Stop Smithfield Foods

This is the second part of a two part series on food labeling. Part I is here.

All Natural
The “All Natural” label means the product contains no artificial ingredients and is minimally processed (a process which does not fundamentally alter the raw product).  For example, animal products raised with the use of artificial hormones can be labeled natural.  Most importantly, natural does not mean organic, although many companies would like consumers to think it does.  In addition, the label does not control the way the animal is raised.  The label must explain the use of the term natural (such as - no added colorings or artificial ingredients; minimally processed.)

No Antibiotics Used
This term may be used on labels for meat or poultry products if sufficient documentation is provided by the producer to the USDA demonstrating that the animals were raised without antibiotics. However, USDA officials concede it’s difficult to make certain firms are adhering to these standards. Antibiotic use is associated with intensive confinement, so the “no antibiotics used” label suggests, but does not guarantee, that the animal wasn’t raised in a factory farm setting.

No Hormones Administered
This label is not allowed in raising hogs or poultry, therefore, this label cannot be used on those products unless it is accompanied by a statement that says “Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones. “No hormones administered” or “no hormones added” labels are allowed for the labeling of beef products and generally indicate that the animal was not confined to a feedlot. As with antibiotics, the USDA does not test for the presence of hormones but relies on documentation submitted by the producer.

Humanely Raised
This label is not regulated by the USDA, however, some organizations are trying to come up with a standard definition. Humane Farm Animal Care’s certification process includes access to wholesome and nutritious feed, appropriate environment design, caring and responsible management, skilled and conscientious animal care, and considerate handling, transport and slaughter.

Debeaking is the partial removal of a bird’s beak.  This procedure is commonplace in factory farms to prevent cannibalism and feather picking. Debeaking is usually accomplished by slicing off part of the beak with a hot blade, shortly after the chicks have hatched.  It is a painful and sometimes fatal procedure.

The tip of a bird’s beak is packed with sensitive nerves, much like our own fingertips.  When debeaked, the birds lose an important sensory organ, experience acute and chronic pain, including phantom limb pain.  In addition, the fast-paced profit-motivated factory farms rush through this procedure and cut some beaks off up to the bird’s nostrils.

Debeaking is a completely unacceptable to “solve” a behavioral problem by cutting off part of an animal’s body.  This is another way big agriculture finds to “blame the victim” by blaming the birds for pecking at each other.  Is it any wonder that these social problems exist when the birds are packed by the thousands shoulder to shoulder?

Have you ever see an “All Natural”, “Organic” or “Cage Free” label on a food product such as chicken breast or eggs? These labels are popping up everywhere in response to a new awareness of what we put in our bodies and how our farmed animals are raised.

While there are many labels that can appear on food packaging, not all of them means the animals have been raised in a humane manner. For instance, the misleading “All Natural” label has no relevance to animal welfare and does not refer to the way the animal was raised, fed or handled.

Here are some food labels you’ll commonly see in the grocery store and their meaning.

Cage Free
This label is placed on eggs or egg products that come from hens who have never been confined to a cage and have unlimited access to food, water, and freedom to roam. This label can refer to birds who have lived their entire lives confined to a building, and the space per hen may not be much more than caged birds.

Free Range
This poultry labels means that the birds were allowed “continuous, free access to the outside for over 51% of their lives through a normal growing cycle.” However, some free-range birds may be housed in open-air barns with limited exits to the outside that are left open for only a short period each day.  Even if the bird is unable or chooses to remain indoors, they can be labeled as free-range.

Grass Fed
“Grass Fed” meat is from animals whose diet was derived solely from forage and who had continuous access to pasture during the growing season. This term is not synonymous with “free range” or “pastured raised.” Meat can qualify for this label even if the animals are confined to a pen and fed hay for months out of the year. Also, they can be given hormones and antibiotics.

Free Range
“Free Range” means the animals were given continuous, free access to pasture for a significant portion of their lives and were never confined to a feedlot. The USDA has no specific definition for “free-range” beef, pork, and other non-poultry products. No criteria (such as the size of the range or the amount of space given to each animal) are required before beef, lamb, and pork can be called “free-range”. Claims and labeling using “free range” are therefore unregulated. The USDA relies “upon producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims.”

Pasture Raised
The “Pastured Raised” label indicates that the meat or eggs came from birds who were provided genuine access to both the outdoors and natural vegetation.

USDA Organic
Currently the only recognized organic program in the U.S. The program’s standards apply to all farm animals and don’t address many animal care issues such as weaning, physical alterations like tail docking, minimum space allowances, gestation crates, transport, or slaughter. However, the “USDA Organic” label does require animals have access to the outdoors and be provided with fresh air, sunlight, and freedom of movement.

Certified Humane
This label means that the product meets the Humane Farm Animal Care Program standards, which include nutritious diet without antibiotics, or hormones, animals raised with shelter, resting areas, sufficient space and the ability to engage in natural behaviors.

American Humane Certified
The first humane food certification program in the U.S., the American Humane Certified standards are similar to those of Certified Humane. Its auditing process now includes 24/7 video monitoring of all live areas, including transportation and slaughter facilities. This label means that the farm animals are:

• free to live and grow under conditions that limit stress
• benefit from injury and disease prevention and rapid diagnosis and treatment
• have readily accessible water, and are fed a diet that maintains full health and vigor
• are free to express normal behaviors and live in an appropriate and comfortable environment that includes sufficient space, proper facilities, shelter, a resting area, and company of the animals’ own kind.

Animal Welfare Approved
This program is administered by the Animal Welfare Institute and currently has the most rigorous and progressive animal care requirements in the nation.  This label requires that all animals have regular access to the outdoors and prohibits physical mutilations like debeaking of hens and tail docking of pigs. This program also requires that producers be family farmers and does not allow producers that have dual humane and factory-farming operations to participate.

Know Your Labels Part II

A gestation crate is a 7 ft by 2 ft metal enclosure used in intensive pig farming, in which a female breeding pig is confined during pregnancy, and in effect for most of her adult life.

As the sows grow larger, they no longer fit in the crates, and must sleep on their chests, unable to turn, until they are slaughtered. The crates are usually placed side by side in rows of 20 sows per row and 100 rows per shed, the floors of the crates slatted to allow excrement to fall into a pit below.

The pigs’ basic needs such as walking, rooting in the soil, and even turning around are denied, and they experience severe physical and psychological disorders. There isn’t enough room for the sow to lie down in a comfortable position. Imagine being pregnant and the only position you can you can settle into is on your stomach.

In January 2007, Smithfield Foods announced it would stop using gestation crates at its facilities but did not offer a timeline for the phaseout.

Today there are over 1 billion overweight people in the world by World Health Organization estimates. Ironically, there are an estimated 850 million more who are starving. Everyone in the industrialized world has more access to farmed animal products than ever before in history. The animals we eat have been bred, or genetically modified in some cases, to grow so big so fast until both eater and eaten can no longer function properly and suffer health problems as a result.

No one is really sure why, but antibiotics have been found to make farmed animals grow faster. The result is the use of 25 million pound of antibiotics used each year in agribusiness. That’s eight times the amount used to treat human illnesses! The overuse of antibiotics favors the strongest organisms who survive each treatment. The growth of resistant and disease causing bacteria weakens antibiotic use in humans and sets the stage for a worldwide pandemic like the recent swine flu scare.

We are increasingly making ourselves vulnerable to bacterial infections that develop immunity to normal lines of antibiotic treatment.

Factory farms are virtual breeding grounds for bacteria to develop and thrive. At industrialized pig farms, each football field-long shed backs into a lagoon where organic waste including manure and dead animals are left to rot and evaporate. Each shed contains thousands of animals packed closely together, making it easy for diseases to spread.

Given these facts it’s not a stretch to infer that our current health care crisis is closely tied to the health crisis in the animal agricultural industry.

Additional reading:
Sierra Club - Abuse of Antibiotics Factsheet
Natural Resources Defense Council - Facts About Pollution from Livestock Farms

Factory farming is a dirty business. The life forms that evolved on this planet and were eventually domesticated by humans were never meant to be packed shoulder to shoulder in cramped, artificially lit structures. It’s easy to dismiss their suffering, to ease the mind by saying “Well, they were raised to be eaten by us. Their only purpose is to be used as food”. While this is true, those same creatures also feel pain, frustration and sadness just like your own pet dog or cat.

Pigs in a packed factory farm

Pigs are highly social, curious animals that are smarter than dogs and just as intelligent and loyal. In factory farms, their natural instincts to burrow, roll in the dirt, run around, and do anything else that comes naturally are denied for their entire lives. Piglets are taken away from their distraught mothers after just a few weeks, and their tails are chopped off, the ends of their teeth are snipped off with pliers, and the males are castrated. No painkillers are given to ease their suffering. Studies show that piglets who have been separated from their mothers after a few weeks suffer increased anxiety and aggression and have diminished problem-solving abilities than piglets who were raised normally.

Wild pigs in their natural habitat

You can help stop this abuse by pledging to stop eating the products of these large scale corporations. We can stop these companies by hitting them where it hurts. Buy pork that has been certified as free-range and naturally raised. Or you can make a change like my family made - stop eating pork altogether.

La Gloria, home of the first victim of swine flu, lies close to a collection of Smithfield’s farms. Residents in the area have long complained about an unnatural smell around the farms, and swarms of flies in the area. The type of fly found near these farms is known to reproduce in pig waste and is suspected of being a carrier of swine flu. Overcrowding and fetid lagoons filled with the rotting remains of dead hogs and fecal matter attracts the flies, which then pass the virus on to humans.

A municipal health official in Veracruz, Mexico stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. Nearby residents believe that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, a brand owned by Smithfield Foods, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak.

This company Smithfield Foods claim to “remain 100 percent committed to environmental leadership, community involvement, employee safety, animal welfare and high-quality food”. They have shown time and time again that they care more about profits than people and animals. Please don’t consume their products, don’t support their poison.

Somewhere east of the North Carolina town of Tar Heel lay rows upon rows of hog farms, as far as the eye can see.  Each hog house, as long as a football field, holds up to 10,000 hogs and backs onto a single large lagoon.  The lagoons are a sickly shade of pink and contain anything from pig waste, to dead pigs, along with everything injected and fed to those pigs. Hog farms in North Carolina also emit some 300 tons of nitrogen into the air every day as ammonia gas, much of which falls back to earth and deprives lakes and streams of oxygen, stimulating algal blooms and killing fish.

Not only are these lagoons damaging the local environment and wildlife, they are also threatening the health of all residents living nearby the factory farms.    People who breathe the air emanating from the swine farms suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage.

Smithfield treats their “products” no better.  Pigs in these farms languish in hot houses, never seeing the light of day or feeling grass under their feet.  They are denied their basic instinct to root through the forest floor.  By the time they’re ready for slaughter, most of these intellegent animals are insane from lack of mental stimulation.  The best thing you can do to help these animals is to not purchase Smithfield products.

Overcrowding and overuse of vaccines could be the reason for the mutation of a powerful new super flu and Smithfield’s super efficient factory farms could be the breeding ground.  This isn’t the first time swine flu has broken out at a Smithfield’s farm.  As recently as 2007, an outbreak at one of the company’s Romanian farms cost the company $13 million.

Smithfield chairman Joseph Luter once was quoted as saying that all of Easter Europe, especially Romania, should become the “Iowa of Europe”.  Does this mean we’ll be seeing swine flu outbreaks centered around Iowa and Romania next?

Companies like Smithfield treat animals as if they were non-living, non-feeling beings.  They obviously don’t think too highly of the people they sell their product to, or the people that live nearby their factories.  The best way to stop companies like this is to hit them where it hurts.  Stop buying pork that was raised on these mass-scale factory farms.  My family stopped eating pork for the last year and we feel healthier without all those extra chemicals in our bodies.