Here is a link to the article that I mentioned in class yesterday about the massive amounts of pig waste generated by Smithfield's "farms". The piece is actually called,
"Boss Hog." This isn't required reading, but take a look if you are interested; the article is quite compelling. Pasted below are the first three paragraphs, just to give you a sense:
Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.
Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.
Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.
Interesting, I never knew EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency or USEPA) was a real company/agency.This artical reminded me of "The Simpsons Movie". In this movie a charater named Homer Simpson drops whole lot of pig waste in a lake and the whole lake and the city becomes contaminated.Then EPA ( Environmental Protection Agency) comes to rescue the city by putting the city in to a glass chamber, to protect world. It seems to me like this fantasy animated cartoon story might come true. If Smithfield company doesn't find better ways to get rid of the pig waste, the sea and the land will become contaminated. Then it would be impossible for both people and animals to live there.
ReplyDeleteI forgot about that the Simpson Movie begins with Homer contaminating Lake Springfield! Yeah, the EPA is very much a real and influential governmental Agency (or, at least it was until the 2nd Bush Administration rolled back many of the environmental regulations that were legislated since the Agency was inaugurated in 1970). Remember the other week when I was discussing the pesticide DDT: how its use was very widespread in the mid-20th Century, but then it was discovered that number of bird species were dying off as a direct result of its use? The EPA was formed in part in the wake of that realization and due to pressures from environmental advocacy groups who wanted the government (then under Nixon) to regulate corporations on the basis of their environmental impact. Another striking event that helped to bring the Agency into existence was the infamous Cuyahoga River Fire in Cleveland in 1969. The Cuyahoga was then so packed with industrial waste that it not only burned, but Time Magazine also described is as a body of water in which a person "does not drown, but decays." Gross.
ReplyDeleteWow,Interesting now I realized that some of The Simpsons episodes are based on real life Historical events. The lake in the Simpson Movie was actually contaminated from before, people use to dump garbages in it that's why the Mayor was persuaded to put the wall around the lake to protect it form futher contamination. When Homer Simpson droped the pig waste in the lake, the lake became more contaminated, that's when every action was taken place. I think This movie was inspired by the Cuyahoga River incident.This is all so Sad, that we are distorying the world, knowing what we are doing.
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ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting topic because many of the choices we make in the supermarket are done without hesitation on where and how are food is being made. I personally stopped consuming pork a few years ago; every now and then, if I happen to attend a social function I occasionally will have a bite of course not to be rude to the host. I always proceed with caution because of the way it makes me feel afterwards. I feel like I am actually high and sluggish. With this information I can see how the relation between the excrement (which can make people noxious) produced in abundance by the hogs creates those symptoms that I experienced. I have to agree with Saliha when she says we are destroying the world. I think Daniel Gilbert a Psychologist from Harvard University said it best when he stated, "What's so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster and still do nothing to stop it. The majority of people on this planet, their overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being.” This matter needs addressing with greater importance for the health of our future generations. (sorry for the two removals above, I was having technical issues lol)
ReplyDeleteNow I feel like Paula Deen is a sellout:( btw there is a call for the return of DDT in the US since bedbugs have re-reared their ugly heads:/
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