USA
Article from The Counter, 05.02.2017
Baylen J. Linnekin is a food lawyer, scholar, expert witness, adjunct law professor, and Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund board member. Linnekin’s first book, Biting the Hands That Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable (Island Press, 2016), reveals how regulations often proscribe sustainable food practices. Linnekin’s writings have appeared in the Boston Globe, N.Y. Post, Des Moines Register, Sacramento Bee, Reason, Huffington Post, VICE, Playboy, Wisconsin Law Review, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Chapman University Law Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle with his partner of more than 20 years.
When Americans grumble about how our food system is broken, the slaughter and processing of farm animals are often at the heart of their critiques. One hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair’s damning novel, The Jungle, exposed many gruesome and unsanitary practices in the food system of his day. A host of important federal food-safety regulations, including mandatory inspections, soon followed.
This is an excerpt from Biting the Hands That Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable (September, 2016) by Baylen J. Linnekin.
But that was hardly the end of the story. Instead, attention to livestock slaughter has only grown in recent years. In 2014, for example, I moderated a panel at Harvard Law School on sustainable meat production as part of a conference called “The Meat We Eat.” The conference was cosponsored by two Harvard Law student groups—the Food Law Society, the first of many similar student groups that have popped up at law schools around the country in recent years, and the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund. The title of my panel—“Reducing Legal Barriers, Empowering Consumers, and Creating Pathways for Sustainably and Humanely Raised Meat”—nicely encapsulates the obstacles that many farmers, consumers, and others face in their efforts to sell, buy, and eat the type of meat they want. Many of these obstacles are the result of a mandatory food-safety inspection system, administered by the USDA, that is deeply flawed.
Today’s USDA food-safety rules require that agency inspectors be present at a facility every day that meat is processed. In 2007, though, stunning reports emerged that USDA inspectors had failed to inspect hundreds of plants regularly, as required, for thirty years. Although the agency’s failure to inspect hundreds of facilities regularly for three decades is outrageous, even that fact doesn’t illustrate the broken state of the agency’s food-safety rules quite as well as does the closure of a Petaluma, California slaughterhouse in 2014. That year, the USDA suddenly forced Rancho Feeding Corporation—the only USDA-approved slaughterhouse in Northern California—to close. An agency investigation indicated the facility had illegally processed cattle that were suffering from cancer.
The presence of cancerous meat led the USDA to order the recall of 8.7 million pounds of beef processed by Rancho. The agency was clearly justified in taking any cancerous meat—which was disgusting at best and which could pose food-safety problems at worst—out of the food supply. By also ordering the recall of millions of pounds of beef that was entirely wholesome, though, the agency was throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Worse still, as I’ll explain, the USDA’s own food-safety rules were largely to blame for the agency’s decision to order the destruction of perfectly good meat.
USDA rules often force small, sustainable farmers to ship animals hundreds of miles away—even out of state—to be slaughtered.
One morning in 2009, when I was living in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I was studying agricultural and food law, I jogged by a pair of cattle dining on grass in a fenced pasture a couple blocks from my apartment. As I slowed down to take a look at them, I noticed some flyers attached to the fencing along the roadside. I stopped running and grabbed a flyer. Sure enough, these cattle or parts of them, at least— would soon be for sale in fifty-pound boxes. After I finished my jog, I called the phone number on the flyers. Another phone call, a few emails, and a week or two later, I was the proud owner of a box of steaks and other cuts raised by Tommy Daniel, a recently retired professor of crop, soil, and environmental sciences at the University of Arkansas.
You’d think that these cattle, raised lovingly and openly in a pasture a block from the main intersection in a college town, might be spared the indignity of enduring a road trip to meet their end at a far-off processing plant. They’d be killed locally and sold to people like me. You’d be wrong. Though Prof. Daniel’s cows lived out their days in a pasture only two blocks from my home, that fact hides the journey they—and animals like them around the country—face if they’re to become dinner. Prof. Daniel had to send his cows only sixty miles to be slaughtered. Other farmers—and their livestock—aren’t so lucky. USDA rules often force small, sustainable farmers to ship animals hundreds of miles away—even out of state—to be slaughtered and processed alongside animals that were raised without the same care. That’s because USDA rules unnaturally amalgamate animals from farmers and ranchers of all types and sizes—from cattle raised on the smallest grass-fed beef farm to those raised on the nation’s largest confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—into many of the same USDA-approved slaughterhouses. This is largely true because rules are uncaring, and because there simply aren’t enough slaughterhouses to meet demand.
“When I take my animals to be processed, I drive past a custom facility three miles from my house and travel three hours to a USDA facility.”
There are more than 800 federally inspected slaughterhouses in the United States, according to recent USDA data. Another 1,800 are operated by states or are “custom” slaughterhouses—where sales are severely restricted to prohibit, for example, sales to grocers. But figures showing a proliferation of custom slaughterhouses are misleading. The thirteen largest U.S. cattle slaughterhouses account for 56 percent of all cattle killed in this country. The figures are similar for hogs (twelve plants account for 57 percent of all slaughters) and other livestock. Commercial plants processed 47.3 billion pounds of red meat (including cattle, pork, sheep, and other hooved animals) in 2014.
USDA requirements for slaughterhouses the agency inspects are part of the problem. They’re so complex that the agency itself funded a report in 2012 for the purpose of establishing “a streamlined regulatory proposal that could be carried forward in future years to make the USDA inspection system less onerous to smaller facilities that could perceivably be built or utilized in more small local communities.” That sounds great. But the report writers concluded that their mission was damn near futile. “After the numerous conversations and meetings, it became apparent that no one with the USDA or . . . working as professionals within the meat industry,” they write, “believe[s] that streamlining regulations will ever occur.”
On-farm slaughter accounted for just 93.4 million pounds of red meat—or a paltry 0.2 percent of meat slaughtered commercially.
Despite this dire conclusion, small farmers do have some choices for operating outside of the USDA system. But these choices come with serious drawbacks. A 2013 report by the Spokane, Washington, Spokesman-Review detailed the problem. Farmers and ranchers are free to use slaughterhouses that are not inspected by the USDA. But meat from animals slaughtered there “must be sold to the consumer before it is butchered.” That means consumers must buy cow, not beef. And they often have to buy hundreds of pounds at a time. “Since a steer yields about 400 pounds of meat, that’s often too much for a single family,” reported the Spokesman-Review. “Several families can go together to purchase an animal, but that’s more hassle for the rancher. And it doesn’t address the needs of individuals who just want to purchase a few steaks or some ground chuck.”
This helps explain why on-farm slaughter accounted for just 93.4 million pounds of red meat—or a paltry 0.2 percent of meat slaughtered commercially. This figure includes mobile slaughterhouses, vehicles that travel to farms to slaughter livestock without forcing them to undergo the discomfort and stress required by lengthy travel. All of this helps explain why Rancho was the only independent USDA-inspected slaughterhouse in all of Northern California in 2014. It also explains why most small cattle farmers are forced to use USDA facilities and pass up the local slaughterhouse. Some even literally drive by the latter on their way to the former. “I’m a beef farmer myself,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told me in 2015, “and when I take my animals to be processed, I drive past a custom facility three miles from my house and travel three hours to a USDA facility.”
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CANADA
Local abattoirs, essential to beef up local meat, can’t keep up. So why aren’t there more?
Eventually, most B.C. livestock is slaughtered into meat — but where?
It’s a question that’s plagued farmers, ranchers, abattoir owners and B.C. politicians for almost 20 years, most recently this month with the release of a policy intentions paper by the provincial ministry of agriculture. A question the pandemic has dramatically thrown into focus.
“There are a lot more (people) wanting to buy local, and it has put a strain on the meat processing sector unlike anything seen in the past,” said Nova Woodbury, the executive director of the B.C. Association of Abattoirs.
B.C. produces between 25 and 50 per cent of the beef, pork and lamb eaten in the province — about 44 million pounds.
The remainder, excluding imports from abroad, likely comes from one of three abattoirs — two are in Alberta, one is in Ontario — that together process roughly 95 per cent of Canada’s beef (the pork industry is similarly concentrated) and supply most grocery stores in the country.
These factories, owned by the multinational meat processors Cargill and JBS, have the capacity to slaughter about 10,500 head of cattle a day — three times more than B.C.’s annual slaughtering capacity, Woodbury said.
“JBS and Cargill control the flow of beef through Canada’s food system,” the National Farmers’ Union noted in an April policy brief. “Their three processing plants form a choke point … (that is) one of the weakest links in Canada’s food system.”
That vulnerability was laid bare by COVID-19.
Last spring, hundreds of workers at JBS and Cargill plants in Alberta tested positive for the virus, forcing them to halt operations temporarily and sending shockwaves through Canada’s meat supply chain — including an ongoing spike in demand for local meat, Woodbury said.
“(Butchers and abattoirs) are just overwhelmed,” she said.
“#JBS and #Cargill control the flow of #beef through #Canada’s #foodsystem,” the @NFUcanada noted in an April policy brief. “Their three processing plants form a choke point…(that is) one of the weakest links in Canada’s food system.” #COVID-19 #food
More overwhelmed, that is, than usual.
B.C. has seen a rapid decline in its meat processing capacity since a 2003 overhaul of the province’s abattoir regulations, in response to Canada’s BSE (mad cow disease) crisis.
The new regulations required provincially inspected abattoirs, then common throughout the province, to upgrade their facilities to meet new food safety and hygiene requirements on par with federally inspected plants such as the pandemic-struck Cargill and JBS plants.
These abattoirs are regulated under “A” and “B” licences and must have a provincial meat inspector check each animal for disease or mistreatment before and after slaughter. There are no limits on the number of animals these abattoirs can process, and their products can be sold anywhere in the province.
Some made the investment, but many abattoir owners left the industry, Woodbury said. That left small-scale farmers in many parts of the province, particularly hard-to-access areas such as Haida Gwaii and Bella Coola, without the ability to slaughter and butcher their animals.
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