www.awionline.org/www.awionline.org/pubs/Quarterly/07... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/business/global/06smithfield.html?_r=1&ref=dining&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/business/global/06smithfie...
- nosse 17y ago"The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure." This made me go woooot!? Clearly an article written to raise emotions than discuss anything serious. PETA crawling to HN, scary shit.
- jrwoodruff 17y agoYea, I got the same impression. While there is definitely truth to this article - anyone that's lived near any size of pig farm can tell you there is - this is hardly an objective look at modern farming, more of a modern version of Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic,'The Jungle.'
- danparsonson 17y agoHave a look at the other articles linked in the comments - perhaps they will present the same information in a more balanced way for you. The subject under discussion is very serious, even if this particular write-up of it does not suit your tastes. As an aside, did it occur to you that your post is written in the same style, of one trying to raise emotions rather than discuss something seriously?
- 4ensic 17y agoOh, "pork" the noun, not the transitive verb. Darn.
- jeremymims 17y agoAround 10 billion animals are killed each year in the United States. It's a truly astounding figure. Let's not kid ourselves that something unfathomably evil is going on. It's great that some people get their animal products from the sustainable farm down the road. That is better. But let's also not pretend it even makes a dent. During World War II, about 70 million people were killed over the course of the conflict (1939-1945). In just the United States alone, we will kill that number of animals in less than three days. If you were to compare the entire loss of American life in that war, it would take you about 20 minutes to achieve in our factory farm system. If you still don't see it as evil, animal agriculture is far and away the number one source of global warming pollution (http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=warning http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=w...).
- dmm 17y agoHumans evolved eating meat. There is significant evidence that a diet high in meat and saturated fat rather than the neolithic agents sugar and grains is among the healthiest available. Why is killing animals to produce food for people an "unfathomably evil" thing?
- starkfist 17y agoThere's actually no evidence for that position that was not produced by someone funded by a meat producer.
- MikeTLive 17y agoI tire of these "prove me wrong" arguments. How about you prove yourself right? Show me that the evidence for that position was all produced by someone funded by a meat producer. This tactic of yours is frequently used by politicians and other extremist groups and I want to see it stopped. You get to be the first one. Start researching your position and prove to me that you are right.
- starkfist 17y ago
- mike_organon 17y agoWhy aren't some of these problems solved by property rights? The article shows case after case of nearby property owners having what seem to be clear cases of health problems and other property violations caused by the pigs. If there isn't a causal link that can be shown in court, then we don't know this is the problem.
- mike_organon 17y agoI recently saw the movie Temple Grandin, a bio of an autistic woman who works with cattle. Her website concerns humane and efficient treatment of livestock. Some fascinating articles. http://grandin.com/ http://grandin.com/
- limist 17y agoAs a vegetarian, when someone with science training asks me why I'm so, my answer is, "The 2nd law of thermodynamics." This is the 2nd law writ large.
- JulianMorrison 17y agoTime to make cell-cultured meat happen, I think. Given that the technology is pretty close to possible, I think that treating sensate creatures as meat factories has lost it defensibility.
- cmars232 17y agoMad max references aside, I wonder if anyone has seriously considered just processing the waste into something useful. If they prevented some of of the careless inorganic stuff from getting in there (batteries, wtf?) couldn't this be an excellent source of fuel & fertilizer?
- wanderr 17y agoI can't seem to find a free version online, but This American Life's TV show, the episode called "Pandora's Box" is very eye opening. They go to a modern pig farm and it's as disturbing and disgusting as this article makes it sound. I thought it was very interesting that they had to scrub down before they could enter for fear that they might introduce germs to the pigs.