Chickenizing Farms and Food: How Industrial Meat Production Endangers Workers, Animals, and Consumers

322 Pages·2016·2.55 MB·English

by  Ellen K. Silbergeld

“An insightful look at where our food comes from and how it is brought to the
dinner plate. Silbergeld brings us face to face with the harsh reality as she
explores ways we can go forward in feeding the world.”
—Food, Inc.’s CAROLE MORISON
“A powerfully original exploration of the problems of industrial-scale animal
agriculture that touches on public health, the environment, and worker safety.
No one else has written so thoughtfully or vividly about the ‘chickenization’ of
the agricultural industry around the world and what it means. Silbergeld has
written an important, informative, and excellent book.”
—TOM PELTON, host of The Environment in Focus, WYPR
“This is a must-read for anyone interested in our food system—how we got here,
why it doesn’t work, and how we move forward.”
—FEDELE BAUCCIO, CEO, Bon Appétit Management Company
“Listen to Ellen. The dangers that she reveals are real, but so are the
opportunities to do better. As a lifelong farmer, producing over 50 million
chickens annually with no antibiotics or drugs, I know that a superior—and
safer—model can be successful.”
—SCOTT I. SECHLER, owner, Bell & Evans
“It takes a tough professor to write a book that takes on the proponents and
opponents of the industrialization of agriculture at the same time. Ellen
Silbergeld’s approach is based in public health: how to make sure all people are
able to access nutritious and safe food. She writes with data, humor, and
passion. This is a critical contribution to discussions about our global food
supply.”
—JOSHUA M. SHARFSTEIN, MD, former Principal Deputy
Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Associate Dean,
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
“This timely book raises issues at the core of our agricultural dilemma. If we’re
going to expand production sustainably and safely, we need to take this
uncomfortable dive into the murky ways in which we keep ourselves fed.”
—JONATHAN RUSHTON, Royal Veterinary College, London
“What are the consequences of the industrialization of our food production?
Ellen Silbergeld’s journey shows why we should be worried and offers a
glimpse of a hopeful future.”
—JAN KLUYTMANS, Consult Microbiologist and Infection Control
Specialist, Breda, The Netherlands
“Our agricultural systems and processes have changed over the last century, with
unintended consequences—from increased human health risks to degraded
environmental conditions. Bravo to Dr. Silbergeld for reminding us of our past,
confronting us with a reality we have allowed, and presenting us with questions
for which we must find answers.”
—WILLIAM C. BAKER, President, Chesapeake Bay Foundation
“This absorbing and compelling work exposes the interconnected risks to food
and worker safety from industrialized animal production. Silbergeld describes
the devastating impact of deliberate manipulation and weakening of consumer
and worker protections by powerful vested interests. Few books have the power
to change public policy. This is one.”
—JAMES RITCHIE, International Union of Food Workers (IUF)
CHICKENIZING FARMS AND FOOD
CHICKENIZING FARMS & FOOD
How Industrial Meat Production Endangers Workers,
Animals, and Consumers
ELLEN K. SILBERGELD
© 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2016
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Silbergeld, Ellen K., author.
Title: Chickenizing farms and food : how industrial meat production endangers
workers, animals, and consumers / Ellen K. Silbergeld.
Description: Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041797| ISBN 9781421420301 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781421420318 (electronic) | ISBN 1421420309 (hardcover : alk.
paper) | ISBN 1421420317 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Food—United States
—Safety measures. | Food supply—United States—Safety measures.
Classification: LCC RA601 .S58 2016 | DDC 363.19/26—dc23 LC record
available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041797
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-
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consumer waste, whenever possible.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Can We Talk about Agriculture?
2 Confinement, Concentration, and Integration: What Is Industrial Agriculture?
3 It All Started in Delmarva
4 The Chickenization of the World
5 The Coming of the Drugs
6 When You Look at a Screen, Do You See Lattices or Holes?
7 Antimicrobial Resistance: How Agriculture Ended the Antimicrobial Era
8 Collateral Damage: Taking and Putting
9 Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray
10 Food Safety: Redesigning Products or Consumers?
11 Can We Feed the World?
12 A Path Forward, Not Backward
Notes
Index
Preface
I came to the issues of industrialized food animal production unexpectedly, like
much of my experiences in science. In 1999, my department chair at the
University of Maryland Medical School asked me to sit in on a seminar being
given by a faculty recruit because the room was sparsely filled. I asked, “What’s
the topic?”
“Drug-resistant infections in the hospital,” he said.
“I know nothing about this,” I said rather brashly, and, having reached that
self-satisfied point in my career where I could make such ridiculous statements, I
added: “I have no interest in this topic.” But he persisted, and eventually I
acceded.
Dr. Anthony Harris turned out to be an excellent and engaging speaker, so as
I slumped in the back of the lecture room, I became interested despite myself. At
one point, Dr. Harris mentioned—almost as an aside—that many drug-resistant
infections came from eating food. That woke me up: at the time, I knew what
most people know, that you can get sick from Salmonella if the chicken salad is
left out too long in the sun. But why were some of these illnesses drug-resistant?
At the small reception and lunch following the talk, I sought out a colleague,
Dr. Judith Johnson, and asked her that same question, “Why are they drug-
resistant infections?” She hardly paused and said, “Oh, that’s because they feed
chickens antibiotics.” I will never forget my immediate and unspoken reaction:
That seems like a really bad idea! More than fifteen years of research and
engagement in national and international policy debates have not changed my
opinion.
I want to bring you along to the same poultry and hog farms and the same
slaughter and processing plants that I have visited and in which I have conducted
research over those years. I will rely on this firsthand experience as well as the
more distant gaze of the scientist. This book will also take you into the kitchen,
not to recommend what to eat or where to buy your food, but to introduce you to
the real events and real people that move food from farms to plates, affecting
workers, consumers, and environments. So this book may differ from others
about food and agriculture, for I do not separate these events. In many ways, we
have the agriculture we deserve, because we don’t see these relationships
clearly.
Changes are needed, but not the changes most commonly advocated in the
debate on food and food production. This book reports on the process of research
and questioning that has led me to consider pathways of change that do not cause
collateral damage, that do not increase the cost of food or make it more difficult
to access food. This book likewise takes seriously the welfare of workers who
make our food possible. I am a scientist deeply engaged in research on many of
the topics in this book, and I know that the basis of science is to make progress
from incomplete to more complete knowledge, and thus from more incorrect to
less incorrect decisions. Making the case for change does not, however, require
us to assume that those who made decisions in the past were utterly wrong.
One of the most striking lessons I learned in my own progress to this
realization was a chance meeting on a mountain hike in Colorado with the
granddaughter of an expert who had served on the US government committee
that approved the use of tetraethyllead in gasoline in 1927. This decision has
been held out by distinguished historians of science as a paradigm of
wrongheaded thinking, all the more wrong because it was made at a time when it
still would have been possible to avoid this path forward to the age of the
automobile. (By implication, this interpretation of history is that those who
rejected the eloquent testimony of Alice Hamilton, one of the founders of
environmental health in the twentieth century, must have been either stupid or
venal.)
As we talked on the mountain path, my new friend told me how pleased her
grandfather had been when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began
the process of removing and reducing lead in gasoline in the early 1970s. When I
asked why in 1927 he had joined the majority of the committee in approving
lead as a gasoline additive, she insisted that he—along with most of the other
experts—had no doubt of the hazards of lead. So why did they approve it?
Because they did not think that there would be so many automobiles that it
would make a difference. Such difficulty envisaging the future explains a great
deal. But an equally important lesson from science is the danger of continuing
past practices, without further examination, just because it is what we have
always done.
Some have argued that the ancient alchemists were not wrong but only less
right in their concepts of chemistry in their quest to turn lead into gold. But their
fault was not a result of incomplete knowledge of chemistry by modern
standards but rather a persistent belief in their theories of transmutation of the
elements in the face of continued failures to make gold from lead. This is when
proto-science trips over into belief or ideology, when practices that no longer