(A week or so ago I reviewed the film "Our Daily Bread," a documentary about the dislocations of industrial farming. In line with that, here is a long excerpt from an article titled "Swine of the Times: The making of the modern pig" by Nathanael Johnson that appeared in the May 2006 "Harpers" magazine. It is one of the most devastating indictments of agribusiness that I have ever read. Unfortunately, the article is not online as Harper's insists on defending the dead tree paradigm. If you go to their website, you will find an index of all their articles but all except maybe 1 percent are not online.)
THE CHICKENIFICATION OF THE AMERICAN PIG American hog farmers have experimented with artificial insemination since the 1930s, but it became standard practice only after vertically integrated megafarms began to dominate the business. Although the pork-packing industry can claim the honor of showing Henry Ford the way to mechanization, it has only recently embraced the principle of vertical integration, which when combined with the assembly line brought Ford and other automobile manufacturers such splendid success. It wasn't until 1991 that anyone in the pig world succeeded in expanding Ford's principles beyond the slaughterhouse, back down the food chain, to hog farms. The innovator was Joseph Luter III, who took over Smithfield Foods in 1975. He saw that poultry companies were already turning big profits by building massive chicken farms and controlling every stage of production. If vertical integration could work for chickens, Luter reasoned, it could work for pigs. Luter wanted to give customers something not often found in nature: uniformity. He wanted shoppers to know exactly what a ham with the Smithfield label would taste like before they bought it. "And the only way to do that," Luter told a newspaper reporter in 2000, "is to control the process from the farm to the packing plant." With AI, Luter could distribute a single line of genetics across a thousand farms. Smithfield provided every farmer with the same pigs, the same feed, and the same detailed instructions. Producers only had to build up-to-spec barns and follow orders. This system lifted the burden, and the benefits, of innovation from the producer's shoulders. Some farmers resented being forced into the role of de facto assembly-line workers, but they did not have much choice. They could not compete with the efficiencies of vertical integration. Megafarms sprouted up around Smithfield's packing plant in North Carolina, and in the mid-Nineties other vertical integrators, such as Premium Standard Farms and Seaboard, began moving into the Midwest, the traditional American hog belt. Now Smithfield turns about 20 million hogs into pork every year, making it the world's largest pork producer. Farmers who wanted to stay in business converted. Many quit. The most stubborn went bankrupt. Between 1979 and 2004, as pork production increased by 6 billion pounds, the number of hog farms in America decreased from more than 650,000 to less than 70,000. "Farmers with know-how and pride got eliminated," one pork producer who had chosen conversion told me. "This kind of farming doesn't take any talent. The company gives you a plan, a consultant, the feed, and the pigs. All you have to do is follow the plan. People who had no talent thought it was great." Luter's system demanded that farmers subtly shift the way they looked at their animals. The good farmer had to know his animals. The successful Smithfield producer has to watch his inputs, death rates, and pounds gained per pound of feed to maximize protein production. Instead of paying attention to individual pigs, producers focused on the efficiency of the herd as a whole. Antibiotic growth promoters like Tylan are advertised in trade magazines as tools to help producers deal with such abstractions: "Tylan helps minimize attrition losses and maximize economic returns," one ad reads. "On average, 30-35% of pigs born never reach full-value market weight because they die, are culled or are lightweights at marketing." As one Midwestern veterinarian put it, his role has changed from something akin to a family doctor to a public health planner. "The days when I would get called in to see one sick pig are long gone," he said. Instead, workers dispatch sick hogs with a bolt gun, or simply swing the runts by their hind legs against the concrete floor. Healing is inefficient. As the way producers looked at pigs changed, so did the animal itself. Luter needed a brave new pig for his new system, and in 1990, Smithfield purchased exclusive U.S. rights to the genetic lines of extraordinarily lean pigs from the National Pig Development Company. These hogs excelled at efficiently converting feed into salable protein, because they wasted little energy on fat production. As an added benefit, the lean meat they produced appealed to lipophobic Americans. At that time, health-conscious Americans shied away from fatty meats but considered chicken lean and virtuous. In 1986 the National Pork Board had begun an advertising campaign that would recast the pig as a second type of chicken. Pork, advertisers asserted, is "the other white meat." Smithfield made this claim a reality. As other pork corporations turned to the Smithfield model, breeding companies designed pigs to accommodate the desire for leaner, more efficient swine. Today geneticists have developed tools to reshape pigs almost as ably as Ford's engineers reshape radiators. WE HAVE GONE TOO FAR I decided to attend the National Swine Improvement Federation Conference in Ames, Iowa, to find out what the leading lights of the hog industry thought of the animal they had created. Surprisingly, meatpackers, academics, and private-sector scientists all gave me the same answer: We have gone too far. Geneticists have made great strides in the last decade. The portion of the hog that people can actually eat (as opposed to the skin, bones, and fat) has increased by 1.04 percent--the equivalent of an extra pork chop per pig. Scientists have shaved 12.9 days off the time it takes the animal to reach market weight and increased the area of the loin eye (used as an indicator for general muscle size) by 1.9 centimeters. Sows give birth to an average of 1.56 more piglets per litter. Today's pigs are impressively uniform and grow large, lean muscles quickly. But the pork has become so lean that packers often have to inject saline marinades directly into the meat--and chefs must drown it in heavy sauces--to make it palatable. What's more, a combination of overbreeding and stressful living conditions makes a percentage of our pork more acidic and less tasty than it used to be. Standing in an Iowa State University lecture hall, flanked by dual PowerPoint screens, food scientist Ken Prusa told the swine improvers that the future of the industry lay in providing customers a "positive taste experience." And providing a positive taste experience means providing less acidic pork, Prusa said. In pork, acids break down muscle tissue, turning it to mush, bleaching it of color and giving it a slightly sour taste. The industry calls this condition "pale soft exudative" or PSE. Prusa held up a plastic-wrapped loin to the audience. The pale meat slumped around his hand. "What's all this reddish liquid sloshing around?" he asked. "Exudate," someone called out. "Purge," said another. "Water." "Right," Prusa said. To be exact, the fluid is mostly water with some iron, proteins, and trace minerals mixed in. He clicked to a slide showing a microscope photograph of healthy muscle, honeycombed with cell walls. Then he clicked to a picture of pale, soft, exudative meat. The slide showed only a mass of gray. "When the cell structure breaks down like this, the meat loses ability to retain water," Prusa said. When cooked, this acidic pork (with a pH below about 5.5) grows rubbery and dry. But as the pH rises--growing less acidic--the pork becomes "a taste experience we can only imagine," Prusa said. "At pH 6.2 and above--I don't know if anyone's ever eaten one of those, but you would not forget it," he said. For years, the Japanese have been buying all the best meat from American slaughterhouses. They need meat that won't melt to mush in shipping, and they are also more willing to pay for quality food. So far, meatpackers have simply picked the best meat off the disassembly line--from one hog here and another there--to satisfy this demand. The Japanese choose the meat by color: darker pork signifies less acid. Americans get the leftovers: the other white meat. But this is changing, Prusa said. If people want more perfect pork, geneticists may have to breed a different animal. "What's your definition of perfect pork?" asked an audience member. "An excellent eating experience," Prusa said. "But commodity consumers aren't interested in that." Prusa's response pointed toward a transformed marketplace: "I don't think we're going to have commodity pork much longer." Instead of settling for "commodity pork"--i.e., the cheapest thing on the shelf--American shoppers seem increasingly willing to pay more forTi brand they can trust or for some information about their meat's past. And although cheap, unbranded pork may remain on supermarket shelves, in the future it will probably come from countries like Brazil and China-- countries with cheaper labor and fewer laws preventing farmers from dumping their waste. At the cocktail party after the lecture, I asked Dan Hamilton, a geneticist for the breeding company Geneti-porc, if scientists would be able to reengineer the pig to produce less acidic meat. It's a difficult problem, he said, because many factors govern acidity. It depends, for instance, on how quickly packers cool the meat after slaughter and how people treat the animal beforehand. But geneticists can contribute by breeding more docile animals--pigs that can endure trying conditions without becoming stressed. When pale, soft, exudative meat first emerged as a major problem, scientists linked it definitively to stress. In breeding the Smithfield-type super swine, geneticists had inadvertently selected for a gene that made hogs prone to panic. Pigs exhibiting this trait might tremble all their lives and die of shock when a barn door banged shut too loudly. Hogs under stress (and humans as well) use an energy-production shortcut, rapidly burning glycogen in their muscles and creating lactic acid as a byproduct. Genetically stressed-out pigs live with their muscles immersed in lactic acid and, unless they die in unusual placidity, their meat goes quickly bad. Iowa State University Professor Lauren Christian is credited with discovering "the stress gene"--shorthand for a segment of DNA that produced heavily muscled, ultra-lean, but also exceptionally high-strung pigs. In 1995 he called on the industry to eliminate the gene, and the breeders responded. Today most genetics corporations have purged it from their breeding pools. All the same, the problems associated with the stress gene still exist. Farmers still complain of pigs that drop dead when they drive their tractors too close to the barn, and the pork industry still loses money on pale, soft, exudative flesh. The American Meat Science Association found that the amount of PSE pork had increased from 10.2 percent in 1992 to 15.5 percent in 2002, when the problem cost the industry $90 million. Either the genetic causes of stress are more complicated than Christian thought or something else is making the pigs crazy. If genes are no longer responsible for all this watery, floppy meat, animal living conditions may be the culprit. Scientists have found that the modern pig's monotonous life in cramped quarters puts it on edge. Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, has shown that when workers petted pigs for five minutes a day, let them out of their crates for a brief walk, or gave them a piece of rubber hose to play with, the animals calmed down. Pigs are, after all, highly intelligent animals--probably more intelligent than dogs--and, like dogs, they grow restless without anything to do. When swine cannot so much as turn around in their crates, they often develop repetitive movements, biting at the air and swinging their heads from side to side--movements that some students of animal behavior say signal frustration or neurosis. As breeders have pushed for efficiency, they have also relaxed the standards for physical traits that allow pigs to stand on concrete their whole lives without going lame. Hogs can live up to twenty years in the wild, but large pork producers usually cull sows after less than four years. Sows can produce more than ten litters, and older sows birth larger, healthier pigs. In confinement a sow's health won't hold up much past three litters. Swine producers recognize the problem, and a faction at the conference argued that it was time to make a change. In an effort to help breeders choose pigs that are less likely to go lame, Dale Miller, editor of National Hog Farmer, was distributing posters at the National Swine Improvement Federation Conference. The posters illustrated the good, the bad, and the ugly in hog body types. As I studied the pictures of pigeon-toed pigs, Miller chatted with Peggy Hawkins, a scientist from Monsanto, who had just ordered a set of posters. Monsanto, the agricultural biotech firm most famous for making the herbicide Roundup and Roundup-resistant crops, also sells sows under the registered trademark "Genepacker." "This lack of soundness has become a real problem," said Miller, who looks like a slim Teddy Roosevelt. "I can't believe the producers have stood for it as long as they have." "Well, if you buy a sow from Monsanto and it dies, we replace it for free," Hawkins said. "So it doesn't affect the producers one way or the other. We figure they're better off having the top genetics." "It affects them when they have to drag dead sows out of the crates every day," Miller retorted. It would be unfair to leave this bit of casual conversation out of context, since, to judge from its marketing, Monsanto recognizes that farmers need durable sows to maximize production, and it specifically positions the Genepacker as a pig with the fortitude to withstand the rigors of confinement. The solution to this problem of soundness, as far as Monsanto or those at the Swine Improvement Conference are concerned, is to breed "better" pigs--pigs that can stand on a 2'x7' rectangle of concrete all their lives without going lame or insane with boredom. And if genetic modification doesn't work, technology often can provide a mechanical solution. Swine Robotics, for instance, has developed a device that removes dead animals from crates--a contraption that looks like a hand truck with a power winch. This "Boar Buzzard" eliminates the problems of poor employee morale and back injuries. On the PSE front, scientists have found they can reduce the amount of pale, soft, exudative meat by taking pigs off their feed eighteen hours before slaughter. The hungry pigs burn off their glycogen reserves, and without glycogen they do not produce lactic acid, no matter how stressed they are. As practical as they may be, there is something troubling about these technical work-arounds. Bit by bit, scientific breakthroughs have emancipated the hog industry from the demands of nature, but each freedom comes at a price. Each new liberty for pork producers depends on further control, further domination of the pig. No one at the conference suggested what seemed the obvious answer: doing away with the causes of stress and lameness. But then, swine geneticists are innovators, not policymakers. In just a little more than a decade, the modern hog industry has produced a tower of efficiency-maximizing products, one stacked atop the next, each innovation fixing the problem the last fix created. It is a monumental if somewhat haphazard structure, composed of slatted floors and aluminum crates, automatic sorting scales and mechanized wet-dry feeders. It is constructed of Genepacker sows, Tylan antibiotic feed, Agro-Clean liquid detergent, Argus salmonella vaccine, Goldenpig foam-tipped disposable AI catheters, CL Sow Re-placer milk substitute, and Matrix estrus synchronizer. The scientists who add their discoveries to this edifice do not see themselves as its architects. As they see it, their job is not to shift the foundations of the hog industry but to build atop its tower of technology, masking what structural flaws they can with new construction, reaching ever upward.
