Schweinehund!
I usually like Matt Petryni’s columns. I don’t always agree with the guy, but he usually seems genuinely thoughtful and I’d put him at the top of the list of this year’s otherwise… lackluster opinion roster over at the Emerald. That said, today’s piece, which attempted to link industrial farming with swine flu (or pandemics in general), was all sound and fury (well, sound at least, and only if you were to read it aloud), signifying… nothing in particular.
First off, they have not, to my knowledge, tracked down the swine flu “patient zero”, which means no one has any idea where this particular strain of the virus originated, outside of some general geographic parameters, so I’m not sure that there’s any particular evidence linking this outbreak to industrial farming. The link between H5N1 (avian flu) and chicken farms, on the other hand, is stronger, but he only mentions it in passing.
Perhaps it will turn out that H1N1 emerged from an industrial pig farm, but to make that claim right now is counterfactual. Furthermore, he entirely leaves out the fact that the deadliest pandemic in modern history, so-called “Spanish Flu” had nothing to do with industrial farming whatsoever.
Second, and more generally, whenever people start going after the “agro-industrial complex”, as it were, I start to wonder what solutions, exactly, they have in mind. Throwing around words like “biodiversity” and “sustainability” is all well and good, but it doesn’t feed people, which is the whole point of factory farms. It’s currently fashionable to “plant a garden” in the back yard (“Oooh look! Michelle Obama has one!”), but in densely-populated urban areas, tiny plots aren’t even close to sufficient to feed the population.
“Buy local” is a lovely mantra when you live in a basically well-to-do provincial backwater like Eugene, but it really isn’t an option in Chicago or Los Angeles. This means that food has to be grown and shipped in from rural areas. And, since everyone* wants cheap food, growers have had to come up with ways to maximize output, which generally entails all of the boogeymen of the “back to the soil!” crowd: industrial farms, genetically modified crops, disconnect from the source of food, and all that. Contrary to what a lot of folks seem to believe, the system we’ve got now is not merely the product of nefarous corporations (Soviet kolkhozy were basically the same thing, only less efficient and reliant on what amounted to forced serf labor), it’s the product of the simple fact that cities need to be fed, and cheaply (“What do we want?” “No war on the poor!” “When do we want it?” “It’s the racist-sexist-LGBT-unfriendly-capitalist-imperialist-industrial complex’s fault we don’t already have it!”).
Some folks on the “John Zerzan” end of the spectrum basically advocate deindustrialization and sometimes even deagriculturalization. This guy just wants us to “[call] on Congress to end to [sic] factory farming in the United States.”** Well, that’s all well and good and would certainly get rid of the factory farms (and, presumably, the pandemics that come with them), but it’d also lead to mass starvation. I’m pretty sure, however, that Matt Petryni isn’t advocating that drastic a “solution.” What’s less clear is what he proposes as an alternative. “Long-term planning”, “biodiversity”, and “understanding [natural] systems… rather than brazenly asserting our superiority over them” are little more than bromides.
People need to be fed, and collectives of mud-caked hippie longbeards simply aren’t up to the task. For all their failings, factory farms are.
Finally, there was this bit:
There really is no current or historic parallel for a hog farm in human society
Yes. Correct. Full stop? Alas, no.
…but if there were, it’d probably lie somewhere between a 19th-century slave ship and a 20th-century shanty town.
The crucial difference, of course is that both a 19th Century slave ship and a 20th Century shanty town are full of human beings. Pig farms are full of pigs. Pigs.
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* Does anyone else find it curious that the kind of people who go strolling around Market of Choice, with it’s stone floors, classical music, fireplaces, and stocked to overflowing with all sorts of organic, exotic, imported, free-range, sustainable, health-conscious stuff aren’t quite the same sorts who buy their groceries at Wal-Mart or WinCo?
I mean, “organic” is a bourgeoisie status thing, isn’t it? I guess the benighted plebs who shop at Wal-Mart just don’t know what’s good for them. If only they could aspire to emulate their betters.***
** Don’t you think some editor at the Emerald could’ve come up with something better than the nearly identical headlines, “Factory farms feeding pandemics” and “Industrial farming tied to pandemics”?
*** Harrumph.
