"I eat animals because I like them.  I like their meat, and I like them.  I like being around them, I like seeing them in the fields around me.  At this time of the year I like seeing the newborn calves in the fields.  I liked being in the barn earlier today feeding hogs, touching the long hairy bristles on their rumps.  I really enjoyed unloading several bison from a trailer this afternoon and watching them run.  I especially liked spending an evening last night smoking some trout on my back porch before going to bed.  Then I liked stepping out of my backdoor this morning at first light and watching several flickers fly off the lawn into the forest.  Just before my rooster crowed to start his day. Did I mention I like animals?  I like being surrounded by them, all kinds of them.  I enjoy sharing their lives, in all ways.  I enjoy nourishing them, and letting them nourish me.  I am glad that I can eat whole foods, knowing the life they lived in life, and sharing their body in death.  There is a richness and variety here that is unsurpassed.  I am glad I do not have to take pills to make up for  impoverished food, that I do not have to spend my evenings trying to figure out what nutrient I am missing and how to compensate for it.  That is just one carnivore's take on life.  I have no problem with vegetarians or vegans.  It’s their life, their choice.  But I love my life, and my choice.  I think it rich beyond compare. I sometimes wonder the degree to which Disney can be seen as a seminal figure in the development of veganism, with his vision of animals as sentimental cartoons.  I am sure this vision influences many young people, who make choices based on inexperience and emotionality.  Animals aren't cartoons, they are real, with a real place in the scheme of things.  However, it also occurs to me that veganism is a natural response to the fear young people feel looking at the future, and at ongoing environmental degradation, the sense that something vital is being damaged beyond repair, and they have to do something to fix it.  In that sense, veganism appears to be an entirely rational, as opposed to emotional, choice.  It does make me sad, because I like animals.  And I see young people making these choices to save the natural world that mean that animals have no place in their world. At least, not in the same way that these wonderful creatures are in my world.  Not in the urban world which I observe to be the common habitat of the wild vegan.  That, it seems to me, is part of the backdrop of this kaliedoscopic modern conversation around meat and ethics which is growing more heated.  One of the strange dilemmas of a warming world of 7 billion heading toward 9."

Picture an hourglass and you’ll understand the local, sustainable meat crisis: there are plenty of willing consumers out there looking for humanely raised, quality local meats, and there are more and more farmers looking to “meat” that consumer demand (sorry – couldn’t help myself!), but the real bottle neck is processing capacity.  Small, community-based meat processing plants have become an endangered species in America, done in by an ocean of super-cheap industrial meat and the challenge of meeting the Byzantine demands of USDA regulation requirements without a Ph.D. in microbiology.

Although species go extinct on earth on a regular basis, every so often there is a major event that comes along and wipes out 40 or 50 percent of all species.   The same happens in the small business world.  A few businesses fold every year due to retirement, poor management, and changes in the market, and that is quite normal.  But then every so often a catastrophic event comes along that causes a wholesale wipeout, such as the recent global credit crunch. 

In the small meat businesses in America, catastrophic events result from changes high up in the regulatory food chain that make it very difficult for small plants to adapt. The most recent extinction event occurred at the turn of the millennium when Small and Very Small USDA-inspected slaughter and processing plants were required to adopt the HACCP Plan system.  It has been estimated that over 20%, perhaps more, of existing small plants went out of business at that time. Now, proposed changes to HACCP for Small and Very Small USDA-inspected plants threaten to take down many of the remaining local plants, making the availability of healthy, local meats a rare commodity.

HACCP is a food safety plan approach that stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Plan, and the intent of HACCP is to prevent contamination of meat by harmful pathogens. Plant HACCP plans are approved and overseen by the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the inspection arm of the US Department of Agriculture.  On March 19, 2010, the FSIS published a Draft Guidance on HACCP System Validation, outlining new rules which would institute regular, year-round validation testing of all meats, whether or not a problem has been identified.  The problem is that these rules do not identify the hazard that they are attempting to address.  It is testing for testing’s sake, and it will cost small plants tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, every year. The financial burden appears great enough that this will destroy much of the remaining community-based meat processing industry, which is enjoying a renaissance and creating jobs. 

Small, local meat processors have always supported food safety. At our plant, we have had a functioning HACCP Plan since 1999, and it works.  We undergo extensive E.Coli testing every year, with zero (0) positive results, ever.  The purpose of HACCP is to employ well-recognized, established processes and process control parameters to produce safe meat products – processes and parameters recognized and published by the USDA itself.  Now, for some reason, the USDA is attempting to test safety into the system and requiring excessive end-product microbiological testing, rather than allowing us to depend on these well-recognized process controls.  Perhaps a large plant slaughtering 5,000 animals per day can afford its own lab and microbiology staff, and can pass the cost along to the consumer, but most small plants can’t.  And perhaps they should – those are the plants where a massive beef recall can involve millions of pounds.

In my opinion, the USDA needs to recognize that "One Size Fits All" inspection no longer fits current industry practice and consumer demand. These new HACCP Validation requirements are going to cause a train wreck in a portion of the industry that is growing due to consumer demand for the first time in years, and then the USDA is going to have a serious embarrassment on its hands. Someone needs to take a clear-eyed look at this situation and find a way to split the agri-business mega-plants from the community-based localized plants within the regulatory structure. This does NOT mean that small plants are not serious about food safety. It is because consumers are serious about food safety (and food security) that they are coming to us, and we need to keep local infrastructure alive in this country.  We need an inspection system which recognizes that the small plants do not put either the economic food system or millions of people at risk in case of a food safety event.

If any individuals are interested in providing comments to the USDA on this matter, I urge you to do it by the new deadline of June 19th, 2010. The original deadline was April 19, but it has been extended due to the great interest and concern that has been generated around this issue.  You can learn more at the Association of American Meat Processors web site, at www.aamp.com/Validation.php. or the Niche Meat Processors Assistance Network at http://www.extension.org/pages/NMPAN_Comments_on_FSIS_Draft_Validation_Guidelines  Please submit a comment if you care about community-based meat processing and humanely produced meats.  Your comments really do matter. Submit your comments to the email address DraftValidationGuideComments@fsis.usda.gov or to the Docket Clerk, USDA, FSIS, Room 2-2127, 5601 Sunnyside Avenue, Beltsville, MD 20705.

Feeding pigs

I like to touch the pigs in the barn while feeding them. Lay my hand on their round hip, feel the warmth and the coarse bristle against my skin. Perhaps this is strange, knowing we will take their life in a day or two, but I appreciate the sense of connection. Pigs don’t like the touch. But Joel’s hogs, raised in the woods in their little band, perhaps feeling secure with their brothers, don’t react at first, then mildly move away. My Pennsylvania hogs, twice my size, bark in alarm and hobble away. They clearly show fear. I have no doubt that they have been frequently physically abused, given their fear. Or perhaps they live in a state of psychological distress.

The local farmers bring in pigs of all size, shape, and color. Berkshires, Durocs, Old Spots, mutts. My Pennsylvania hogs are typically uniform – boring white hogs with washed out blue eyes. No doubt they have superior genetics for certain traits, courtesy of a breeding program out of Iowa State or elsewhere. Perhaps they mature on corn 17.3 days ahead of the control groups, and are 8.6% leaner. Certainly they are dependably available and cheaper – that’s why I have them. But I can’t help but feel that something is lost. Hard to put your finger on it. Beauty, variety, individuality, ability to fatten on acorns, apple gleanings, or table scraps – these are not the goals of USDA sponsored breeding programs. But surely these are traits worth supporting with our consumer dollar, too. If the consumer doesn’t do it, perhaps these unique races of animals will disappear. Or maybe not. I remember the lady who unloaded her pig, and smiled as it went to its pen and immediately plunged belly first into its water trough. “She loves water so much”, the owner confided to me, as if she were delivering her pig to a day care center, not the abbatoir. This sense of loving their animals, yet holding the boundaries of utility in place, marks many of my clients attitudes. I think they would continue to raise their pigs under almost any market conditions.

Originally published January 22, 2009

It is no secret that a lot of the energy driving the local food movement is connected to schools. Much of that energy has coalesced in the past several years into organizational focus and legislative action to get more locally produced whole foods into local school systems. At the same time, institutions of higher learning are experiencing an unprecedented push from within the student body to offer more local foods in the dining halls. The breadth and depth of the energy driving these movements is astonishing, such as concern for childhood obesity; climate change, farmland preservation, nutritional density of foods, animal welfare, local living economies, as a short list.

This movement has certainly affected our work at T&E. We have begun sending local meats to the dining services at Washington and Lee and Virginia Tech universities. Last year, the Harrisonburg School System built its annual local food meal around 1000 pounds of locally-raised ground beef from T&E (produced by a Holstein steer from a farm in Elkton, VA and a Holstein cow from an organic dairy in Dayton, VA – how’s that for knowing where your food comes from?). This spring we hosted a group of students – both graduate and undergraduate- from the University of Virginia, who are part of a large multi-year project studying local food systems in central Virginia. They spent the afternoon touring the plant and learning about the potential and limitations for production of locally processed meat.

Recently a group of high school students from a local private school connected to Eastern Mennonite University came through. That week was a mid-semester break for them, and a teacher was taking the opportunity to teach a week-long class on local food systems. They went around to local farms, dairies, poultry plants, distribution centers, and T&E. The students came through T&E on a day when we were running the kill floor. They joked around nervously as we put everyone into process room hair nets and butcher wraps, as required by our sanitation procedures. I led them through the process room and the coolers, and their eyes got big looking at the hanging carcasses and the meat cutting process. Then we went on to the high point of the tour – out onto the kill floor where, that day, we were slaughtering pigs.

Naturally, there is a fair amount of blood, some neat piles of offal in trays awaiting inspection and disposal, and a few warm carcasses waiting to be pushed into the cooler. There is a warm biological smell, difficult to describe – the smell of blood? of offal? – that permeates the air. The odor can be faintly nauseating at first and yet simultaneously attractive at some atavistic caveman level. Some people find the smell intolerable, so I told the students that if they did, they should walk out then and there, and there would be no shame in that.

But in fact they all stood their ground, fascinated. Our kill floor is small enough that an observer can witness the entire process from beginning to end from a single vantage point. Due to the compact footprint of our building, our rail line is not linear, but moves through an S-shape from the knock box to the cooler door. Right after the group walked onto the floor, Phillip knocked a large hog using the fixed-bolt stunner, which caught the group’s attention immediately. A blank .22 cartridge fires the stunner, so the noise is inescapable. Playing tour guide, I explained the entire process, but there were few eyes on me. Everyone gazed in rapt attention as Phillip stuck and bled out the hog, and watched as other hogs were being skinned and eviscerated.

We proceeded to the large carcass cooler where beef and lamb carcasses were hung, along with the hogs. There we discussed anatomy, pointing out where the actual cuts of meat found in supermarkets came from, but I noticed that half the class lingered at the cooler door or listened for the sound of the bolt gun discharging. The death of any animal is profound, whether it is a beloved pet, a barnyard friend, or simply an anonymous pasture denizen. That this process can be executed in an atmosphere of simple respect is revealing. The fact that our inspector literally touched not only every animal, but also did a simple autopsy on all major organs was also revealing, both for the concern for the consumer but the animal itself.

Several days later I had a chance encounter with the teacher again. He told me that the day after their tour at T&E, the class had visited a large poultry plant. Rockingham County has the reputation as the birthplace of the modern turkey industry in America, and is home to a number of major poultry plants, operated by the usual suspects: Tyson’s; Cargill; Pilgrim’s Pride; Perdue; as well as some independent plants. These are very high volume plants, with thousands of birds going through the line every day. After that visit, he asked that class what they thought of the difference between the mega-plant they visited and T&E. He said the answer was summed up by one student when she said: “After today, I never want to eat turkey again, but after yesterday, I would be happy to eat any meat that came from T&E.”