Turkey D-Day

Today is turkey D-Day. About 40 birds will be prepared for the Thanksgiving Day table… in other words butchered. Tomorrow about 40 more will meet their maker and become someone’s dinner. I recently “talked” on facebook with a friend of mine from Fort Hood and shared about my transition to farmatarianism, eating only meat that you know personally. I was a vegetarian for eight years. I wasn’t a really good vegetarian, whatever that means. I was more concerned about the way meat was produced and what was in it. I was also concerned about the effects of excessive meat consumption on our bodies and the planet. I wasn’t concerned that animals should never be killed for food.

Anyway… it was probably strange for my friend to hear that I would be helping slaughter some 80 birds and what’s more I would happily eat them given the chance. I still don’t eat a lot of meat. It’s not often an option at the farm, but when it is I appreciate the life of the animals that we eat. Our turkeys are free range in every sense of that word. They roam free all day, foraging for food and stretching their legs. Our goats and cows also spend the majority of their time in pastures eating their meals straight from the soil. That is worlds apart from how your Big Mac or even grocery store meat is produced.

So, every year Cargill (God bless ‘em!) donates about 100 turkeys to the farm along with their bedding and feed. We raise them and sell them for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We could ruminate on why Cargill would donate these birds to a farm that teaches methods of agriculture directly opposed to large industrial-scale production. Perhaps it’s a form of penance, an attempt at reaching some sort of redemption. Perhaps someone in the company has a subversive ironic streak. Regardless, it is a good things for these birds and the people that buy them.

Clearly, these turkeys have been bred for one thing and one thing only… meat. These are dumb animals. These birds see a large predator (aka me or Edwina, the wayfaring farm dog) and think to themselves, “Hey let’s all go check that out! Guys come over here! Look a predator! Let’s all go say hi!” Needless to say they would not last long in the wild. Unfortunately they also don’t last that long on the farm. One turkey randomly had a heart attack one day and became dinner. It seems they are looking for ways to die. Apparently it is not really true that turkeys can drown from looking up at the rain, but they’re so dumb it seem plausible.

Barbara Kingsolver’s account of trying to get her turkeys to reproduce and hatch eggs is a riot. The reason industrial turkey sex is so funny is because it simply does not happen. Imagine a couple of full grown adults who are supposed to be well versed in the birds and the bees, stumbling over what’s what and what goes where like a couple of pimply teenagers. Add to the lack of knowledge the fact that these guys are bread to be a tub o’ meat on toothpicks. They are no longer physiologically shaped for reproduction. In case this hasn’t been made abundantly clear let me say it. The turkeys you buy in the store do not have sex. They all have to be artificially inseminated in order to reproduce. That in itself is not humane.

There are heritage breed wild turkeys out there that you can buy. Those guys are smart and they know how to have sex. So, think about the life of turkeys this holiday season when you’re sticking that Butterball in the oven or deep fryer. Support turkey sex and happy turkeys this year and buy your bird from a farmer.

The Agricultural Amway

In a recent class on compost tea some skepticism was expressed about people touting the benefits of compost tea in order to sell products. This led one skeptic to muse about ways they could market a product that would carefully insure that your compost tea was brewed at ambient temperature (in other words, do nothing and make you pay for it). I was also amazed to hear that compost tea is sold in bottles on the shelves of organic gardening stores. The benefits of compost tea come from the microbial organisms living in it. Bottling compost tea for any length at all destroys one of the primary benefits of the brew.

The list could go on of agricultural and gardening products that make all kinds of claims about controlling pests and weeds and make your tomatoes as big as your head, of which there is very little evidence to support such claims.

This is the agricultural Amway. Companies often try to get one or two farmers to buy into the benefits of their product and then they make those farmers into dealers of the product. You can see where this is going can’t you? I don’t how much this functions exactly like a pyramid scheme, but it’s the same idea. The guys on top get some people to buy into the idea and the more people they sell on it the more the guys at the top make. All the while nothing is really happening. No product is actually benefitting anyone and an entire market is created out of thin air.

This is exactly what has driven our species to the brink… promises that can never be fulfilled or kept. Ammonium nitrate can only get you so far before it destroys the very thing it promises to save.

I’m brewing up another post about compost tea that looks at what makes compost tea beneficial, but also confounds our modern ways of looking at agriculture.

Farm and Food Session 1

The first session Genetically Modified Foods and Mammal Health was presented by Howard Vlieger of Verity Farms. The session covered a lot of the basics of GMO foods and crops and the issues involved. There are some good places you can go to read up on these basics. I was mainly interested in some of the connections made in the presentation.

The process for creating GMO plants injects viruses or bacteria with genes into the DNA of plants. This process was described as “shooting a bullseye with a shotgun.” This is a very imprecise process that cannot hit the same place twice within an organism. It is known that the process of creating a GMO creates new proteins. The speakers conservative estimate was that 1200 new proteins are being created in GMO corn and soybeans. When these plants are fed to animals in the form of feeds, their stomachs do not recognize some of these foreign proteins and this causes irritation and ulcers in the animal’s stomach. Mr. Vlieger was clear that this was not a scientific study, but was based on his experience and data that he collected.

Mr. Vlieger was able to take pictures at the hog slaughtering facility that he uses for slaughtering his pigs. He took pictures of the stomachs of his own pigs, “A” Natural pigs, “B” Natural and conventionally raised pigs. Of course his pigs had very healthy looking model pig stomachs. Both of the “natural” pigs were not given antibiotics or hormones, but there are no restrictions on GMO in what is fed to these animals. Their stomachs both showed significant irritation, inflammation, and ulcers.

What I found really interesting was the difference between “natural” pig stomachs and conventional. Those of us who are predisposed to think the worst of conventional agriculture would assume a bloody mess. In fact, the antibiotics are effective in keeping the inflammation and irritation down in the stomachs. The stomachs are not red and irritated, but they do appear more pale than the Verity Farms pig. However, it does not prevent the immune system from attacking the foreign proteins and creating ulcers.

If GMO feed causes this kind of reaction in pigs (and/or other livestock), what might the effect be on the end consumer, you and me?

The final piece that I found interesting was the connections that were made concerning the corporations that produce both pharmaceuticals and seeds. Syngenta, Bayer, Monsanto and others are first and foremost chemical companies. They use these chemicals on and in crops which are then fed to livestock. When the livestock inevitably become sick the veterinarian is brought in to make them healthy using drugs also produced by the same companies. Producers also feed hormones to their livestock to improve their production.

The purpose of all of this is to sell meat to consumers. So what happens when we buy this meat and eat it? We get heartburn, indigestion and acid reflux. So we go to the doctor and he prescribes drugs to deal with that which the same companies benefit from. The point is that these chemical companies are creating and driving a market and a need that depends on sick animals and sick people. It is also important to point out that the promises of GMO feed and seed has yet to be realized.

Who Owns the Seeds?

I posted this a while back on twitter, but keep forgetting to share it here. This is a chart from the same guy who showed us who owns the companies that make “organic” food, Phil Howard. This one shows who owns the companies that make and sell seeds.

Global and Local

This chapter of Being Consumed concerns globalization. In particular Cavanaugh explores the relationship of the universal to the particular. This is an age old philosophical problem of the one and the many. How should the local and global, one and the many be related?

In Christianity, we claim to be a universal faith, but one marked by the particularity of Christ. This paradox is difficult to overcome…or live into. At different extremes Christians can be exclusivist and deny God’s presence even in the world, while others claim a radical inclusivism that renders the particularity of Christ null and void. Neither stance is faithful to Jesus or helpful in fulfilling our mission of embodying God’s mission to the world in communities of reconciliation.

Cavanaugh goes on to talk about this paradox in globalization. Globalization at once attempts to claim both diversity, and universal dominion. There is a global system of ordering our lives that dictates the terms by which people, countries and corporations can participate in the economic order. It is universal and all-encompassing. Proponents point out that this is expressed in a myriad of ways and really produces diversity of choices and cultures.

However, I would argue with Cavanaugh that this diversity of choice is an illusion masking the worldview that it is ultimately offering to the world…consumerism. There are unlimited forms of culturally relevant, contextualized products and choices, but in the end the product they are selling is the belief in consumption. This passage really drives home the point,

The giant brewer Miller responds [to advertising by "microbrews"] with an ad touting the virtues of good old macrobrew: “It’s time to drink beer made in vats the size of Rhode Island.” What we don’t see is that Plank Road and Leinenkugel are both owned by Miller, which in turn is owned by a South African conglomerate. So much for diversity. The surface appearance of diversity in fact masks a stifling homogeneity.(69)

The Eucharist is also an antidote to this problem. Christ is the “concrete universal.” In the Eucharist the body and blood of Christ are offered to the local gathering in order to unite them with the Body of Christ. “The closer one is attached to the particular community gathered around one particular altar, the more united one becomes to the universal” (71). He contrasts this with the effect of consumerism. The consumer “becomes a kind of empty shell, itself dependent on the constant novelty of the particular for its being, yet itself simultaneously destroying the particularity of the many and thus negating its own being” (74-75). Whoa! That sounds serious.

It is important to point out that this is not an anti-capitalist rant. “The call to Christians is not so much either to embrace or try to replace abstractions such as ‘capitalism’ with other abstraction. It is rather to sustain forms of economy, community and culture that recognize the universality of the individual person” (86). Once again Cavanaugh draws on a relevant example to this blog in order to illustrate how the church can overcome the problem of globalization in practice, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). We can create alternative economies by connecting farmers and eaters, overcoming the abstraction of consumerism. Food no longer comes from some anonymous distant place; rather it comes from another particular human being, and the consumer enters into a relationship with that producer” (87).