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Once again America and the world are shocked at
the extent business will go to make money. And I don't just mean the inhumane
treatment of cows and the resulting record recall of 143 million pounds of beef.
We aren't happy with the amount of milk a normal cow produces. Growth
promotants, production boosting hormones, antibiotics and all other forms of
cost-reducing profit-enhancing technology is never enough.
Today's highly concentrated and consolidated food
system is dominated by huge multinational corporations that aren't happy with
the profit normal animals, humans and the earth will provide. The desperation of
small operators is palpable as these modern Robber Barons sit fat and happy in
their office suites looking down on the lowly highly disadvantaged independent
competitors. The marketplace is so demanding and predatory that small and medium
sized companies have little hope of surviving even with corner cutting and/or
resorting to outright cheating.
Milking
the system
The Bible instructs us to care for our animals,
“A righteous man respects the life of his animal.â€
Our cows tell the ugly and sad story. A cow that once gave milk over a
period of eight or more years is now, with the use of Monsanto’s rBGH hormone
and aggressive hot feed rations, often used up after three years. The weak
remains of this completely drained animal milking machine is then ground into
our school lunches, fed to recovering patients in hospitals and nursing homes
and further distributed through food service companies into restaurant and other
institutional trade. This cheap meat is used by big food service companies to
drive producers of good, healthy and safe local beef out of
business.
No one is better off except the big food and chemical
corporations. Desperation is seen in the way both humans and animals are
treated. Our food system is like the coal mines and miners of Appalachia – family farm agriculture and small processors
are being strip-mined out of business as the enormous wealth created from their
labor and land is stolen by Tyson, Cargill, ConAgra, Swift, Monsanto and their
big retail partners. Our nation’s future health and well-being is at
stake.
Recalling
the beef while eliminating the competition
USDA as a wholly owned subsidiary of the big food
cartel is not the people’s agency that President Lincoln envisioned. Isn’t it
interesting how the well publicized food recalls negatively affect the smaller
plants most? What would this week’s beef recall have looked like had the
inhumane treatment been videoed at one of the major plants, which by the way
have tight security preventing such embarrassments? Many of the large national
recalls have resulted in the elimination of smaller plants like Hudson and
Topps, causing further consolidation of our food system into fewer and fewer
hands.
USDA cops
are in the pocket of the criminals
Obviously we aren’t happy with the job USDA is doing
in protecting our food supply. However, what many don’t realize is the USDA is
also responsible for making sure the marketplace is fair and competitive, giving
us good choices as to where we buy our food.
USDA has abdicated their responsibility for enforcing
the antitrust laws that were designed to protect the producers of our food from
unfair business practices, thereby protecting all of us from monopoly control
over what we eat. One hundred years ago Congress agreed that we are best served
by a family farm and ranch food system with many buyers and sellers serving the
best interests of consumers, not a system controlled by the Robber Barons that
we have today. What physical and mental toll does it take on the management and
labor of small and medium sized companies when they get up every morning facing
the life threatening predators of big food? We see the anxiety in the lack of
dignity and respect shown to others and to the animals that provide our
food.
Bigger is
not better
The relatively modern “bigger is better†experiment
in agriculture and food, also known of as industrial agriculture, has been a
complete disaster. The economy of scale and efficiency lies have been propagated
throughout our corporate controlled universities and government agencies since
before the days of Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz. Industrialization has been
mandated through government policy, driving farm and ranch families off the land
and into the cities to do “more productive workâ€. Like in Appalachia, this industrial model is mining, rather than
nurturing our land, people and communities, leaving a wasteland of broken rural
towns and dead dirt. Dan Glickman was
asked during his term as Ag Secretary why USDA didn’t enforce the antitrust laws
from the early 1900’s protecting independent producers and our marketplace. He
said, “It’s different this time. We are trading in a global market, we need big
companies that can do business globally.â€
Let’s not allow the serious and totally unacceptable
problems that have been exposed in the past couple weeks to push us closer to an
even more dangerous food system – one controlled more and more by big food and a
corrupt USDA.
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