Close to the Bone: The Fight Over Transparency in the Meat Industry

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All that started to change in the 1970s, as the meatpacking industry mechanized and moved away from skilled labor. Confined animal-feeding operations, commonly known as “factory farms,” were born and sustained by the intensified production of crops like corn and soybeans for feed. By the Reagan era, Americans had fallen in love with microwaveable food, frozen food and especially fast food. The number of McDonald’s franchises, as just one metric, had grown from fewer than 150 stores in 1959 to more than 11,000 in 1990.

In this new climate, the industry began to manage its image as aggressively as it had begun to manage its animals. Large producers successfully lobbied Congress to create a “checkoff” program, which imbued private industry with the power, via the U.S.D.A., to collect a percentage of all beef and pork sales to be used for the general promotion of eating meat. But the bill also included language from meat producers, specifying that “despite the fact that many of our members may produce a commodity that is the subject of governmental price supports, we are opposed to increased government intervention or regulation.” Thus began an era in which U.S.D.A. officials began to view themselves as partnering with industry, rather than monitoring it.

Soon groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which had focused almost exclusively on abuses of laboratory animals and anti-fur campaigns, decided to begin conducting their own sorts of inspections. C.O.K. scored an important victory when its investigators videotaped chickens crowded, sometimes eight per crate, into rows of wire cages stacked at a barn owned by I.S.E. America, which sold eggs with the industry-created Animal Care Certified seal. C.O.K. filed a Better Business Bureau challenge to that self-certification and eventually won. I.S.E. dropped the label.

The North American Meat Institute, the lobbying group representing most of the country’s largest meat companies, complains that consumers are being misled by animal rights activists, who, they say, are not simply encouraging consumers to reduce meat consumption but are also opposing consumers’ right to eat meat, cheese and dairy, all as part of what one headline on the institute’s website called “the liberal vegan agenda.” Mike Wolf, the manager of C.O.K.’s undercover investigations, doesn’t deny that animal rights organizations are trying to persuade consumers “to move toward a plant-based diet,” but he insists that meatpackers are the ones who have created the necessity for undercover investigations by blocking consumers from seeing how their food is made. With the government working hand in hand with business, the only remaining window into the food system is the lens of an activist’s camera.

Exposing the industry’s standard practices, Wolf argues, generates a demand for change from legislators and, perhaps more significant, from major restaurant chains. In 2012, for instance, after the Humane Society of the United States released undercover footage of pregnant sows immobilized for months in narrow “gestation crates” at a Smithfield Foods subsidiary, McDonald’s announced that its breakfast sausage would no longer be made from pork bred in gestation crates — and Smithfield, along with other major pork producers, raced to announce that it was phasing the devices out. The industry opposes undercover investigations, Wolf says, precisely because they work.

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As video activists push harder, the industry is pushing back, against not just activists but also journalists and whistle-blowers, with laws to prosecute a new kind of crime: “animal-facility interference.”

In 2011, State Representative Annette Sweeney of Iowa introduced H.F.431, a bill that sought to make it illegal to produce, possess or distribute any record of “a visual or audio experience occurring at [an] animal facility.” Sweeney, a former executive director of the Iowa Angus Association, wrote the bill at her kitchen table with input from lawyers for the Iowa Poultry Association. The law that eventually passed, H.B. 589, makes it a crime only to give a false name on a job application, but the intention was clear.

Since then, four more states have passed similar measures, known collectively as “ag gag,” with each law more ambitious than the last. Last year, for example, legislators in North Carolina, still the largest hog producer in the United States, passed an anti-whistle-blower law that gives businesses the authority to sue any person, including employees, who have accessed nonpublic areas of the workplace in order to document company lawbreaking. Wyoming passed a law that makes it a crime to “preserve information in any form” about any “private land” if you intend to share the data with the federal government — potentially shielding cattle ranchers from being cited by the Environmental Protection Agency for polluting state waterways.

Wolf told me that the industry response over the last decade has made him think hard about the limits of undercover videos. While the camera may expose inhumane or unappetizing actions at a place like Quality Pork Processors, it doesn’t capture the corporate higher-up who demanded increased production, the industrial engineer who came up with a work flow to make it happen, the union boss who approved the speedup or the floor supervisor who berates workers who fail to keep pace. The hidden cameras carried by undercover investigators provide our only view onto the meatpacking industry, but they are a pinhole, not a panorama.

As such, the view is imperfect — and, the meat industry says, distorted. But its best defense from the animal rights activists may be simply to reinstate the power of the government-led transparency that we had in the mid-20th century. If companies like Hormel feel that they have been misrepresented, they might do better seeking more transparency, not less.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016 ... fight.html