by Bailey Porter
Editor-in-Chief
“Supersize Me,” which documented the sickening facts about fast food that we’ve always known but only really made the connection to while watching Morgan Spurlock’s health deteriorate on screen, became a great conversation piece for vegetarians. I know I felt more confident in sharing my reasons for being a vegetarian to some people who don’t easily consider the humane treatment of animals as a strong enough argument.
More poignant than watching how factory-farmed meat contributed to Spurlock’s health problems is reading the facts Robert F. Kennedy Jr. collects in his riveting book, “Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy.”
People might say they couldn’t go a day without eating meat and in the same sentence complain about the number of SUVs on the road. As much as Bush-haters want nothing to do with the Administration’s policies overseas, nonexistent health care reform or irresponsible education legislation, without knowing it, they are supporting Bush every time they eat factory-farmed meat.
Kennedy, a specialist in environmental litigation, represents family farmers, environmental and animal rights groups, American Indians and food safety advocates alike in 34 states in legal fights against the hog industry.
While traditional farms are exempt from some laws that prohibit dumping animal waste into the environment because they effectively turn the waste into fertilizer for their crops, factory farms cannot legally do the same.
Statistics don’t lie: a pig produces 10 times the waste of a human and so a factory farm with 50,000 pigs produces more waste than a city of 1 million people. And unlike cities that have to treat and dispose waste properly, factory farmers are allowed to dump their waste where ever. All of the toxic chemicals pumped into factory-farmed animals to increase their growth and keep them alive in unnatural conditions get dumped untreated into the land, air and water.
Hog waste “contains a witch’s brew of nearly 400 toxic poisons, including heavy metals, antibiotics, hormones, deadly biocides, pesticides, and dozens of disease-causing viruses and microbes,” according to Kennedy. The scary thing is that although this list looks too awful to be real, the pollutants are very real and effect average Americans.
Kennedy writes of clients who contracted Pfiesteria, a microbe from hog farms that kills millions of fish and causes incurable lesions, respiratory illness and brain damage in humans.
Just as Kennedy made headway with a 2001 court ruling that stated factory farms violate the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and Clean Water Act, Bush granted the industry more breathing room turning a blind eye on yet another pollution-causing industry that continues to wreak havoc on the environment and people’s standard of living. Bush appointed the head of a junk-science think tank Harvard Center for Risk Analysis as the director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
The OIRA reviews all major regulation proposals. Since this director works with anti-environment, anti-regulation big shots from the oil, auto, chemical, drug, agribusiness and mining sectors in HCRA, it’s a scary thing to think about the ethics and goals of the OIRA, which operates secretly. Recently, the OIRA worked with the EPA to develop new regulations to officially alter the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
Now if that isn’t reason enough to visit the local Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, I don’t know what is.
Bailey Porter, a senior journalism major, is editor in chief of the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at porterb@ulv.edu.