By now one would have to live in a cave not to have heard about the sick and diseased cattle that should have been labeled “downers”, caught on secret video being terribly mistreated by meat processing plant workers in an attempt to get them into the processing line.  As a result, there is now a huge recall of the millions of pounds of ground meat from that processing plant.  People are horrified to learn that this plant supplied school lunch programs and most of the meat subject to the recall has already probably been consumed.  Predictably, there are calls for increased regulation, shock that the oversight already in place missed this, realization that this isn’t an isolated incident, and renewed interest in abstaining from all meat and converting to veganism and vegetarianism.

 

I’m actually not shocked, because I think this is pretty standard behavior for this industry, and probably has been for some time.  I’ve been reading of factory farmed meat horrors since at least the late 80s or early 90s, low quality and oversight of school lunch foods, and I haven’t seen anything to suggest that the situation has gotten any better, in fact, perhaps it’s much, much worse.  The main difference is now more people know about it and can’t avoid knowing about it.  

 

So what do we do?  I don’t think we need more regulation (the already agencies charged with overseeing inspection and enforcing regulations don’t always do enough with the tools they have), and I don’t think that everyone abstaining from meat entirely is the best way to solve the inhumane and horrifying industrial meat production that is the norm every day.  

 

We do need greater transparency, though.  With transparency, things will sort themselves out a lot better than with bigger bureaucracies, even more regulations, and industry image spin campaigns.  But people (I hate to call them consumers) need to demand greater transparency and they need to make changes in their food-sourcing habits to foster transactions with greater transparency.

 

It's hard, if not downright impossible to have meaningful transparency when the food source is multi-tiered, multi-national corporations (no, the label’s photo of the smiling cow out on green pasture with a red barn in the background doesn’t count as transparency).  We’ve got to understand the that Little House on the Prairie images on the packages bear no relation to how the food inside was produced.  Food Obscurity will continue and even increase if people keep buying their food the same anonymous way, in the same anonymous places, with the same strangers in charge of the products.  That is as much true if the food buying is done at Piggly Wiggly or Whole Foods.  

 

 

Obtaining food locally does require a bit of forethought, perhaps some networking, and even some investigation to get started, some change in buying habits, cooking at home more, and perhaps some additional cost (but not always, especially if all the "junk", convenience, and impulse costs are stripped away because you buy less at the conventional grocery stores).

 

Certainly the internet has made sourcing locally much easier in many ways, but just talking about local food with our families, friends, neighbors, coworkers also spreads the word and can yield sources in surprising places.  In my case, I found a local “hobby” farm while redeeming a birthday gift certificate at a local massage therapy business.  The hour of massage was great, but the phone number for the source for local eggs and meat has been longer lasting.  Other people have made connections at the county fair.  Lots of kids sell their 4-H so that can sometimes be a good source that is right under our noses.

 

Greater transparency without the need for excessive regulation could happen, at least to a greater degree, if people even just changed a few sources, a few items, and then cut back on their consumption of anonymous, processed, convenience foods (and no, the multi-national agri-businesses won’t take that sitting down).   But it would go a long way toward greater transparency, trust, and safety in the our food.  

 

 

The irony is that we know *so little* about our food and its production (with a few exceptional glimpses like the downer cattle & forklift videos that shock our senses and force us out of our "microwave & serve" stupor now and then), yet the multi-national corporations know *so much* about us, down to tiniest detail about how, where and why we spend our food budget dollars (even the "buying power" of infants); they see everything we do with the grocery store buyer's cards, the market focus groups, the Nielson ratings, the data mining from electronic payment transactions, etc.  That's very frightening, in a way that shorter and more transparent farm-to-table routes.  The sad news is that increasing regulations and inspections for all meat producers because of abuses from the big meat processing guys, are an unbearable and unreasonable burden on the small local producers.  It might not be long before we have no choices.