A Scary Movie – A Tipping Point

I wish there was some way to lobby those voting on this year’s Academy Awards. If so, I would be flooding their emails asking them to vote for Food, Inc. as the best documentary film. My daughter insisted that we take the time to watch this film. I expected this to be a propaganda piece (which it was at times) that I could mostly dismiss after making a few changes in my food shopping and eating habits. It was much more than I expected and by the end of the movie I was angry. First, I want to urge anyone reading this blog post to watch the movie. It is both scary with respect to the safety of our food supply and a good social commentary on how our American way of life, including many of our freedoms, has been co-opted by multi-national companies whose only moral imperative is to become more powerful and more wealthy. Second, I want to provide some personal testimony about my experience with the food industry and how radically it has changed.

I grew up in the food business. My dad, a couple of uncles, and some of our family’s closest friends were all involved in some aspect to providing food to our community. My dad ran a chain of grocery stores. Before the company was sold to a large corporation, Cooper & Martin had 30+ stores in middle Tennessee. One uncle was a meat buyer and butcher at another grocery chain. A second uncle was in charge of installing and maintaining refrigeration equipment for meat departments at A & P stores in Tennessee and Kentucky. A close friend of my dad’s was in store management but also had a farm not too far from Nashville where he raised cattle, hogs and had several large chicken houses. Another of my dad’s closest friends owned one the largest meatpacking operations in the middle Tennessee area. As I was growing up, I knew all these people and their operations very well. It was fun as a kid to visit the farm and see how the animals were cared for. Yes, I understood that one day they may end up on my dinner plate – but there was a respect for the animals by the farm owner and those who worked for him. I don’t know if he believed in God, but I do know that he treated God’s creatures with respect. Maybe the greatest contrast between what I saw on his farm and what was in the movie were the chickens. He had what seemed to me very large houses for his chickens. I suspect that my young eyes made these seem larger than they were. In any case, the chickens lived in a bright, airy environment (but not odor free) and were let outside in a fenced area on good weather days. The chickens in the film were not so fortunate – they lived their entire 41 day existence in the dark packed in so tight there is almost no room to move. A florist gives more care to a rose than is given to these living, breathing creatures of a loving God. I am not an animal rights activist – but I am a respecter of God’s creation. Nothing that He has created deserves to be treated as shamefully as those chickens – period.

In the early 1970’s when I worked for the State Health Department, I had a friendly relationship with the county health officer in a rural county. One day over lunch I asked him where he had worked before he started with the county. He said that he had been a representative for an animal feed company. In those days, the feed companies were the engine that drove the chicken business. His job included trying to talk farmers into building large chicken houses and raising chickens under contract. The feed company would “finance” the construction of the houses and would “finance” the first group of chickens. As you might guess, this was a better deal for the feed company than it was for the farmers. My friend had become pretty disenchanted with the feed company and was considering quitting. One day he was visiting one of his farmers when the crew came to haul the mature chickens to the processing facility. He grew up in the country but even with that background, he was appalled by the brutal way the chickens were handled. What finally put him over the edge was after the truck left for the processing plant, another truck arrived from a certain soup company. The men on this truck picked up all the underweight and diseased chickens left in the house. It was years before I ate any canned soup again.

Another quick story from my days working for the state. I was involved with one of the first “feedlot” operations for hogs in middle Tennessee. The men who own the operation were experienced in raising hogs and wanted to try the feedlot approach because people in the industry told them they could make more money. It was a mess but at least it was a small mess. They never had more than 100 hogs at a time and the land they had was too steep to build a larger operation. Even though this operation shut down, we knew there would be others. Tennessee was one of the first states to adopt a fairly comprehensive program for protecting the environment from feedlot operations. A number of large companies acquired options on tracts of land in Tennessee for the purpose of building CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). CAPOs were feedlots “Super-Sized.” As it turned out, the environmental guidelines we developed were too expensive to comply with and they chose other states.


I remember a story Garrison Keller told on A Prairie Home Companion. It was the first real cold snap of the winter and everyone knew it was hog-killing time. A number of families got together each year and shared the labor. While the men were slaughtering the hogs one at a time, a group of young boys decided it would be great sport to throw rocks at the hogs in the pen. One of the grandfathers saw what was happening. He went over and grabbed the boys taking them out of earshot of the rest of the folks. He told the boys to stop throwing the rocks and tormenting the hogs. The boys objected saying something like “Why, what’s the big deal? They’re going to be killed in a few minutes anyway.” The grandfather answered “Yes, that true. Those hogs are part of God’s provision for our families. But while they are still alive they are God’s creatures and are due kindness and respect from us because of what they are.” A great and thought provoking story.  While God gave man dominion over the animals, we should remember not a single animal died until man sinned. We also have the promise that when the curse is completely rolled back, the lamb will lie down with the lion.

The summer before my senior year in college, I worked for the meat packing company owned by my dad’s friend. Most of the summer my work consisted of filling in for salesmen when they took their vacation. Towards the end of the summer, all of the salesmen had taken a vacation and I still needed to work. In order to keep me on the payroll so that I would be able to pay for college (and wedding) expenses, I worked around the plant. That, to my dismay, included spending time on the killing floor. After almost losing my cookies a few times, I acclimated and became adjusted to the environment. After watching the process and talking to both workers and managers, I realized that everyone involved had a respect for the animals. A great deal of time had been invested in finding the most humane way to kill the animal and minimize any pain. This was not done for the efficiency of the operation – it was done so that everyone involved could go home each evening with a feeling that what they were doing was in no way cruel or demeaning. All that occurred over 40 years ago but I remember it very clearly. I think I remember discussing this with my dad and as I told him what I observed he just nodded his head.

Before I move on I do want to mention one additional point. While I was working in the meat packing plant I observed a number of inspectors from the Department of Agriculture. They were there every day, they had the freedom to go anywhere in the plant, and the workers knew who they were and why they were present. According to the movie, today there is little inspection, even at the very large plants. In the movie it was noted that almost 90% of all ground beef for fast food restaurants and the prepackaged beef for grocery stores comes from only four sources. Is it any wonder that hardly a month goes by with some food product being recalled because of contamination?

My dad was a product of the Depression and WWII. He was captivated by new technology and growth. In most circumstances, dad considered bigger to be better. However, towards the end of his career, he began to notice and comment on the fact that the “big boys” were driving all the small meat packing houses out of business. Some of the tactics used by the ‘big boys” were pretty nasty and many of the small packing houses were forced out of business after several generations of service to the community. I think my dad saw the danger in what was happening but felt powerless to do anything about it.

Most of my career as an environmental consultant has been involved in helping commercial and industrial clients comply with the various regulations in a way that allowed them to still be profitable. About 15 years ago we were working on a nationwide study for a trade association. In our research for that study, we came upon a process that was used during WWI that could possibly benefit many of our clients. We performed some laboratory studies and confirmed that this procedure would indeed be beneficial to our clients and reduce the potential for certain pollutants leaching from a waste material. We published the results of our investigation in a report distributed nationwide (which places the procedure in the public domain). After our report was public, a large corporation filed for a patent for this process. The U. S. Patent Office granted the patent in spite of the fact that the process had been placed in the public domain and was, in fact, merely a different application of a process used during WWI.

We contacted a patent attorney and learned that it would cost us between $250,000 and $500,000 to contest the patent. Our intention was to put this process in the public domain so that people could use it without paying our company, or anyone else, any license fee. We obviously could not afford to contest the patent and so many of our clients are paying an outrageous license fee every year for a process a high school chemistry student could assemble in his back yard. This is similar in principle to what Monsanto has done with the genetically altered soybean seeds. Monsanto now controls over 90% of the soybean seed market. These seeds are patented and it is illegal for the farmers who grow the crops to collect and clean the seed for next year’s crop. We should pause and consider this a moment. Farmers purchase seed with their money; plant the seed on their land; work the fields with their equipment using fuel they have purchased; and, at the end of the season they harvest their crop but are forbidden to use a part of the harvest (seeds) to continue the process next year. What a travesty our government and its legal system have created. Shame on us for allowing this to happen.

The thing in the movie that sent me over the edge was the realization that more than a few states have enacted laws forbidding people to publically criticize the food suppliers. In the movie a mother who lost her toddler son to E Coli won’t mention the names of the fast food outlets where her son ate because she has been threatened with lawsuits that would bankrupt the family. In the state of Colorado it is a felony (with prison time attached) to criticize the beef or pork producers for their animal management practices. Is this not unbelievable? Yes, maybe it is time for another revolution if we are going to save what is left of the American way of life. The government corruption that has lead to this situation transcends parties. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have contributed to this threat to our food supply and the health of our families. We need to elect people to office that are willing to go back to the days of the “trust-busters” and break up these large corporations who have a strangle-hold on our food supply. This is about more than just safe food; it is an issue that goes to the very foundation of who we are as a people. If we are not willing now to stand against the multi-national corporations who are raping our land and poisoning our people for their own power and profit, then a time will come when our only option may be to just lie down and let the tanks roll over us.

[An interesting novel about how the large companies are able to locate “factory farms” in places where they are not wanted is That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx. She is the author of The Shipping News, one of my favorites, and she is able to take a sometime humorous look at a terrible situation.]