Almost all of the pork eaten in this country comes from Smithfield Foods. Last year they killed 27 million hogs. Amazingly, there aren’t that many people in all the major U.S. cities combined.

An eye opening article was just published in Rolling Stone magazine by Jeff Tietz. In it, he describes the tremendous amount of pollution Smithfield Foods dumps into the environment each year.

As I’ve posted earlier, pollution annihilates our chances of feeding and keeping our brains healthy:

• Fish is good for your brain, but will there be any left?
• What an ozone alert means for brain health
• Pesticides lower brain performance
• Smog may reduce your brain’s power

That in itself is reason enough to stay away from mass produced pork.

There is, however, an incredibly sad cruelty that lies at the heart of Smithfield Foods $11.4 billion /year empire. As Jeff Tietz writes:

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat

About 20 years ago I remember seeing a one page advertisement in Time magazine. It was a picture of a calf, and it described similarly tragic living conditions. After seeing that ad, I never once ate veal parmigiana out at a restaurant again.

And the only time you’ll catch me eating barbeque ribs again is if my wife and I buy the meats free-range.

Addendum: If you’d like to read a very thoughtful article on these issues, I recommend Romann Weber’s ‘Escaping the Abattoir’.

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I stopped regularly drinking milk years ago for health reasons, and- based on the sheer volume of milk propaganda going around- have always felt the dairy industry has had an unnatural grip on American dietary habits.

From the site www.milksucks.com:

Dairy products are a health hazard. They contain no fiber or complex carbohydrates and are laden with saturated fat and cholesterol. They are contaminated with cow’s blood and pus and are frequently contaminated with pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics. Dairy products are linked to allergies, constipation, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases.

The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America’s leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow’s milk to children, saying it can cause anemia, allergies, and insulin-dependent diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease, America’s number one cause of death.

And dairy products may actually cause osteoporosis, not prevent it, since their high-protein content leaches calcium from the body. Population studies, backed up by a groundbreaking Harvard study of more than 75,000 nurses, suggest that drinking milk can actually cause osteoporosis

Came across a very recent study showing that the more milk you drink each day, the more likely you are to get Parkinson’s disease- a horrible degenerative disease of the brain that is surprisingly common in the elderly.

Men who consumed more than 16oz of milk a day were 2.3 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s than those who drank no milk at all.

The study, conducted by researchers at Korea University, was published in the journal Neurology.

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