Cow Industrials

Cow Industrials July 6, 2004

Working for Change has a disturbing, Wendell Berry-esque article from Dan Nagengast called "Safe, but do we want to eat it?" Nagengast begins with this attention-getting sentence:

When I found out that our industrialized food system considers chicken manure an acceptable source of protein in cattle feed, it was clear to me that consumers and corporate agriculture have very different ideas about how we should produce food.

There's something deeply wrong with a system that makes the animals that feed us seem like Divine in Pink Flamingos.

Nagengast notes how a growing awareness of the unwholesome practices of industrial agriculture is leading to a growing consumer demand for more "natural" and "organic" alternatives. Such alternatives have, so far, mostly been available only at the pricier end of our food supply:

Some have argued that we are headed for an elitist food system, in which wholesome food is available only to those who can afford its higher sticker price. There is some truth to this, as anyone who has visited a gourmet grocery or restaurant lately knows. Such labels as "free-range," "hormone free," "natural" and "organic" are common at the high end of the food marketplace.

This high-end preference for wholesome food is easily mocked and exploited by faux-egalitarians like David Brooks. Look at the silly Birkenstock-wearing coastal elites with their brie and their free-range beef, Brooks writes. And thus this ersatz champion of the people of the red-state heartland becomes a tool of industrial agriculture and defends the common people's right to hamburger from an industrial lot where the cattle feed on Cipro and chicken manure.

The main line of defense for unwholesome, industrial agriculture is of course to pretend that it's actually something else (see again "The Meatrix"). They keep talking of "farms" and "farmers" even though such words no longer apply in any meaningful way.

"Food marketers today know how seductive the romantic family farm image is to consumers," Nagengast writes. "It is used all the time in food packaging and advertising."

The words "farm" and "farmer" can be construed with a narrow, technical denotation that includes the ghastly work of the industrialists, but to define a word in such a way that it utterly contradicts every connotation it ought to carry is a wretched abuse of the language.

That's why I took the words "farm" and "farmer" out of this story wherever they had been used to refer to the industrial milk production facilities which really do not deserve the name.

Tim Molloy's hook for the article is the incongruity of the idea that Southern California's dirty air comes not just from freeways and factories, but from such "all-natural" sources as dairy cows on dairy farms. The first hint one gets that the word "farm" isn't an apt term comes in the seventh graf:

Marquez, whose family runs two dairies with a total of 70 acres and 2,000 cows, said it's hard to resist the $200,000 an acre being offered by developers. …

Two thousand cows on 70 acres? This ain't The Big Red Barn. Eventually, seven grafs later, Molloy concedes that what he had been referring to as "dairy farms" really didn't fit the term:

Due to expensive land and encroaching urbanization, southern California [dairy farms] dairies are more geographically concentrated than those in other states, leading to a bigger manure problem. At a typical dairy [farm], hundreds of cows are locked into stations where they line up to eat hay. Once released into open areas, they jam together under whatever shade they can find to avoid the heat and glare of the sun.

I left the words "farm" and "farmer" intact in the following paragraph, the only one in which Molloy uses the terms in their truest sense:

In other parts of the country, farmers have room to spread manure as fertilizer. But in Chino and surrounding dairy regions, manure can remain for up to six months before tractors scoop it up for shipment to farms as fertilizer.

One distinction between a "farm" and an industrial food production facility is this capacity to absorb and employ the manure that's produced there. At a farm, this manure is a valuable resource that enriches and restores the health of the farm. At an industrial facility, it becomes a toxic industrial waste.

One of the things Wendell Berry teaches us is that the abuse of the land requires a corresponding abuse of the language. From my perch as a landless consumer in the American food chain, I can't do much directly about the abuse of the land. But it is my job as an editor of words to defend against the abuse of the language. And part of that job is to disallow the use of the word "farm" where it doesn't belong.


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