Making The Food System Ours

States around the country with large conventional farming operations are attempting to put a stop to the recent spike in undercover videography at factory farms.  Animal welfare activists have captured a number of short videos from inside these farms in the effort to expose what they perceive to be abuse and illegal mistreatment of farm animals.

In response, the Iowa legislature has already passed a bill making it illegal to enter a farming operation under false pretenses, and other states are following suit.  You can find the details, as well as one of the videos, here:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/02/29/147651002/states-crack-down-on-animal-welfare-activists-and-their-undercover-videos

Although these laws raise important legal questions about privacy rights and whistle-blowing, the real issue is more fundamental.  These videos raise basic questions about our (inter)national industrial food system: namely, is such treatment of animals inevitable in this system, and who is responsible for the conditions inside of these factory farms?

It is tempting to condemn the farm owners and workers at these operations as cruel and perhaps even heartless, but the truth is more subtle.  The actions depicted in the videos are disturbing, but we need to see them not as the result of individual cruelty, but as symptomatic of a food system that is built around producing and moving massive amounts of food over enormous distances as quickly and as cheaply as possible.  If this description sounds familiar that's because it should - what I've described is the basic operating formula of any manufacturing industry.  After all, there's a reason these operations are called factory farms!

When farming loses its respect for the environment and its relationship to the local community it ceases to be agri-culture and instead becomes agri-business.  And the final step in this process - the one that we are now experiencing - is that farming transforms from agri-business, to agri-manufacturing.  In such a situation, it is inevitable that animal welfare be neglected in favor of the "bottom line."

The industrial food system belongs to all of us.  Every time, for instance, that we purchase pork from one of these factory farms we are funding this system.  Not only are we making profitable the poor treatment of animals at these factory farms, we are also validating the large-scale production of genetically modified corn, soy, alfalfa, and other crops, the great majority of which harvest goes toward feeding factory farmed animals instead of people.

But it's difficult not to fund this system.  The meat and produce produced by the industrial food system are cheap, and when you're on a budget they're almost impossible to turn down.  That's why the Food Policy Working Group continues to advocate for the food justice of Memphis and Shelby County, with an important focus on local farmers and farmers markets.

There are few things as basic and as vital as the food that we eat.  It's time that we take control of the food on the dinner table and it make ours.