Tag Archives: Farming

DG3K, Saddam and New Years Eve

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As you might remember, Dead Guy 2K was a Texan. DG3K was also. There is a lot of significance to that, to me at least. While Justin, 22, Specialist, of Spring Texas was being killed Mr Bush was having our own Cindy arrested AGAIN. In Crawford.

At the ranch where he pretends to be a commoner.

An old term for that would be “gentleman farmer”. Somebody who does farming when and if the urge strikes him, … sort of like a hobby.

Oh yeah, I kind of noticed the coincidence (you know our Gubmint would of course never ever lie to us or anything like that) between the rapidly (then) approaching DG3K Before New Year’s event and the sudden hurry-up-and-hang-Saddam event.

But the latter would not and could not have been any kind of diversion to take our eyes off of the former, right?

I can’t really pretend to cry for Saddam, he was after all just another torture freak in the pay of Our Leaders until he decided to go independent on them.

But killing him made a martyr out of him. If they had let him rot in jail for the rest of his life, it wouldn’t have taken much longer, he was after all nearly 70 years old, and he would have been just another old prisoner dying a slightly accelerated natural death.

Instead he has become a rallying point.

They are dumber than a box of dirt.

Saying grace

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Is grace recited before meals anymore? It seems the bigger the dinner, the more preparation or participation that goes into the repast, the greater is the sense that something is missing if we omit the prayer to dive into our food. A private reflection might be payed during the erstwhile silent moment but a word spoken of spiritual thanks seems no longer apropos in this secular thinking child’s age. Religiosity abounds still of course, but it is separated less from state and education than from the other aspects of daily life with which it also conflicts, such as buying and selling, lending and consuming, trading upon the disadvantage of others. End of the lineI too wonder if giving thanks for our abundance need be directed to God or divine provenance in appreciation of our predatory advantage, before a meal or after. For myself I have found a better occasion.

Driving on the highway every once in awhile I encounter a cattle truck, the trailer sides simple sheet metal grates behind which one can see the fur of livestock. You can only see the bodies standing steadily at the edge in semi darkness and apparent silence. I search to catch their eyes but the metal bands seem positioned to obscure our visibility or more probably theirs.

I used to entertain fantasies of derailing their voyage, stopping the driver to offer the animals a reprieve, however futile. But we’ve got a pretty principled meat processing company on our side of town, and I have come to accept the inevitability that mankind wants to domesticate some mammals to eat them.

When you see those large cattle trucks in non-rural areas, there’s little question as to where they are going. It is rare that cattle would be traded between ranches, or taken to the veterinarian, or sent to a State Fair to be exhibited as 4-H pets, or being put to pasture, as happens to horses no longer either. As much as you would like to think otherwise, the cattle in those trailers are being delivered to the slaughterhouse. When you see the unfortunate cows, they are only hours -perhaps minutes- from the ramp which leads to the aboitoir, to a violent ignoble death at the hands of a harried production line.

I remember reading about traditions surrounding the slaughter of pigs. The human-like cries of pigs have always wreaked psychic damage on the men who have to kill them. Some farming villages have ceremonies to ritualize the process. In many cases, a single person is given the responsibility of dealing the fatal blow. The Kosher tradition of food purity comes not from concern for regulating the quality of a meat source, but insuring rather that the animal was properly killed. Again, not by public health standards but spiritual.

When I find myself passing a truck carrying cows or domestic buffalo to their demise, I try to linger beside the trailer for a moment, long enough to give a thought to the beings inside. But I lack for what to say. To hope that their death will be as painless as possible, to pray for their understanding, to give thanks for their stoic, if involuntary, contribution, to thank them.

The price of chicken

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Child laborers at the looms making affordable fabric
The American high standard of living is built on economies of scale, predicated on cheap supplies on terms usually detrimental to the suppliers. In materials, this means exploiting the environment, in manufacturing it means cheap labor, in food it means industrialized farming.

It’s an oft repeated mantra, and counter to a consumerist imperative, but this dilemma can be addressed by showing restraint, even in light of growing populations. It’s resource conservation.

If we can’t afford a fairly traded commodity, we should perhaps consider going without it. We could make do with fewer consumer goods for example. or less meat and more beans and rice maybe. We would not need to subject animals to factory farms if we could reduce our demand; not going without, going with less. If range fed beef is indeed a luxury, couldn’t we consider not having a feast of it everyday? Just because a substitute can be had for cheaper doesn’t mean we have to indulge yourselves. Especially, I would think, if the cheap price means inherent harm on the other end.

A free-range. grain-fed chicken costs $2.85 per pound to bring to your table. Not $0.89 per pound, or $1.99 for the whole chicken, but $2.85/lb, or $7.30/lb for the boneless breast fillet. That’s what it costs to raise a chicken in conditions that wouldn’t turn our stomach or haunt us if we were really knew. Priced any lower and the chicken supplier has to cut corners and mistreat the animals in ways you would never willfully approve. Instead of three cheap chickens in every pot, how about buying one humanely raised chicken instead? Permit yourself the luxury of feeling good about the demands you are making on the food supply, about the sacrifice being made by others to sustain you.

A healthy-raised pig costs $8 per pound. Anything less comes from a place you don’t want to get within 20 miles downwind, much less see. Same deal. If you are now eating cheap bacon, pay more for an honorable source but buy less.

Range-fed beef costs upwards of $8 per pound. You’ll be doing yourself a favor avoiding the mad cow disease of factory abused cows and calves. $8/lb. Any less and it’s packing the trauma of its final breaths into the flesh you think you are enjoying. Plus the antibiotics pumped into the cow to enable it to survive the cramped unhygienic conditions of feed lots.

Wild salmon costs $12 per pound. It’s good for you, one of the best sources of nutrition this side of broccoli. But that’s not true about farm grown salmon. Now the domestic stocks are contaminating the natural fisheries. Stop encouraging the aquaculture robber barons. Don’t eat their salmon or their shrimp, they’re killing the environment and the local fishing communities.

The price test works for everything that’s unbelievably cheap. What? Were you thinking it was the miracle of modern capitalism? Goods available for less than the cost you would think they could be made? If it wasn’t affordable to you before, the company has now found out how to steal it from someone to bring it to you.

If you see something you never thought you could afford, and its price is too good to be true, it is for someone. The true cost is being born by someone else, maybe a pre-teen indentured servant, maybe someone who works a 12 hour shift sharing a bunk with the person who handles the other 12 hours, maybe someone who’s been incarcerated for the sole reason that their governor needs a low-wage labor pool, maybe it’s someone working off a debt which just keeps growing, maybe it’s an immigrant living in a special economic development zone from which one may neither move in nor out, maybe it’ll be you in a few years, without options in our race to the bottom global economy.