Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig Read online

  Scientists and farmers had created “the other white meat.” Although the phrase originated in a marketing slogan, in one sense it was literally true. Scientists from Texas A&M University showed that a factory-farmed pork loin’s levels of myoglobin—the protein responsible for redness—were much lower than those of beef and comparable to those in chicken or fish. That pale color owed much to the new farming methods. Myoglobin carries oxygen to working muscles: the less a muscle works, the paler its color. Chicken breasts are white because those muscles are never used for flying. Crated veal is pale because the calf had no room to walk. Pigs raised on pasture had meat of a darker hue. By the 1980s pork had become a white meat because confinement pigs, packed into small pens, rarely used their muscles.

  Whether customers preferred meat from these new pigs was a different question. After an initial boost spurred by the campaign, pork sales leveled off. People started thinking of pork as white meat, but they didn’t start buying much more of it: per capita pork consumption stayed level at just under fifty pounds from the 1980s through the 2000s. Meanwhile, consumption of chicken—the original white meat—kept climbing, from fifty-four to sixty-nine pounds per capita.

  In all of this innovation, one aspect of pork production was ignored: flavor. At an industry conference in the 1960s, an animal scientist at Oklahoma State University observed that in the rush to create lean pigs, “pork quality has been completely ignored by swine breeders.” In 2000, industry experts writing in National Hog Farmer came to the same conclusion: “Currently, industry breeding schemes create pigs that grow fast and efficiently but lack the superior meat and eating quality consumers prefer.”

  One quality problem, identified in the 1960s and still unsolved, is “pale, soft, and exudative” pork, which is gray, mushy, and tasteless. This meat, it turned out, came from skinny, neurotic pigs. “Their personalities are completely different,” the animal scientist Temple Grandin wrote of the lean pigs. “They’re super-nervous and high-strung,” and the stress appeared to be damaging their meat. Such pigs also had a tendency to drop dead of shock. As a group of veterinarians explained, such pigs “show an increase in carcass lean but much greater susceptibility to sudden death.”

  In creating lean pigs, American pork producers had created a new set of problems, of which meat quality was only the most obvious. Modern pig farming, many critics charged, destroyed small farms, fouled land and water, and threatened public health. Most of all, the critics said, the new farms made pigs miserable—a charge that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, was becoming harder to refute.

  SEVENTEEN

  Vices

  While examining a group of hogs at a confinement facility around 1990, a veterinarian noticed a pregnant sow that appeared to be in pain. He asked about her and learned that she had broken her leg the day before and that her piglets were due in a week. “We’ll let her farrow in here,” the plant manager said, “and then we’ll shoot her and foster off her pigs.” The vet offered to splint her leg for free, but the manager turned him down. With 5,000 sows and just three full-time employees, he didn’t have the manpower to care for a sow with a leg splint.

  The vet was appalled. He had grown up on a hog farm. His father would have either treated the sow or euthanized her immediately, not allowed her to suffer for a week and then give birth. “If it is not feasible to do this in a confinement operation,” the vet concluded, then “there is something wrong with confinement operations.”

  As the twentieth century wound to a close, many people were coming to that same conclusion. The New York Times printed its first analysis of modern pig farming in 1980, headlined “Hog Production Swept by Agricultural Revolution,” which pointed to the many smaller farmers being forced out of the business. A few years later writer Orville Schell published Modern Meat, raising concerns that feeding antibiotics to pigs might create drug-resistant pathogens. In 1996 the Raleigh News and Observer earned a Pulitzer Prize for its five-part series investigating how North Carolina’s state government, captive to hog barons, had allowed the industry to pollute with impunity.

  Then, in the late 1990s, the public learned about “mad cow disease.” The infection, new to science, was contracted by cows that ate parts of other cows in their feed, and it could be passed along to humans who ate infected beef. The horror of a brain-destroying disease, caught from fast-food hamburgers, called attention to the appalling details of livestock production. Critiques of factory farms became a staple of investigative journalism and a category of books unto itself, from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) to Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and beyond.

  People began looking at meat in new ways. For decades, America’s food system had operated on the principle of opacity: steaks and chops magically appeared in supermarkets, and consumers didn’t ask many questions. As one industry insider explained, “For modern agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.” But scandal threw open a window. When consumers began tracing their pork back to its source, many discovered that they didn’t like what modern farming was doing to family farms, the environment, public health, and the welfare of pigs.

  Before World War II nearly every Corn Belt farmer practiced mixed farming, raising not only hogs and cattle but also corn and soy to feed them. By the late 1960s, however, a livestock expert had already noted “the disappearance of the diversified general Midwestern farm.” Farming in the industrial style—with high-priced machinery, hybrid seed corn, and chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides—expanded crop yields and increased the acreage that one farmer could handle. Many farms disappeared, and those that remained were larger and more specialized. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson infamously offered this advice to farmers: “Get big or get out.”

  And that’s exactly what happened. According to the US Department of Agriculture, there were 3 million farms in the United States raising hogs in 1950. By 2002, that number had dropped to 79,000, a loss of more than 97 percent. In 1950, the average hog farm had 19 animals; a half century later, the average was 766. Much of the consolidation has happened in the last three decades. In 1992 farms with more than 2,000 animals accounted for just 30 percent of the total hog population in the United States. By 2004, 80 percent of hogs lived at these enormous facilities. In 2010, the top four hog producers had captured two-thirds of the market, and the largest—Smithfield Foods—controlled nearly a third of it.

  The big producers now control every aspect of that market, from the moment a sow becomes pregnant to the sale of pork chops at the grocery store. Under the traditional system, farmers bred and raised pigs and sold them to pork packers at buying stations or auction barns. Under the new system, many farmers never own the pigs at all but instead act as agricultural foster parents. Much of the work of modern hog raising is done by independent farmers who operate under contract to big corporations, raising pigs according to contractual specifications. The corporation owns the boars that produce the semen, the sows impregnated by that semen, and the piglets born as a result. The company creates proprietary blends of feed and stipulates how the pigs must be fed, watered, and dosed with drugs. The company owns the slaughtering plants, and many times it owns the trucks that deliver packaged meat to retailers. “Vertical integration gives you high-quality, consistent products with consistent genetics,” Joseph W. Luter III, chairman of Smithfield, said in 2000. “And the only way to do that is to control the process from the farm to the packing plant.”

  Consolidation led to geographic shifts. Since the 1820s, most hogs had come from corn-raising states. But starting in the 1980s the industry shifted east. North Carolina, desperate to replace a devastated tobacco sector, welcomed hog farming with open arms. The number of hogs raised there doubled from 1987 to 1992, then doubled again by 1998. It was expensive to ship corn and soy from the Midwest, but overall costs came down thanks to cheap labor, lax environmental r
egulation, warmer weather (which reduced the need to heat barns), and proximity to eastern markets. Wendell Murphy, founder of a large hog producer, held a seat in the state legislature and unapologetically backed laws friendly to his industry.

  Packing plants grew larger as well. By 2006, 95 percent of hogs in the United States were slaughtered at plants that handled more than 1 million hogs a year, and one plant in North Carolina killed 8 million annually. The kill and cut lines moved at lightning speed—1,300 hogs per hour in some cases—and became highly automated. Previously, meatpacking had required expensive skilled labor because there was no way to automate the disassembly of hogs. Tight control of breeding produced not just lean hogs but almost perfectly uniform ones, which allowed machines to do more of the work. The packers hired low-skill, low-wage workers, often immigrants recruited from Mexico and Central America. These laborers had little bargaining power, and their working conditions suffered accordingly: meatpacking soon had one of the highest injury and illness rates of any US industry. It was no accident that the hog industry—like the broiler hen industry—grew most quickly in the South, the region least welcoming to organized labor.

  As the hog farms and slaughterhouses grew larger, so did the retailers. In 1997, the four largest grocery retailers held a modest 19 percent of the market. In 2009, the four largest controlled more than half of the market. These large retailers—led by Walmart—demanded meat of uniform quality, in huge quantities, at low prices. To satisfy the grocery chains while maintaining profits, the big pork companies squeezed the least powerful player in the supply chain: the farmers who raised pigs on contract. For every dollar spent on pork, farmers received an ever smaller portion—from fifty cents in the 1980s to less than a quarter by 2009.

  Consumers didn’t know what percentage of their dollar was making its way to farmers. They only knew they could buy very cheap pork. In constant dollars, the price of pork was 30 percent lower in the 2000s than it had been in the 1950s. In this sense, modern confinement hog farming had been a spectacular success. But cheap meat proved costly, for pigs as well as for people.

  After a week of heavy rain in June 1995, the dike failed on an eight-acre manure pond in eastern North Carolina. About 25 million gallons of “red, soupy waste”—a slurry of hog feces and urine—spilled out of the pond, across tobacco and soybean fields, and into the New River, where it killed millions of fish. “It came through the woods,” a neighbor said. “You could see the dark stuff. It made me sick.”

  The spill exposed a big problem in North Carolina’s new hog country. A 250-pound hog excretes 7.8 pounds of feces and 2.65 gallons of urine per day, about four times as much as a human being of equivalent weight. The 60 million pigs in the United States in 1995 produced almost as much waste as the country’s 266 million people. Strict rules governed the disposal of human waste; not so the pig waste.

  Slatted floors freed farmers from the chore of shoveling manure, but the waste did not disappear. It was flushed into open cesspools thirty feet deep and acres wide. The contents sometimes seeped into groundwater, fouling nearby wells and streams. Assuming the dam didn’t break, some of the liquid in the lagoon evaporated, and bacteria partially broke down the waste. What remained was sprayed onto nearby fields. Theoretically it served as fertilizer, but it was applied in concentrations far higher than the ground could absorb and therefore washed into streams. The ponds themselves emitted ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other noxious chemicals, making life unbearable and sometimes dangerous for those downwind. As one man who lived near a manure lagoon explained, “We are used to farm odors. These are not farm odors.”

  In 2007 farmers discovered a new problem: for mysterious reasons, manure started foaming and bubbling up through the slatted floors. The bubbles contained gases including methane, a highly flammable by-product of decomposing waste. In 2011, at a farm in northern Iowa, the manure foam exploded, killing 1,500 pigs and seriously injuring one worker.

  The problems of waste disposal shaped where hog facilities could be located. In 1997, North Carolina placed a moratorium—it later became a ban—on the construction of new hog lagoons and spray fields. As a result, the industry shifted to the high plains of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, where producers found looser environmental regulations and fewer neighbors to complain of the stench.

  American taxpayers might not like the sights and smells of confinement operations, but they have been underwriting those operations all the same. For many years, the federal government subsidized the price of corn and soy. A corporation that bought hog feed on the market enjoyed the benefits of that price cut, but a small hog farmer who grew his own corn and soy did not. According to one estimate, federal crop subsidies saved hog producers $8.5 billion between 1997 and 2005. Similarly, the lack of environmental regulations meant that a facility’s neighbors and society as a whole absorbed the costs of waste disposal. All told, experts suggested that American taxpayers gave hog producers a subsidy of about $24 on every hog.

  And those estimates didn’t include other externalities—costs that aren’t reflected in the price of a pork chop. Livestock production plays a major role in climate change. Sources of greenhouse gases include forest clearance to grow corn and soy (which releases the carbon stored in trees), feed crop cultivation (which relies on petroleum-intensive fertilizers), and the biological processes of the animals (such as methane in belches and manure). Depending on whose estimate you believe, the global livestock industry generates between 15 and 50 percent of the gases that cause climate change.

  Feeding antibiotics to pigs can also lead to drug-resistant bacteria that threaten human health. More than three-quarters of the antibiotics used in the United States go to livestock farms, and according to the FDA, the majority of those drugs are “medically important” within the health-care system. But feeding those antibiotics to pigs plays a role in diminishing their effectiveness in people. When such drugs are used as a feed supplement, antibiotic-resistant bacteria can evolve in animals and then spread to humans, increasing the risk of illnesses that cannot be cured. In response to such dangers, Denmark, a leading pork exporter, banned the use of antibiotics to promote growth, and its pork industry has continued to thrive. Pork producers in the United States have resisted such change, insisting that the agricultural use of antibiotics is safe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), however, offered an alarming assessment in a 2013 report: “Antibiotic use in food animals can result in resistant Campylobacter bacteria”—a nasty bug that can cause bloody diarrhea and temporary paralysis—“that can spread to humans.” The report also warned that drug-resistant salmonella followed a similar path from animals to humans. The CDC concluded, “The use of antibiotics for promoting growth is not necessary, and the practice should be phased out.” The FDA in 2013 issued a new policy with precisely that aim, but critics suggested that loopholes would allow current practices to continue.

  Pigs have shouldered the most direct costs of modern hog farming. The pork industry, not surprisingly, claims that confinement barns are perfect for the animals. “They love it,” the president of one pork corporation has said. “The conditions that we keep these animals in are much more humane than when they were out in the field.” The evidence suggests otherwise.

  Hogs in confinement endure a litany of horrors. They spend their lives standing over septic pits, and ventilation systems are often used sparingly to keep heating and electricity costs down. Workers who enter the barns sometimes don respirators, a convenience not available to the thousands of pigs who breathe the air constantly. “Acute and chronic infections of the respiratory tract in pigs are common,” according to Biology of the Domestic Pig, a standard reference work. “Most are related to . . . inadequate ventilation, improper temperature and humidity, poor nutrition, and high levels of irritant gases such as ammonia.”

  Hogs also develop behavioral problems that the industry refers to as “vices.” One
vice is a tendency to bite the tails of other pigs, which can lead to infection. Market pigs are juveniles, just five or six months old when slaughtered, and are as intelligent, playful, and curious as puppies. On pasture or in barns, they spend much of their time exploring with their mouths and snouts—rooting, chewing, poking, exploring. But in a confinement facility with metal bars and concrete floors, such instincts find an outlet on the only soft surfaces around—other pigs. “Without malleable substrates to chew, pigs direct what appears to be inquisitive or exploratory behaviors toward other pigs and are rewarded by movement of the tail and perhaps the taste of blood,” according to a team of university livestock experts. The industry’s solution to this problem is to cut off the tail, leaving only a one- or two-inch stub so sensitive that a pig would attack any other pig that dared nip it.

  Sows in modern hog facilities spend nearly all of their lives in two-by-seven-foot crates. The system keeps them from fighting each other and maximizes space in barns, but it also prevents them from walking or even turning around. The sows’ suffering has prompted campaigns to ban the use of crates. (Courtesy Humane Society of the United States)

  Sows suffer particularly shocking conditions. For nearly all of her life, each sow is allotted a space only slightly bigger than she is. These cages, the industry says, prevent fighting among sows and keep them from crushing their newborn piglets. These claims are true. But it is also a matter of economics. “Once a building is built, the most efficient use of space will be to have as many units of production in that building as is possible,” one industry expert explains. “The sow crate allows the greatest number of breeding sows in a given building space.”