by Bob Schildgen—Senior Editor, SIERRA Magazine
THE MEATYOU EAT: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America’s Food Supply by Ken Midkiff (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95)
Henry Kissinger is a farmer. That’s one of the many revelations in this feisty exposé of how the corporate dominated food system damages the environment.
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Former Sierra Club Clean Water Campaign director, Midkiff sounds like a local farmer grumbling while he sips coffee at the worn Formica counter in a local café. “Too much manure in one place,” is the problem with giant livestock operations. As one of his farmer friends puts it, “Mother Nature never intended for 80,000 hogs to shit in the same spot.”
Behind this putrefying proximate cause of the disaster is the corporate ownership that turns the art of agriculture into an industrial process. “What most of us think as farming barely exists,” says Midkiff. “There are fewer and fewer individual farmers tilling their own soil. Fewer farm kids are playing in the creek, which has … most likely been poisoned with fertilizer, pesticides, or bacteria.” Instead, millionaires like Kissinger sit on the board of ContiGroup, “one of the wealthiest agribusiness corporations in the world,” raising millions of hogs a year. “Joe Luter, the CEO of Smithfield Foods, the largest producer of pork in the world, describes his occupation as “farmer” yet lives in a condo on Park Avenue.”
It’s pretty clear that the industrialized agricultural system, with its gigantic machinery and concentrated markets, is incompatible with traditional methods, where a farmer orchestrated the growth of a variety of crops and livestock—and manure was an asset instead of mere sewage.
Midkiff’s populist insight not only makes for colorful blasphemy against agribusiness magnates who peer down on this mess from their penthouses. It also helps him expose how destructive practices hammer people as hard as they do the environment. After busting packing house unions, the slaughterhouses brought in migrant workers, one whose fate Midkiff describes: “Juan could not take a break even to sharpen his knife or use the bathroom…
He pissed down his pants at his workstation while he was attempting to hold a slab of greasy meat and trim off the fat, his knife slipped and severed two of his fingers. They fell onto the worktable, became contaminated, and were not reattachable. ”The work Juan did, “disassembly,” is corporate-speak for butchering.
One way out of the dilemma is for consumers to demand food grown sustainably, with concern for the land and the people who work on it, Midkiff says. They must seek out distributors, including farmers markets and the emerging farm co-ops. These groups set decent prices to enable a farmer to meet the cost of production and stay in business (instead of going bankrupt, as in 1999, when hog prices plunged to nine cents a pound). To make the task easier, Midkiff provides a state-by-state list of contacts, which enhances his valuable contribution to the growing movement for sustainable agriculture.