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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Bombay, Shanghai, Delhi, Beijing, New York, London, Los Angeles, Tokyo are some of the most populated cities on earth. It turns out living in these sorts of places may be really bad for your long term brain health. A new study out of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California indicates that smog may speed the development of atherosclerosis.

Nino Kuenzil, an associate professor of preventative medicine at USC notes: “If confirmed, the public-health relevance would be enormous. Atherosclerosis plays a major role in a broad array of diseases, and almost everybody is regularly exposed to ambient air pollution, 24 hours a day, over a lifetime.”

As I’ve commented on in several earlier posts, the ability of your brain to function well is critically dependent on its blood supply. The better the blood supply, the better your brain will function as you get older. Since atherosclerosis cripples the blood supply to the brain, avoiding atherosclerosis is incredibly important when it comes to maintaining brain power.

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